I do not. I consider it to be decidedly injurious both to body and mind. Is it not painful to witness the pale cheeks and the dejected looks of those boys who are often flogged? If their tempers are mild, their spirits are broken; if their dispositions are at all obstinate, they become hardened and wilful, and are made little better than brutes. [Footnote: "I would have given him, Captain Fleming, had he been my son," quoth old Pearson the elder, "such's good sound drubbing as he never would have forgotten—never!"
"Pooh! pooh! my good sir. Don't tell me. Never saw flogging in the navy do good. Kept down brutes; never made a man yet."—Dr Norman Macleod in Good Words, May 1861.] A boy who is often flogged loses that noble ingenuousness and fine sensibility so characteristic of youth. He looks upon his school as his prison, and his master as his gaoler, and as he grows up to manhood, hates and despises the man who has flogged him. Corporal punishment is revolting, disgusting, and demoralising to the boy; and is degrading to the schoolmaster as a man and as a Christian,
If schoolmasters must flog, let them flog their own sons. If they must ruin the tempers, the dispositions, and the constitution of boys, they have more right to practise upon their own than on other people's children! Oh! that parents would raise—and that without any uncertain sound—their voices against such abominations, and the detestable cane would soon be banished the school-room! "I am confident that no boy," says Addison, "who will not be allured by letters without blows, will never be brought to anything with them. A great or good mind must necessarily be the worse for such indignities; and it is a sad change to lose of its virtue for the improvement of its knowledge. No one has gone through what they call a great school, but must have remembered to have seen children of excellent and ingenuous natures (as have afterwards appeared in their manhood). I say, no man has passed through this way of education but must have seen an ingenuous creature expiring with shame, with pale looks, beseeching sorrow, and silent tears, throw up its honest sighs, and kneel on its tender knees to an inexorable blockhead, to be forgiven the false quantity of a word in making a Latin verse. The child is punished, and the next day he commits a like crime, and so a third, with the same consequence. I would fain ask any reasonable man whether this lad, in the simplicity of his native innocence, full of shame, and capable of any impression from that grace of soul, was not fitter for any purpose in this life than after that spark of virtue is extinguished in him, though he is able to write twenty verses in an evening?"
How often is corporal punishment resorted to at school because the master is in a passion, and he vents his rage upon the poor school-boy's unfortunate back!
Oh! the mistaken notion that flogging will make a bad-behaved boy a good boy; it has the contrary effect. "'I dunno how 'tis, sir,' said an old farm labourer, in reply to a question from his clergyman respecting the bad behaviour of his children, 'I dunno how 'tis; I beats 'em till they're black and blue, and when they won't kneel down to pray I knocks 'em down, and yet they ain't good.'"—The Birmingham Journal.
In an excellent article in Temple Bar(November 1864) on flogging in the army, the following sensible remarks occur:—"In nearly a quarter of a century's experience with soldiers, the writer has always, and without a single exception, found flogging makes a good man bad, and a bad man worse." With equal truth it may be said that, without a single exception, flogging makes a good boy bad, and a bad boy worse. How many men owe their ferocity to the canings they received when school-boys! The early floggings hardened and soured them, and blunted their sensibility.
Dr Arnold of Rugby, one of the best schoolmasters that England ever produced, seldom caned a boy—not more than once or twice during the half year; but when he did cane him, he charged for the use of the cane each time in the bill, in order that the parents might know how many times their son had been punished. At some of our public schools now-a-days, a boy is caned as many times in a morning as the worthy doctor would have caned him during the whole half year; but then, the doctor treated the boys as gentlemen, and trusted much to their honour; but now many schoolmasters trust much to fear, little to honour, and treat them as brute beasts.
It might be said that the discipline of a school cannot be maintained unless the boys be frequently caned, that it must be either caning or expulsion. I deny these assertions. Dr Arnold was able to conduct his school with honour to himself, and with immense benefit to the rising generation, without either frequent canings or expulsions. The humane plan, however, requires at first both trouble and patience; and trouble some schoolmasters do not like, and patience they do not possess; the use of the cane is quick, sharp, decisive, and at the time effective.
If caning be ever necessary, which it might occasionally be, for the telling of lies for instance, or for gross immorality, let the head master himself be the only one to perform the operation, but let him not be allowed to delegate it to others. A law ought in all public schools to be in force to that effect. High time that something were done to abate such disgraceful practices.
Never should a schoolmaster, or any one else, be allowed, on any pretence whatever, to strike a boy upon his head. Boxing of the ears has sometimes caused laceration of the drum of the ear, and consequent partial deafness for life. Boxing of the ears injures the brain, and therefore the intellect.