pick up a fare. The slightest touch with the whip would be more
effective. Allowing, however, that it were absolutely necessary to
remind the horse of the presence of the whip by continually cracking it,
a crack that made one hundredth part of the noise would be sufficient.
It is well known that animals in regard to hearing and seeing notice the
slightest indications, even indications that are scarcely perceptible to
ourselves. Trained dogs and canary birds furnish astonishing examples of
this. Accordingly, this cracking of whips must be regarded as something
purely wanton; nay, as an impudent defiance, on the part of those who
work with their hands, offered to those who work with their heads. That
such infamy is endured in a town is a piece of barbarity and injustice,
the more so as it could be easily removed by a police notice requiring
every whip cord to have a knot at the end of it. It would do no harm to
draw the proletariat's attention to the classes above him who work with
their heads; for he has unbounded fear of any kind of head work. A
fellow who rides through the narrow streets of a populous town with
unemployed post-horses or cart-horses, unceasingly cracking with all his
strength a whip several yards long, instantly deserves to dismount and
receive five really good blows with a stick. If all the philanthropists
in the world, together with all the legislators, met in order to bring
forward their reasons for the total abolition of corporal punishment, I
would not be persuaded to the contrary.

But we can see often enough something that is even still worse. I mean a
carter walking alone, and without any horses, through the streets
incessantly cracking his whip. He has become so accustomed to the crack
in consequence of its unwarrantable toleration. Since one looks after
one's body and all its needs in a most tender fashion, is the thinking
mind to be the only thing that never experiences the slightest
consideration or protection, to say nothing of respect? Carters,