"Head masters and mistresses," having discussed the vexed question of corporal punishment, the public may be permitted to consider for themselves a subject usually cloaked as " unpleasant," says Mr, Charles McEvoy in the London " Daily Herald."
There is not the slightest doubt that it is a question of teacher and child. Some can manage anybody, and some can manage nobody. The latter class beat. And when one comes to the motive of beating, one finds simply incomtence, cowardice, or pleasure. Jnfortunately, from the psychological aspect, the latter is the commonest of all motives.
People who beat children delight in speaking of the "sloppy sentiment' of those who see through them. No person who could beat, and physically as well as mentally wound a child, is anything but a coward and a bully, and even one well-delivered stroke from a cane, tawse or birch, would arouse a wonderful amount of sloppy sentiment in him (or her) self—about themselves, There is an admiration for boxing, simply because it is at least essentially manly and fair. It is for defenceless children that fighting in the human race is almost exclusively reserved. This condition ceases with quite remarkable unanimity about the time when the child is old enough te hit back. It is then too big to be beaten The one exception to the above remarkable rule of life occurs under such forms of institutionalism as give power to beat under the protection of numbers. In reformatory schools, for instance, young men and women may be held down by a number of privileged persons, and tortured into a condition de sirable from the point of view of the institution.
And institution has never taken the] cient refinement to place itself on tie only terms compatible with intelligent governorship—a sense of Christian kindness and justices which never would, or could, go hand in hand with beating. And all this applies equally to the police-court flogging of children.
Mr. Bernard Shaw pointed out jong ago that the only conceivable excuse for striking a child is when it is done in temper. The smug exponent of the "sloppy sentiment" theory declares that it must never be done except when. the beater is calm and unimpassioned. What
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