And for you, good people, who do not believe in this sort of thing,
what about this case? It is a hard case, no doubt. There is no
pleasing feature in its early stages, but does not its outcome warrant
all its ugly phases?

Grant that it is all old fashioned; that to you it seems silly for the
old man to go alone and pray after trouncing the boy, or that you fear
the "boy's will was broken" by this episode, yet review the facts in
their entirety, and see if there is not a good in them that you are
wont to overlook.

The punishment was harsh, but it was just such as "Dodd" Weaver had
been needing for a long time, and the only thing that could reach him
just then. It would have been a crime to treat in like manner a gentle
little girl with a sweet disposition, but was it a crime in the case of
"Dodd?"

And if not a crime in "Dodd's" case, why in other cases like his? And
if the punishment was right, inflicted by the hand of the grandfather,
why not by the hand of the teacher who shall have occasion to resort,
even to this, to put a boy into the right way? I do not mean a
cold-blooded whipping, inflicted by a Principal for a trifling
transgression of a rule in some department of school, under one of the
assistant teachers, but a retribution, swift, sure, and terrible, that
is inflicted by the person against whom the wrong is done, and which
falls upon the willful transgressor to keep him from doing so again.

For this is the mission of penalty, to keep the wrong-doer from a
repetition of his wrong doing.