Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 05.pdf/136

 Unmarried Ladies. amounts poor paterfamilias has to pay the dressmaker. Well says the poet, — "We sacrifice to Dress, till household joys And comforts cease. Dress drains our cellars dry. And keeps our larder lean, puts out our fire, And introduces Hunger. Frost, and Woe."

It seems to be clear that if a girl is attend ing school — even though she be of the full age of twenty-one years — and misbehaves, the schoolmaster has a right to chastise her moderately. The reasonableness or unrea sonableness is a question for the jury to decide, if the young lady objects and goes a-courting. It has been settled that the punishment of a girl with a rod which leaves marks or welts on the person for two months afterwards (or even for a much less time) is immoderate and excessive. Mr. Mizner, out in Iowa, after he had chastised his inter esting pupil, had the pleasure of having the court decide that he had no right to whip her for failure in her lessons or for irregularity in attendance, but only for a definite offence which the pupil has committed, so as to maintain order and discipline, and that the scholar must understand and know, or at least have the means of knowing, for what she is punished.1 Per contra, it is equally dangerous for a pedagogue to go to the 1 State v. Mizner, 45 Iowa, 248; Id. 50 Iowa. 145; Stewart P. Fassett, 27 Me. 266. 287.

other extreme, and kiss a scholar well up in her teens : this might be held to be an assault.1 It is not well for a parent to send a girl of eight to school with her hair done up in curl-papers, notwithstanding the Lau reate's dictum about books and locks. A ratepayer of Hammersmith, London, did this, and his child was sent home to him; the parent, indignant, refused to allow her to attend school again, whereupon he was summoned before the magistrate for neglect ing to send his child to school, and was fined five shillings, with the option of going to jail for three days. The magistrate did not decide the general question as to whether children can go to school dressed as the whim of the progenitors may dictate, or whether the teachers are to be the judges of their adornment, but merely held that if curl papers were objected to at one temple of learn ing, and the parent considered them a sine qua non, then he must find a school where they were admitted and permitted. That celebrated legal luminary, Sir Thomas More, used to correct his daughters with a peacock-feather fan; but the historian docs not say whether it was the handle or the other part that was brought into sharp and sudden contact with the young ladies. 1 Cracker r. C. & N. V. Ry., 36 Wis. 657.