. I mean, above all, what are still called
means of education, instead of means of torture,--blows.

Many people of to-day defend blows, maintaining that they are milder
means of punishment than the natural consequences of an act; that blows
have the strongest effect on the memory, which effect becomes permanent
through association of ideas.

But what kinds of association? Is it not with physical pain and shame?
Gradually, step by step, this method of training and discipline has
been superseded in all its forms. The movement to abolish torture,
imprisonment, and corporal punishment failed for a long time owing to
the conviction that they were indispensable as methods of discipline.
But the child, people answer, is still an animal, he must be brought up
as an animal. Those who talk in this way know nothing of children nor of
animals. Even animals can be trained without striking them, but they can
only be trained by men who have become men themselves.

Others come forward with the doctrine that terror and pain have been the
best means of educating mankind, so the child must pursue the same road
as humanity. This is an utter absurdity. We should also, on this theory,
teach our children, as a natural introduction to religion, to practice
fetish worship. If the child is to reproduce all the lower development
stages of the race, he would be practically depressed beneath the level
which he has reached physiologically and psychologically through the
common inheritance of the race. If we have abandoned torture and painful
punishments for adults, while they are retained for children, it is
because we have not yet seen that their soul life so far as a greater
and more subtle capacity for suffering is concerned has made the same
progress as that of adult mankind. The numerous cases of child suicide
in the last decade were often the result of fear of corporal punishment;
or have taken place after its administration. Both soul and body are
equally affected by this practice. Where this is not the result, blows
have even more dangerous consequences. They tend to dull still further
the feeling of shame, to increase the brutality or cowardice of the
person punished. I once heard a child pointed out in a school as being
so unruly that it was generally agreed he would be benefited by a
flogging. Then it was discovered that his father's flogging at home had
made him what he was. If statistics were prepared of ruined sons, those
who had be