When only three criminals receive this punishment in one year it is worth while considering whether it should be continued, or, if it is to be continued, whether it should not be extended to crimes against women and children and other nameless horrors. Highway robbers to-day are all of the lowest and the poorest, but in the other category of crime there are sometimes men of means who find their way into the dock.
If it ever comes to be recognised, as Butler in his beautifully prophetic account of the land of Erewhon would have us believe, that crime is a disease and should be treated by a family Straightener, as we now call in the doctor, then all doubts as to corporal punishment will disappear. The Erewhonians when they had lapsed from the path of honesty took, under their doctor’s advice, a flogging once a week and a diet of bread and water for three months on end with the same heroism and resignation with which we undergo a cure at Harrogate after a London season. Once recognise that the birch rod is a cure for dishonesty, violence, and malicious injury to property, then all sensible men and women afflicted with these tendencies would welcome the cure and visit their Straightener as they now visit their dentist.
But at present we are far from the realisation of these sane, clear-sighted dreams. Flogging, as the law uses it as a punishment to-day, is not used, I fear, merely as a remedy or even a deterrent but rather by way of revenge. It is almost wholly used against the very poor and degraded. Even under the White Slave Act, I cannot remember any case in which it has been used against a well-to-do man. In any case it is only available against the actual procurer and not against the landlords, ground landlords, restaurant proprietors, and dressmakers, who knowingly share in the woman’s earnings and live on them.
Flogging may, or may not, be an advisable form of punishment, but if it is to be used, let it be administered automatically and without fear or favour to all beasts and blackmailers and hooligans, be they rich or poor. At present the chances of a rich man being flogged for his wickedness on earth are about the same as those of the camel with an ambition to loop the needle.
CHAPTER XI
THE POLICE COURT
Squeezum. The laws are turnpikes, only made to stop people who walk on foot and not to interrupt those who drive through them in their coaches.
Fielding: “The Coffee-house Politician.”
Act II., Scene II.