and predicated plaintiff's right of recovery on proof of the fact that the punishment administered was unreasonable and unnecessary under all the circumstances. . . . We have examined all the other instructions complained of, and find no prejudicial error in any of them.

SEDGWICK, J. Two of the questions discussed by the commissioner seem to be of sufficient importance to justify further suggestions. The plaintiff's allegation of cruelty and inhuman punishment on the part of the defendant is denied in the answer. The defendant admitted that she inflicted punishment upon the child, but alleged that it was necessary for the correction of faults, and was reasonable, and not excessive or cruel. The question was discussed in the briefs, as to how far Courts and juries should interfere with parental discretion and inquire into motives, and the necessity and propriety of punishment inflicted. It seems to be held in North Carolina that if a parent acts in good faith and without malice, and does not inflict permanent injury, the law will not interfere however unmerited and severe the punishment may be. This doctrine does not seem to be supported by precedents from other jurisdictions. In later times it is not thought, as it once was, that so large a latitude of parental authority is necessary. It is generally held that punishment may be excessive and cruel, and therefore unlawful, although it falls short of inflicting permanent injury. On the other hand, some Courts seem to have ignored the right and duty of exercising parental discretion, and to have disregarded the consideration of good faith and the absence of passion or malice, as of no importance. Manifestly the jury must determine whether the punishment inflicted was of such an excessive severity as to imply malice or the absence of true parental love; but to attempt to put the jury in the place of the parent, and ignore all latitude of discretion, does violence to the plainest principles underlying the relation of parent and child. . . . It is not possible to exhibit to the jury the character and disposition of the child, its needs and dangers, its susceptibility to ordinary influences and methods of correction and discipline, or its want of such qualities, as these matters are known to the parent. Instructions which omit to present these considerations to the jury are faulty; if they are so framed as to necessarily convey to the jury the idea that no regard is to be paid to the parental discretion and judgment, and that the whole question is to be determined by the jury upon their general notion of parental duty, without regard to the motive of the parent, or his judgment as to the enormity of the fault of the child, or the degree of punishment necessary to correct it, they are erroneous. The instruction requested and refused was as follows: "The jury is instructed that the defendant in this case, having the same dominion over the plaintiff that a parent has over a child, had the legal right to restrain the plaintiff from doing wrong, to chastise her for wrongdoing, when acting in good faith and the facts, fairly weighed in the judgment of the defendant honestly and intelligently exercised, demanded

the use of a switch or other similar instrument in punishing her." There is no doubt that, in the condition of the record, the defendant was entitled to have the jury plainly instructed. . . . But it is not so clear that the defendant was entitled to have the instruction given, as framed and as requested, as to require a reversal of the judgment because of its refusal. The conclusion of the commissioner appears to be right, and is approved, and the judgment of the District Court

The other judges concur.

Affirmed.

733. Wм. M. COOPER. Flagellation; A History of the Rod in all Countries. (Ch. XLI.) School Punishments. Solomon has said, "He that spareth the Rod hateth his son; but he that loves him chastises him betimes," and the maxim has been considered indisputable in all ages. Schoolmasters have regarded the Rod as absolutely indispensable in the education of the young. The first flogging schoolmaster that we meet with in our reading is Troilus, who used to whip Homer, and who, after performing that operation effectually, assumed the title of Homeromastix. This worthy man received no other reward for his enterprise than crucifixion, which he suffered by the orders of King Ptolemy. Horace calls his schoolmaster, who was fond of this discipline, "the flogging Orbilius" (plagosus Orbilius); Quintilian denounces the practice of whipping schoolboys on account of its severity and its degrading tendency; and Plutarch, in his "Treatise on Education," says: "I am of opinion that youth should be impelled to the pursuit of liberal and laudable studies by exhortations and discourses, certainly not by blows and stripes."

But it is in European schools that we find the birch most systematically used. In German schools the Rod was at one time plied industriously: the operator was called the "blue man;" some professors preferred to inflict the punishment with their own hands; but in general it was inflicted by a man wearing a mask, and having his instrument concealed under a blue cloak (whence the name, the "blue man"). . . . It is recorded of a Suabian schoolmaster that, during his fifty-one years' superintendence of a large school, he had given 911,500 canings, 121,000 floggings, 209,000 custodes, 136,000 tips with the ruler, 10,200 boxes on the ear, and 22,700 tasks by heart. . . . In England the schoolboy has been, time out of mind, subject to the birch. . . .

...

