hardly bear to look; for here we find pious fraud masking the violation
of the body by obscene cruelty. Any parent or school teacher who takes
a secret and abominable delight in torture is allowed to lay traps into
which every child must fall, and then beat it to his or her heart's
content. A gentleman once wrote to me and said, with an obvious
conviction that he was being most reasonable and high minded, that the
only thing he beat his children for was failure in perfect obedience and
perfect truthfulness. On these attributes, he said, he must insist. As
one of them is not a virtue at all, and the other is the attribute of a
god, one can imagine what the lives of this gentleman's children would
have been if it had been possible for him to live down to his monstrous
and foolish pretensions. And yet he might have written his letter to The
Times (he very nearly did, by the way) without incurring any danger of
being removed to an asylum, or even losing his reputation for taking
a very proper view of his parental duties. And at least it was not a
trivial view, nor an ill meant one. It was much more respectable than
the general consensus of opinion that if a school teacher can devise a
question a child cannot answer, or overhear it calling omega omeega,
he or she may beat the child viciously. Only, the cruelty must be
whitewashed by a moral excuse, and a pretence of reluctance. It must be
for the child's good. The assailant must say "This hurts me more than
it hurts you." There must be hypocrisy as well as cruelty. The injury to
the child would be far less if the voluptuary said frankly "I beat you
because I like beating you; and I shall do it whenever I can contrive
an excuse for it." But to represent this detestable lust to the child
as Divine wrath, and the cruelty as the beneficent act of God, which is
exactly what all our floggers do, is to add to the torture of the body,
out of which the flogger at least gets some pleasure, the maiming and
blinding of the child's soul, which can bring nothing but horror to
anyone.