an
who beats his children and every schoolmaster who flogs a pupil is a
conscious debauchee is absurd: thousands of dull, conscientious people
beat their children conscientiously, because they were beaten themselves
and think children ought to be beaten. The ill-tempered vulgarity that
instinctively strikes at and hurts a thing that annoys it (and all
children are annoying), and the simple stupidity that requires from a
child perfection beyond the reach of the wisest and best adults (perfect
truthfulness coupled with perfect obedience is quite a common condition
of leaving a child unwhipped), produce a good deal of flagellation among
people who not only do not lust after it, but who hit the harder because
they are angry at having to perform an uncomfortable duty. These people
will beat merely to assert their authority, or to carry out what they
conceive to be a divine order on the strength of the precept of Solomon
recorded in the Bible, which carefully adds that Solomon completely
spoilt his own son and turned away from the god of his fathers to the
sensuous idolatry in which he ended his days.

In the same way we find men and women practising vivisection as
senselessly as a humane butcher, who adores his fox terrier, will cut
a calf's throat and hang it up by its heels to bleed slowly to death
because it is the custom to eat veal and insist on its being white; or
as a German purveyor nails a goose to a board and stuffs it with food
because fashionable people eat pate de foie gras; or as the crew of
a whaler breaks in on a colony of seals and clubs them to death in
wholesale massacre because ladies want sealskin jackets; or as fanciers
blind singing birds with hot needles, and mutilate the ears and tails
of dogs and horses. Let cruelty or kindness or anything else once become
customary and it will be practised by people to whom it is not at all
natural, but whose rule of life is simply to do only what everybody else
does, and who would lose their employment and starve if they indulged
in any peculiarity. A respectable man will lie daily, in speech and in
print, about the qualities of the article he lives by selling, because
it is customary to do so. He will flog his boy for telling a lie,
because it is customary to do so. He will also flog him for not telling
a lie if the boy tells inconvenient or disrespectful truths, because
it is customary to do so. He will give the same boy a present on his
birthday, and buy him a