In those days it would appear that boys were flogged, not for any offence, or omission, or unwillingness or incapacity to learn, but upon the abstract theory that they ought to be flogged. Erasmus bears witness that this was the principle upon which he was flogged. . . . So necessary was the Rod considered in education that in the case of princes whose delicate skins could not be ruffled, whipping boys were provided, on whom the offences of their royal masters were unsparingly visited. . . . Most of the schools in England have their stories of flogging, and of masters who were proficient in the art. . . . Dr. Busby of Westminster, whose name has passed into a proverb for scholastic severity. His rod, he used to say, was the sieve which sifted the wheat of scholarship from the chaff. . . . Dr. Parr deserves mention in the annals of school flagellation. He had a firm belief in the utility of the birch. At his school in Norwich there was usually a flogging levee before the classes were dismissed. . . . One of the undermasters told him one day that a certain pupil appeared to show signs of genius. "Say you so?" said Parr, "then begin to flog him to-morrow morning."

734. JAMES BOSWELL. Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791. Vol. I, Dent ed., pp. 18, 433.) . . . Johnson began to learn Latin with Mr. Hawkins, usher, or under-master of Lichfield school, "a man (said he) very skilful in his little way." With him he continued two years, and then rose to be under the care of Mr. Hunter, the headmaster, who, according to his account, "was very severe, and wrong-headedly severe. He used (said he) to beat us unmercifully; and he did not distinguish between ignorance and negligence; for he would beat a boy equally for not knowing a thing, as for neglecting to know it. He would ask a boy a question, and if he did not answer it, he would beat him, without considering whether he had an opportunity of knowing how to answer it. For instance, he would call up a boy and ask him Latin for a candlestick, which the boy could not expect to be asked. Now, Sir, if a boy could answer every question, there would be no need of a master to teach him.” . . . Indeed Johnson was very sensible how much he owed to Mr. Hunter. Mr. Langton one day asked him how he had acquired so accurate a knowledge of Latin, in which, I believe, he was exceeded by no man of his time; he said, "My master whipt me very well. Without that, Sir, I should have done nothing." He told Mr. Langton, that while Hunter was flogging his boys unmercifully, he used to say, "And this I do to save you from the gallows." Johnson, upon all occasions, expressed his approbation of enforcing instruction by means of the rod. "I would rather (said he) have the rod to be the general terror to all, to make them learn, than tell a child, If you do thus or thus, you will be more esteemed than your brothers or sisters. The rod produces an effect which terminates in itself. A child is afraid of being whipped, and gets his task, and there's an end on 't; whereas, by exciting emulation and comparisons of superiority, you lay the foundation of lasting mischief; you make brothers and sisters hate each other."

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On Saturday, April 11, 1772, he appointed me to come to him in the evening, when he should be at leisure to give me some assistance for the defence of Hastie, the schoolmaster of Campbelltown, for whom I was to appear in the House of Lords. When I came, I found him unwilling to exert himself. I pressed him to write down his thoughts upon the subject. He said, “There's no occasion for my writing. I'll talk to you." He was, however, at last prevailed on to dictate to me, while I wrote as follows:

"The charge is, that he has used immoderate and cruel correction. Correction, in itself, is not cruel; children, being not reasonable, can be governed only by fear. To impress this fear, is therefore one of the first duties of those who have the care of children. It is the duty of a parent; and has never been thought inconsistent with parental tenderness. It is the duty of a master, who is in his highest exaltation when he is loco parentis. . . . A stubborn scholar must be corrected till he is subdued. The discipline of a school is military. There must be either unbounded license or absolute authority. The master, who punishes, not only consults the future happiness of him who is the immediate subject of correction, but he propagates obedience through the whole school; and establishes regularity by exemplary justice. . . . Custom and reason have, indeed, set some bounds to scholastic penalties. The schoolmaster inflicts no capital punishments; nor enforces his edicts by either death or mutilation. The civil law has wisely determined, that a master who strikes at a scholar's rye shall be considered as criminal. But punishments, however severe, that produce no lasting evil, may be just and reasonable, because they may be necessary. Such have been the punishments used by the respondent."

735. THOMAS ARNOLD. Life and Correspondence. (1872. Vol. I, p. 113.) In considering his general management of the discipline of the school, it will only be possible to toucho n its leading features.

I. He at once made a great alteration in the whole system of punishments in the higher part of the school, "keeping it as much as possible in the background, and by kindness and encouragement attracting the good and noble feelings of those with whom he had to deal." . . . For the younger part of the school, he made a point of maintaining, to a certain extent, the old discipline of public schools.

"The beau ideal of school discipline with regard to young boys would seem to be this, that, whilst corporal punishment was retained on principle as fitly answering to and marking the naturally inferior state of boyhood, and therefore as conveying no peculiar degradation to persons in such a state, we should cherish and encourage to the utmost all attempts made by the several boys, as individuals, to escape from the natural punishment of their age by rising above its naturally low tone of principle."

