hood was to
break our will. Can anything be more disgusting than the spectacle of a
nation reading the biography of Gladstone and gloating over the account
of how he was flogged at Eton, two of his schoolfellows being compelled
to hold him down whilst he was flogged. Not long ago a public body in
England had to deal with the case of a schoolmaster who, conceiving
himself insulted by the smoking of a cigaret against his orders by
a pupil eighteen years old, proposed to flog him publicly as a
satisfaction to what he called his honor and authority. I had intended
to give the particulars of this ease, but find the drudgery of repeating
such stuff too sickening, and the effect unjust to a man who was
doing only what others all over the country were doing as part of the
established routine of what is called education. The astounding part of
it was the manner in which the person to whom this outrage on decency
seemed quite proper and natural claimed to be a functionary of high
character, and had his claim allowed. In Japan he would hardly have been
allowed the privilege of committing suicide. What is to be said of a
profession in which such obscenities are made points of honor, or of
institutions in which they are an accepted part of the daily routine?
Wholesome people would not argue about the taste of such nastinesses:
they would spit them out; but we are tainted with flagellomania from
our childhood. When will we realize that the fact that we can become
accustomed to anything, however disgusting at first, makes it necessary
for us to examine carefully everything we have become accustomed to?
Before motor cars became common, necessity had accustomed us to a
foulness in our streets which would have horrified us had the street
been our drawing-room carpet. Before long we shall be as particular
about our streets as we now are about our carpets; and their condition
in the nineteenth century will become as forgotten and incredible as the
condition of the corridors of palaces and the courts of castles was as
late as the eighteenth century. This foulness, we can plead, was imposed
on us as a necessity by the use of horses and of huge retinues; but
flogging has never been so imposed: it has always been a vice, craved
for on any pretext by those depraved by it. Boys were flogged when
criminals were hanged, to impress the awful warning on them. Boys were
flogged at boundaries, to impress the boundaries on their memory. Other
methods an