There can be little doubt but that the general feeling will be that the young men accused of complicity in the Mayfair jewel robbery, when a jeweller was badly beaten about the head and robbed, richly deserved the punishment which Lord Hewart, Lord Chief Justice, meted out to them. Four young men of good families conspired to carry out the crime, during which the jeweller, Mr. E. Bellenger, a director of Cartier Ltd., was hit over the head with a small black mallet and so badly injured that for a while his life was in jeopardy. It is a provision of British law that where a robbery has been committed with violence the perpetrators may be punished by whipping with the cat-o-nine-tails, and in this particular case the punishment may be rightly said to fit the crime. Much has been said for and against this form of punishment, and there are many who deplore the fact that it is still used in connection with certain offenses. It is contended by those who hold that view that corporal punishment tends to brutalize those who have to endure it, and there may be something to be said for such a contention, though it is clear that when it is used upon a criminal who uses violence to assist his purpose, it may justly be said that he is already something of a brute and deserves to be treated as such. Probably the more powerful argument in favour of the retention of this form of punishment on the statute books is that experience has proved that flogging does indeed act as a deterrent. It will be remembered that when in England there was an epidemic of garrotting in connection with robbery, an Act was passed providing that men guilty of such attempts should be whipped. On passage the law was sternly put into force by the judges, with the result that this particular form of crime speedily disappeared. In the present case two of the four men are to receive corporal punishment, Robert Paul Harley receiving as much as twenty lashes, while David Wilmer is to receive fifteen, It is noteworthy that the fact that these men come from good families will not save them and because of the manner in which they attacked Mr. Bellenger, a severe excoriation of their backs may induce them toward better behaviour when ultimately they emerge from jail
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.