Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/180

164 times elderly people—undress them, lay them on the floor, and whip their bottoms with birches.

And people who consider themselves most advanced, and who are grandsons of those who seventy-five years ago got rid of corporal punishment, now, in our day, most respectfully and quite seriously, petition his Excellency the Minister, or whoever it may be, not to allow so much flogging of grown-up Russians, because the doctors are of opinion that it is unhealthy ; or beg that tliose who have a school diploma should not be whipped ; or that those who were to be flogged at the time of the Emperor's marriage should be let off. And the wise Governm.ent meets such frivolous petitions with profound silence, or even prohibits them.

Can one seriously petition on this matter? Is there really any question? Surely there are some deeds which, whether perpetrated by private individuals or by Governments, one cannot calmly discuss, and condemn only under certain circumstances. And the flogging of adult members of one particular class of Russian people, in our time and among our mild and Christianly-enlightened folk, is such a deed. To hinder such crimes against all law, human and divine, one cannot diplomatically approach the Government under cover of hygienic or educational or loyalistic considerations. Of such deeds we must either not speak at all, or we must speak straight to the point and always with detestation and abhorrence. To ask that only those peasants who are literate should be exempt from being beaten on their bare buttocks, is as though in a land where the law decreed that unfaithful wives should be punished by being stripped and exposed in the streets, people were to petition that this punishment should only be inflicted on such as could not knit stockings, or do something of that kind.