the hand. And as to public
educators, the teachers, their position could be no better raised than
by legally forbidding a blow to be administered in any school under
penalty of final loss of position.

That people who are in other respects intelligent and sensitive continue
to defend flogging, is due to the fact that most educators have only a
very elementary conception of their work. They should constantly keep
before them the feelings and impressions of their own childhood in
dealing with children. The most frequent as well as the most dangerous
of the numerous mistakes made in handling children is that people do
not remember how they felt themselves at a similar age, that they do
not regard and comprehend the feelings of the child from their own past
point of view. The adult laughs or smiles in remembering the punishments
and other things which caused him in his childhood anxious days or
nights, which produced the silent torture of the child's heart, infinite
despondency, burning indignation, lonely fears, outraged sense of
justice, the terrible creations of his imagination, his absurd shame,
his unsatisfied thirst for joy, freedom, and tenderness. Lacking these
beneficent memories, adults constantly repeat the crime of destroying
the childhood of the new generation,--the only time in life in which the
guardian of education can really be a kindly providence. So strongly do
I feel that the unnecessary sufferings of children are unnatural as well
as ignoble that I experience physical disgust in touching the hand of a
human being that I know has struck a child; and I cannot close my
eyes after I have heard a child in the street threatened with corporal
punishment.

Blows call forth the virtues of slaves, not those of freemen. As early
as Walther von der Vogelweide, it was known that the honourable man
respects a word more than a blow. The exercise of physical force
delivers the weak and unprotected into the hands of the strong. A child
never believes in his heart, though he may be brought to acknowledge
verbally, that the blows were due to love, that they were administered
because they were necessary. The child is too keen not to know that such
a "must" does not exist, and that love can express itself in a better
way.

Lack of self-discipline, of intelligence, of patience, of personal
effort--these are the corner-stones on which corporal punishment rests.
I do not now refer to the system of flogging employed by mise