across the shoulders. A red streak appears on the white skin. Again the thongs are shaken out, again the hands rise, again the whips are brought down with full force, and the streak on the skin grows redder and broader. A turnkey gives out the number as each stroke falls; and the silence is broken only by his voice, by the descent of each successive blow and by the cries and groans of the sufferer.

[But] the man who has been guilty of the most atrocious cruelty will do his best to conceal the smart which he is made to feel himself; and if any sound is heard at all it proceeds from an involuntary action of his vocal organs which he strives his utmost to check. After twenty lashes he will retain a look of defiance, though almost fainting and barely able to walk to his cell.

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Any one who has witnessed such a scene may be permitted to ask to what good end it is enacted; anyone who has not witnessed it can hardly be competent to judge its good or ill effects."

To this Mr. Pike adds these significant words:

"It is far from an agreeable task to watch the face and. figure of the flogger as he executes his sentence."

It is a point that should not be lost sight of, that the use of the lash as a punishment is irredeemably debasing to all who have to take part in it; to him who receives it, to him who administers it, and to those whose unfortunate duty compels them to witness it. I am told that it is an absurdity to talk of "degrading" the criminal, that he is. past that, he is already so degraded. If that unfortunately be true in some cases, it is not true in all. And the worst of it is, that you cannot possibly confine the degradation of flogging to the criminal; besides the one who is flogged, there is also the one who flogs, the one who stands by to see it. done, the one who orders the flogging, and, beyond all that, there is society who approves it. The whole moral toneof the community is lowered by violent punishments.

How nauseating the sight is, was testified at the meeting of the International Penitentiary Congress, 1872, by a governor' of one of our English prisons, who, obliged to be present whenever corporal punishment was administered in his jail, confessed that the sight always made him ill. But, for all that, he was so accustomed to rely upon it that he could not believe that discipline could be maintained in the prison without the aid of this sickening punishment.

DOES IT REFORM?

Let us proceed to put the test questions in regard to the lash that we have done previously in regard to the gallows. Is the punishment of flogging necessary for the protection of society? That is to say, (i) does it reform the criminal? (ii) does it deter others from crime?

(i) At the International Penitentiary Congress, Sir E. Du Cane defended the use of the cat as a prison punishment, on the ground that it would be impossible to preserve discipline without the fear of it. He defended it as a general punishment by urging that "when criminals abstained from the use of their fists or of deadly weapons, flogging might be remitted, but till then it could not be given up. Moreover, he had known prisoners acknowledge that but for flogging they would not have become tractable and reformed characters." Sir Edmund Du Cane's argument is more curious than convincing. Save in the two instances of capital and corporal punishment, the nature of the penalty is never made to coincide with the nature of the offence; the judge does not order the burglar to be robbed, nor the swindler to be cheated,

Major Fulford, for 23 years Governor of Stafford jail.

nor false money to be passed on the coiner! Why then should violent men be punished by violence? The confidence shown in the "tractable and reformed" characters of the prisoners, who could ascribe this change in their disposition to the application of the cat-o'-nine-tails to their backs, was worthy of a better cause. Such an acknowledgment has too strong a savor of hypocrisy to altogether commend itself to the unprejudiced mind.

At this same Congress Mr. Clarke Aspinall, of Liverpool, said that wife and woman beaters deserve the lash and in the majority of cases no other punishment has any effect. This argument addresses itself in the first place to the spirit of vengeance. When anyone says that this or that criminal deserves to be hung, or to be flogged, they do not mean that flogging is a punishment calculated to deter him and others from crime, but that they would inflict pain on him in retaliation for the pain he has inflicted upon others. With the second part of the argument we need not concern ourselves, as wife-beating is not punishable by the lash.'

1

A QUESTION OF GOVERNORS.

Mr. Shepherd, for forty years governor of Wakefield prison, which had an average of 1,000 inmates, stated that for thirty years no corporal punishment was inflicted in that prison. He advocated total remission, and his

Although a judge may not sentence the wife-beater to corporal punishment, he may so sentence a man who has forged the seal or process of the County Court, or a man who has solemnised a marriage without a licence or in an unregistered building. That "the law is a hass" everyone knows, but such legislation goes beyond even asinine stupidity.

experience was that nearly every prisoner who had been flogged returned to gaol again. Mr. F. Hill's experience confirmed Mr. Shepherd's as to the needlessness of flog-ging as a prison punishment, and remarked that there could not be a better conducted prison than Wakefield. Comparing this conflicting evidence as to the need of the fear of the lash to maintain discipline in prisons, one is. bound to arrive at the conclusion that it is all a question of governors and government. Some governors preserve discipline admirably by means of the suaviter in modo; others, having only tried the fortiter in re, imagine they can not get on without it. The last look only to the immediate visible consequences of the punishment they administer, and do not consider the hardening effect it must necessarily have upon the prisoner's character.

LORD NORTON.

(ii) What is the evidence that the fear of corporal punishment acts as a deterrent? A vague and rambling article by Lord Norton, published in the Prisons' Service Review for February, 1897, probably represents the view of the average Englishman on this matter. I will pass

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here much of it as refers to the whipping of juveniles, for although I am against that as heartily as I am against the flogging of adults, it is nevertheless a problem which needs to be looked at from a different point of view. In the case of juveniles it is a choice of evils that is offered us, the stigma of the prison or the degradation of the birch; in the case of adults it is not a choice of one or the other, flogging is a punishment additional to imprisonment. Lord Norton says:

"For those of more responsible age, guilty of higher crimes.

from motives of violent passion, love of doing mischief, or prurient desire for notoriety, we have recent full experience of the lash's efficacy in the way of counter-motive. It stopped the annual shootings at the Queen; it arrested frequent damages to works of art in the National Museums, it saved old gentlemen from being garotted for their watches; and it might have ignominiously extinguished the heroism of the dynamitards.”

Lord Norton makes several statements in the short paragraph I have quoted, but he does not refer to a single fact or a single figure in support of them. Periodic shootings at the Queen, and frequent injury to works of art, could only be the work of persons who were more or less insane, and I do not believe that there is a single lunatic asylum to-day in which the responsible physician would order the patients to be flogged. cannot be whipped into order.

Disordered brains

THE GAROTTING FALLACY.

In regard to the garotting fallacy, it always strikes me as curious that those who believe that flogging stopped garotting never pause to wonder why garotters as a class should have been specially amenable to this particular form of punishment. As a matter of fact, garotting was a form of robbery practised almost entirely by a particular gang whose operations were carried on chiefly in the Metropolis in the Autumn of 1862. When the gang of criminals was captured, the crime disappeared. In November, 1862, twenty-seven persons were indicted for garotting at the Criminal Court, and of these twenty-one were convicted and punished. In the following January the Recorder congratulated the jury on the cessation of garotting, and in July, 1863, that is to say, several months