“Ay, sir,” said the gentleman, “and he becomes a sportsman in course of time, and flogs his pointers, setters, and hounds, for pursuing their instincts—he becomes their tyrant. He goes to one of our universities, perhaps, and drives gigs, tandems, and even stage-coaches, without knowing how to handle the reins; he blunders, turns corners too sharply, pulls the wrong rein, diverts the well-trained horses from their proper course, which they would have critically pursued but for his interference, nearly oversets the vehicle by his awkwardness, and then, as if to persuade the lookers on that the fault was not his, he belabours the poor brutes to the utmost of his power; or it may be, lays on the thong merely for practice until he is proficient enough to apply it knowingly. Are the horses tired,” continued he, “worn out in service?—he flogs to keep them alive, and makes a boast of his ingenuity in forcing a jaded set to their journey’s end, by establishing a ‘raw,’ and torturing them there.”
“Depend upon it,” said I, “such a chap had ‘whips for a penny’ when he was a child.” “Quite so,” said my companion; “you have put this matter before me in a new point of view.” Here we were startled by the familiar sound of the coach whip, and saw a stage-driver flogging in the severest style four heated, panting, and overpowered horses, coming in with a heavily laden coach; the lash was perpetually laid on; even the keenest at the draught were flogged, that they might pull on the rest, and the less powerful were flogged to keep up with them. The coachman, no doubt, when a child, had his share of ‘whips for a penny.’ When he grew up and entered upon his vocation, he perhaps at first compassionated the horses which he was obliged to force to their stages in a given time; he might have had his favourites among them too, and yet often and severely tested their powers of speed or endurance; and at length, as they became diseased and stiff in the limbs, and broken-winded from overwork, he may have satisfied himself with the reflection, that the fault was not his, that his employer ought to have given him a better team, and that it was a shame for him to ask any coachman to drive such “rum uns.” Habit renders him callous; he does not now feel for the sufferings of the wretched animals he guides and punishes; nay, he often coolly takes from the boot-box the short handled Tommy, which is merely the well-grown and severer whip of the species which his employer and himself had used in childhood, when they both bought “whips for a penny,” and lays it as heavily as his vigorous arm empowers him, on one of the worn-out wheelers, which unhappily for themselves are within range of its infliction. The hackney-coachmen and cabmen, too,
“Though oft I’ve heard good judges say
It costs them more for whips than hay,”
are not much worse than their more consequential brethren of the whip; all of them consider the noble creature, subjugated by their power, and abused most criminally through their cruelty, as a mere piece of machinery, to be flogged along like a top as long as it can be kept going.
We reached the upper end of one of the numerous lanes leading from the Thames; five splendid horses were endeavouring to draw up a heavy waggon-load of coals; but as the two first turned into the street at right angles to the others, they were not aiding those behind them. Being stopped in their progress for some time, by a crowd of coaches, chaises, cabs, carts, and omnibuses, the labour of keeping the waggon on the spot it had already attained, and which was steep and slippery, rested upon the three hinder horses. At length the team was put in motion, all the leading ones being useless in succession as they turned to the angle of the street; and just at the critical point, when the whole enormous draught rested on the shaft horse, the waggoner, taxing its strength beyond its capability, struck it with the whip. The noble brute made one desperate plunge to execute his tyrant’s will, and fell—dead upon the pavement. “I think,” said my companion, “that we have had a good lesson upon whips to-day; I should prefer any other gift for my little boy here; for though it may be urged that he, like the rest of his sex at the same age, would merely make a noise with a whip, and would inflict no serious pain, I am bound to bear in mind the actual fact, that with the very sound of a whip is associated in the imagination of all domesticated animals, the apprehension of pain; that they are terrorized when they hear that sound, even through a child’s hand, and I must therefore conclude that this symbol of cruelty should not be his plaything.” I agreed with him fully, and as our business lay in different directions, we parted at Blackfriar’s Bridge, not, however, until my companion of the hour had handed me his card of address. This was an act of unexpected compliment which I could not return exactly in the same way; I told him that I had never written my name on a visiting card in my life, but that I was Martin Doyle, at his service, and a contributor to the new Irish Penny Journal, just started in Dublin. “Is not Dublin,” said he, “in Ireland?” I stared. “I believe,” added he, “that Ireland is a pretty place.” I wished the geographical gentleman a rather hasty farewell.
As I walked on, I pondered on the many other instances in which the whip is an instrument of terror or tyranny. First, I thought of the Russian bride meekly offering a horsewhip to her lord, as the token of her submission to the infliction of his blows, whenever it might suit his temper to bestow such proofs of tenderness upon her, and of the perpetual system of flagellation, which, as we are told by travellers, is exercised in the dominions of the great autocrat upon wives, children, servants, and cattle. I thought of French postilions—flagellators of the first order, at least as far as “cracking” without intermission testifies; and, finally, of the British horse-racer.
Horses high in mettle, ardent in the course, without a stimulus of any kind, struggle neck and neck for victory; they approach the winning post; one jockey flogs more powerfully than his compeers; the agonized horse, in his fearful efforts, is lifted as it were from the ground, by two or three desperate twinings (the stabbing at the sides is but a variety of the torture) of the cutting whalebone round his flanks; and at the critical instant, making a bound, as it were, to escape from his half-flayed skin, throws his head forward in his effort, half a yard beyond that of his rival, who has had his share of torture too, and is declared the winner—of what?—a gold-handled prize-whip, which is borne away in triumph by the owner of the winning horse! To be sure, he pockets some of that which is so truly designated “the root of all evil;” but the acquisition of the whip is the distinguishing honour.
And how does this whip in reality differ from any of the “whips for a penny?” It is of pure gold and whalebone; the others are but of painted stick and the cheapest leather; yet they are both but playthings—the one in the hand of a man who has spent, it may be, half his patrimony, and as much of his time in the endeavour to win it, while he attaches no real or intrinsic value to it afterwards; the other in the hand of the child, to whom it appears a real and substantial prize. The jockey-man is not a whit more rational in this respect than the boy who bestrides his hobby-horse, and flourishes his penny whip.
Then succeeded to my imagination a far more brutal scene, the steeple-chase. A horse is overpowered in a deep and heavy fallow; he is flogged to press him through it; he reaches a break-neck wall; a desperate cut of the whip sends him flying over it; again and again he puts forth his strength and speed, and falls, and rises again at the instigation of the whip. He comes to a brook; it is too wide for his failing powers, and there is a rotten and precipitous bank at the other side; he shudders, and recoils a moment, but a tremendous lash, worse than the dread of drowning, and the goading of the spur, force him in desperation to the leap; his hind feet give way at the landing side; he falls backward; his spine is broken, and at length a pistol bullet ends his miseries.
In a word, the donation of “whips for a penny” to any child, fairly starts him on the first stage of cruelty; and if, from peculiarity of temperament or the restraining influence of the beneficent Creator (who, though he has allowed man to have dominion, and has put under his feet all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, has withheld from him the authority to abuse his privilege), the child grows into the man who is merciful to his beast, the merit is not due to the injudicious person who first presents him with his mimic whip in infancy.