Delaware houses one-half of her population in the city of Wilmington. All the rest of the State is strictly rural. Our people are of the soil. They are typical farmers—plain, wholesome, God-fearing people who obey the law and who punish crime with severity. We have neither the means nor the machinery with which to patrol our rural districts with armed officers. It follows, then, that we must have laws carrying severe penalties and rigidly enforce them.
Half the people in Delaware south of Wilmington never lock their doors at night, window fasteners are uncommon, and thought of burglars is totally absent from the minds of our people. Once in a long while some half-drunken loon will enter a house at night. When he is not kicked out as a mere intruder he is locked up, tried, convicted and whipped according to law, and then locked up long enough to think it over himself and to deter all others from a like offense.
Those who criticise the whipping post adversely overlook the fact that Delaware is the broad highway between four chief American cities.
Our unthinking critics include those who do not know that time or the loss of time means nothing at all to a very large proportion of our population. A day, or a week, or a month, more or less, costs a low-grade negro nothing at all in opportunity or in money. The native negroes of Delaware know their place and make no trouble. They are far above the average in habits and in intelligence, but we have a floating negro population which is definitely bad, and we must safeguard our people, white and black, against those who come from all parts of the Shore country to the canneries, work a few weeks or months and then pass on, only to give place to another lot just as bad, or even worse.
The negro with city habits is a worse proposition than the farm trained hand, who is usually law-abiding and useful. Delaware can handle her own negroes with little or no force, but the passing throng of bad men needs attention, and they file by with eyes front on the whipping posts. Cells mean nothing at all to such men, white or black.
Delaware is absolutely free from all forms of white slavery. This particular form of crime is punished here without recourse to the Mann Act or aid from the Federal authorities. Did the whipping post do naught else but keep cadets out of Delaware it proves its eternal value here. In every other State in the Union in which there is a large city the white slave problem comes up with a degree of regularity. The same people who condemn the whipping post wring their hands and wonder what to do about the cadets and their wretched victims. Delaware answers, “Whip the cadet!”
Years ago a gang of desperadoes undertook to rob a Wilmington bank. They tunneled under the building, and would have carried off $500,000 in negotiable securities but for the suspicions of an alert watchman. They were arrested, and on trial paid one attorney a very large fee solely to the end that they might be saved from the public whipping. The late great Chief Justice Lore sentenced them to long terms in prison and to the utmost limit of the law as to pillory and lashes.
There has never been a bank robbery attempted in Delaware from that day to this by professional burglars. These men were bank robbers of the first grade; the same men who managed one of the sensational robberies in New York—the Metropolitan Bank, I think. That type of criminal never considers Delaware now for a second.
A prison term means nothing at all to him, but he would never dare show his face in his usual haunts after the lash fell on his bare back in a Delaware jail.
All prison reformers and all humanitarians agree that the object of all punishment is to prevent crime—remotely to cure the criminal. We are not discussing the cure of criminals. We are discussing the whipping post per se, and I submit that the whipping post has prevented two of the most terrible of all crimes short of murder—white slavery and burglary. There is a grave doubt in my mind if there has been a single burglary in Delaware within twenty years committed by a man who was entirely sane and wholly sober, and I do not recall any second offenders.