I am inclined myself to give very little credence to the story.
CHAPTER XIV.
John Bull's Cousin German.—A Salutary Lesson.—Women's Vengeance.—A Battle with Rotten Eggs.—An Unsavoury Omelette.—Tarring and Feathering.—Description of the Operation.—An Awkward Quarter-of-an-hour.—Vengeance of a Ladies' School.—A Town Council of Women.—Woman's Standing in the States.—Story of a Widow and her Two Daughters.
onathan is the cousin-german of John Bull, but yet not so German as one might imagine; for, if Germany supplies America with three or four hundred thousand immigrants yearly, these Germans do not Germanise America. On the contrary, they themselves become Americanised, thanks to that faculty of assimilation which they possess in a high degree.
One strong proof of this is the way in which women are treated from one end of the United States to the other. And here I may say that in this matter Jonathan sets John Bull an example which the latter would do well to profit by.
Whilst English justice gives merely one or two months' imprisonment to the man who is found guilty of having almost kicked his wife to death, an American town is in arms at the mere rumour of a man having maltreated a woman.
Here are a few scenes which I have come across in America:
Elmore Creel, an inhabitant of Greeve's Run, Wirt County, Virginia, had been known for some time to have subjected his wife and children to harsh treatment. The complaint became, at last, so general that an avenging mob took upon itself to chastise him. At midnight, Creel's house was surrounded. Creel was in bed. A squad of masked men broke into the house, and, overcoming his struggles, tied his hands, took him to the yard, and gave him a fearful thrashing with cowhides and hickory withes. After whipping him, they untied him and let him go, with the warning that another visit from them might be looked for if he was not kinder to his wife.