I mean
the people of Japan), have shown that manliness is not in danger where
children are not hardened by corporal punishment. These gentle means are
just as effective in calling forth selfmastery and consideration. These
virtues are so imprinted on children, at the tenderest age, that one
learns first in Japan what attraction considerate kindliness bestows
upon life. In a country where blows are never seen, the first rule of
social intercourse is not to cause discomfort to others. It is told that
when a foreigner in Japan took up a stone to throw it at a dog, the dog
did not run. No one had ever thrown a stone at him. Tenderness towards
animals is the complement in that country of tenderness in human
relationship, a tenderness whose result is observed, among other
effects, in a relatively small number of crimes against life and
security.

War, hunting for pleasure, corporal discipline, are nothing more than
different expressions of the tiger nature still alive in man. When the
rod is thrown away, and when, as some one has said, children are
no longer boxed on their ears but are given magnifying glasses and
photographic cameras to increase their capacity for life and for loving
it, instead of learning to destroy it, real education in humanity will
begin.

For the benefit of those who are not convinced that corporal punishment
can be dispensed with in a manly education, by so remote and so distant
an example as Japan, I should like to mention a fact closer to us.
Our Germanic forefathers did not have this method of education. It was
introduced with Christianity. Corporal discipline was turned into
a religious duty, and as late as the seventeenth century there were
intelligent men who flogged their children once a week as a part of
spiritual guardianship. I once asked our great poet, Victor Rydberg, and
he said that he had found no proof that corporal punishment was usual
among the Germans in heathen times. I asked him whether he did not
believe that the fact of its absence had encouraged the energetic
individualism and manliness in the Northern peoples. He thought so, and
agreed with me. Finally, I might note from our own time, that there
are many families and schools, our girls' schools for example, and also
boys' schools in some countries, where corporal punishment is never
used. I know a family with twelve children whose activity and capacity
are not damaged by bringing them under the rule of duty alone. Corporal