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Utopia of Usurers and Other Essays by G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
page 31 of 103 (30%)

(3) Most people, on hearing the suggestion that it may come to corporal
punishment at last (as it did in every slave system I ever heard of,
including some that were generally kindly, and even successful), will
merely be struck with horror and incredulity, and feel that such a
barbarous revival is unthinkable in the modern atmosphere. How far it
will be, or need be, a revival of the actual images and methods of ruder
times I will discuss in a moment. But first, as another of the converging
lines tending to corporal punishment, consider this: that for some reason
or other the old full-blooded and masculine humanitarianism in this matter
has weakened and fallen silent; it has weakened and fallen silent in a
very curious manner, the precise reason for which I do not altogether
understand. I knew the average Liberal, the average Nonconformist
minister, the average Labour Member, the average middle-class Socialist,
were, with all their good qualities, very deficient in what I consider a
respect for the human soul. But I did imagine that they had the ordinary
modern respect for the human body. The fact, however, is clear and
incontrovertible. In spite of the horror of all humane people, in spite
of the hesitation even of our corrupt and panic-stricken Parliament,
measures can now be triumphantly passed for spreading or increasing the
use of physical torture, and for applying it to the newest and vaguest
categories of crime. Thirty or forty years ago, nay, twenty years ago,
when Mr. F. Hugh O'Donnell and others forced a Liberal Government to drop
the cat-o-nine-tails like a scorpion, we could have counted on a mass of
honest hatred of such things. We cannot count on it now.

(4) But lastly, it is not necessary that in the factories of the future
the institution of physical punishment should actually remind people of
the jambok or the knout. It could easily be developed out of the many
forms of physical discipline which are already used by employers on the
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