Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/853

Rh their father's support? Should the brute not rather be flogged and made to bear the punishment which is his due, instead of punishing his wife and children by a separation? These questions, which I have heard asked frequently, I shall endeavor to answer. A separation is a hard remedy. Through no fault on their part, the man's wife and children suffer bitterly. If the whipping-post could obviate all this, that would be an argument strongly in its favor; but what are the results of lashing the man? I will detail them. 1. You deprive him of his citizenship ban, and banish him. He can never return to the community in which ho lived and face his former acquaintances. 2. All his usefulness as a member of society is destroyed. All the good that was ever in him is driven out. With every lash you sear his soul and instill hatred and bitterness that can never be effaced. He, thenceforth, becomes a hapless wanderer and an outcast, with no ties or aspirations in common with his fellow-men. 3. His wife is divorced, practically, without the benefit of a regular divorce. Why so? Because the man, after being lashed, will never again return to her. You may assuredly assume this. But that is not all. 4. His children, most innocently and undeservedly of all, will suffer keenly. Not only are they deprived of their father, who will leave home, and friends, and usefulness behind, but they will be spoken of and treated slightingly by their youthful companions as the children of the man who has been flogged, and the stain will cling to them until the grave has closed over their remains. The very things to be deprecated and avoided are thus brought about by the whipping-post. According to a natural though not just impulse of our human nature, the very wife whose husband has been flogged on her account will meet with a degree of scorn, however undeserved. The State has, in no case, the right thus practically to destroy a citizen.

Apart from all these considerations, the demoralizing effect and brutalizing tendency of a public lashing should alone operate to condemn such legislation. While wife-beating may be suppressed, such exhibitions as were witnessed in Baltimore recently sow seeds that will crop out in other directions and produce a harvest of crime. This is a natural law, well understood by students of penal science. No exhibition can have a worse tendency than the public treatment of a human being in a manner that ignores his claim to consideration as such. The recent exhibitions, as related in the local newspapers, of a sheriff walking through the streets of Baltimore, "jauntily dressed," in procession with his "staff," and reported as feeling in "elegant trim" for his job, windows being raised all along the route, women and children rushing to pavements and casements, were a sad commentary upon our "improved" laws. The fruits of those exhibitions will outweigh, in their evil, all the possible "reformation" hoped for from such legislation.

Another consideration is the following: No man, by any act of his, can forfeit or lose his human nature. We are all created in one