ions have disappeared, to
the great advantage of society and the individual. But it may be hard
to awaken a pedagogical savage to the conviction that, in quite the same
way, a thousand new secret and mighty influences will change our crude
methods of education, when parents once come to see that parenthood must
go through the same transformation as marriage, before it attains to a
noble and complete development.

Only when men realise that whipping a child belongs to the same low
stage of civilisation as beating a woman, or a servant, or as the
corporal punishment of soldiers and criminals, will the first real
preparation begin of the material from which perhaps later an educator
may be formed.

Corporal punishment was natural in rough times. The body is tangible;
what affects it has an immediate and perceptible result. The heat of
passion is cooled by the blows it administers; in a certain stage of
development blows are the natural expression of moral indignation, the
direct method by which the moral will impresses itself on beings of
lower capacities. But it has since been discovered that the soul may be
impressed by spiritual means, and that blows are just as demoralising
for the one who gives them as for the one who receives them.

The educator, too, is apt to forget that the child in many cases has
as few moral conceptions as the animal or the savage. To punish for
this--is only a cruelty, and to punish by brutal methods is a piece
of stupidity. It works against the possibility of elevating the child
beyond the level of the beast or the savage. The educator to whose mind
flogging never presents itself, even as an occasional resource, will
naturally direct his whole thought to finding psychological methods of
education. Administering corporal punishment demoralises and stupefies
the educator, for it increases his thoughtlessness, not his patience,
his brutality, not his intelligence.

A small boy friend of mine when four years old received his first
punishment of this kind; happily it was his only one. As his nurse
reminded him in the evening to say his prayers he broke out, "Yes,
to-night I really have something to tell God," and prayed with deep
earnestness, "Dear God, tear mamma's arms out so that she cannot beat me
any more."

Nothing would more effectively further the development of education than
for all flogging pedagogues to meet this fate. They would then learn
to educate with the head instead of with