Flogging, therefore, for the younger part, he retained, but it was confined to moral offences, such as lying, drinking, and habitual idleness, while his aversion to inflicting it rendered it still less frequent in practice than it would have been according to the rule he had laid down for it. But in answer to the argument used in a liberal journal, that it was even for these offences and for this age degrading, he replied with characteristic emphasis —

"I know well of what feeling this is the expression; it originates in that proud notion of personal independence which is neither reasonable nor Christian but essentially barbarian. It visited Europe with all the curses of the age of chivalry, and is threatening us now with those of Jacobinism. . . . At an age when it is almost impossible to find a true manly sense of the degradation of guilt or faults, where is the wisdom of encouraging a fantastic sense of the degradation of personal correction? What can be more false, or more adverse to the simplicity, sobriety, and humbleness of mind, which are the best ornament of youth, and the best promise of a noble manhood?"

736. S. P. PECKHAM. The Unwhipped Generation. (1910. Educational Review, XI, 414.) . . . Under "Discussions" in the Educational Review for May, 1910, was a paper entitled "The Unwhipped Generation." Its main contention was that the public-school teacher should be at liberty to whip, and should whip extensively, it would seem. Said the writer of that paper: "The home has, temporarily we hope, ceased to fulfil that function (disciplining children). . . . Mothers' clubs and teachers' and parents' associations are wholly inadequate. I maintain then, that the school as an institution ought to step into the breach, armed with its old weapon, the birch rod. . . . Since, often, in extreme cases, the parents' consent cannot be gained, the school should fight for its old-time right to punish regardless of the home. . . . Something of the old-time terror of punishment ought to be re-established, so that the small children may be led to believe it dangerous to commit various petty misdemeanors. Then they will come into the high school trained to respect law and order, to assume responsibility, to be real gentlemen and gentlewomen." Would that we could question the fact of failure in child discipline in most homes to-day! Assuredly, even the most intelligently loving of parents find it all but impracticable to stand against the tendency at large to let children habitually decide for themselves matters which are distinctly healthful or unhealthful for the body,

nourishing or ruinous for the mind, specifically moral or immoral. . . . "This urchin," says the writer of "The Unwhipped Generation," "has no fear of correction. Why should he have? He has never been corrected. He is of the unwhipped generation." Of another boy, whose mother had said that he "must be taken just right," "In nine cases out of ten, that 's just the trouble — he has not been taken just right, which is by application of a shingle," etc. Such jocose passages are frankly used as supports for the emphatic plea for whipping in school, with earnestly expressed confidence in ideal results.

Were this plea favored by only a dozen or two, a score or two, of the workers in the public schools, readers might drop "The Unwhipped Generation” with a philosophic laugh — presumably it would not be on the pages of the Educational Review. But, written by a teacher, it is a clear-cut expression of opinion on the increase among public-school teachers. It is now no rare thing to see private or newspaper letters like in import one not long ago on the school page of The Evening Post, despairing of the "rule by moral suasion, a charming and attractive principle — until one has tried it;" deploring the fact that "the Board of Education, in its Utopian illusion, abolished the rod;" and with praiseworthy earnestness demanding permission to whip pupils "before it shall be too late, before our city shall be overrun with criminals that our school system has helped to foster." There is every evidence to one who studies the schools that they are filling with this sentiment. Must we have our free-school children in an atmosphere made by teachers who depend more upon whippings than upon what may come under the head of "moral suasion"? No reminder is needed that these teachers are, as a rule, most kindly, anxious in work for children's good. Indeed, a courageous striving for moral welfare of great swarms of pupils to whom circumstances forbid the giving of any deliberate training is back of the demand for permission to whip: it is only conscientious and resolute teachers who take trouble to make this public demand, fearlessly advising use of the one form of punishment which would, as they hope, stop insubordination which hinders all class work. Not, as should be stated here, that many teachers believe that familiarizing children with school whippings, re-establishing "something of the old-time terror of punishment," would bring pupils to the high school trained to "respect law and order, to assume responsibility, to be real gentlemen and gentlewomen." As a rule, teachers now advocating corporal punishment do so on the ground that, bad as are ultimate effects, whippings appear necessary; they distinctly do not believe in whipping as a large feature in moral training, and it is with regret that they say a word in favor of legalizing the rod in the hand of any teacher who chooses to use it.

The explanation, then, of increase of pleas for the whip is simply that certain school conditions, not of teachers' making, force the resort to the whip.

Not teachers' free choice, but growth of unanimous school conditions, explains growth of demand for liberty to whip. To see remedies, we must see as clearly as possible where blame lies. For atrocious behavior of high-school pupils, "The Unwhipped Generation" puts the blame largely or wholly upon the home. But must we not ascribe a part of that blame to elementary schools — a small share to teachers, a large share to school conditions, primarily this combination: classes fully three times too large to permit good individual training; a confusing, unmanageable program of occupations; and children usually put under new teachers every five months? Disrespect for school, insolence towards instructors, irresponsibility, laziness, lack of ambition, lack of honor, are, we are told, common characteristics of high school pupils of this