Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/277

 250

of the republic are not the proper element. They are above him. His true position will readily suggest itself. It can hardly be doubted but that public opinion will in time strike the ferule from the hands of the teacher, leaving him as the true basis of gov ernment only the resources of his intellect and heart. Such is the only policy worthy of the State, and of her otherwise enlightened and liberal institutions. It is the policy of progress. The husband can no longer mod erately chastise his wife, nor according to the more recent authorities, the master his servant or apprentice. Even the degrading cruelties of the naval service have been averted. Why the person of the school-boy, ' with his shining morning face ' should be less sacred in the eye of the law than that of the apprentice or the sailors, is not easily explained. It is regretted that such are the authorities — still courts are bound by them." Truly a remarkable discourse on tyranny, coming from a Stuart, judge! On the other hand, Horace Mann, an eminent educational authority, said of cor poral punishment : " It should be reserved for baser faults. It is a coarse remedy, and should be employed upon the coarse sins of our animal nature, and when employed at all should be administered in strong doses." In Danenhoffer v. State (67 Ind. 295; 35 Am. Rep. 216), it was held that a boy was justifiably punished for neglecting to carry a note from the teacher to the school superintendent and running home because he feared the note would bring him a trounc ing. The note announced that the boy re fused to give an excuse for absence from school. His absence was on account of at tending the funeral of a child of a Protestant. The school was in charge of Catholics, and as they protested that the whipping was not for that absence but only for refusing to give that as the excuse, the court held them ab solved. In Heritage v. Dodge (64 N. H. 297), the master was held blameless for beating a boy for coughing in a manner which he construed

as affected and intended to interrupt and dis turb the exercises. In vain the youth offered to prove that " he could not help coughing by reason of q. chin-cough." If I had been that boy's father, and believed his story, I would have wallopped the master — " beatten the maesther," as John Browdie said in "Nicholas Nickleby" — and justified on the ground of an uncontrollable nervous impulse in my right arm. In State v. Mizner (45 Iowa, 248; 24 Am. Rep. 769), when lacking only fifteen clays of being twenty years old, for the pur pose of getting into a public school told the teacher that she was twenty. This is a favorite feminine dodge — women tell that tale up to midnight of the last day of the year, if not longer. She was whipped after she became twenty-one, but the court held that her lie entitled her to all the privileges of the school, including that of being whipped after becoming of age and not legally a scholar. She could not voluntarily become a scholar and be free from the penalty of dis obedience. Precisely the same was held in Stevens v. Fassett (27 Maine, 166). In this case the defendant having been permitted to occupy the master's seat and desk, re fused to remove when required, and hence the trouble and eighteen pages in the report. The court thought he did not gain adverse possession of the master's seat and desk, but occupied them only under a revocable license. The teacher may make rules and require compliance, and chastise for non-compliance, but they must be reasonable rules. Thus in State v. Vanderbilt (116 Ind. n; 9 Am. St. Rep. 820), it was adjudged that a teacher has no right to make a rule requiring pupils to pay for school property wantonly or care lessly destroyed by them, and whip them for not complying. The case does not disclose what the property was. But the court re marked that no child should be punished for carelessness, for it is a common and not very blameworthy fault; and that as few children have money, and if the parents or guardians