The Daily News. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1912. FLOGGING SENTENCES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 174, 10 December 1912, Page 4

The Daily News. TUESDAY, DECEMBER 10, 1912. FLOGGING SENTENCES.

The question of the use of the birch has been revived lately at Home, as the result of several severe sentences passed by magistrates, and judges in various parts of the country. The iniquitous White Slave Traffic lias been mainly responsible for the revival of this timehonored controversy, and the press generally has been agitating for an extension of flogging. The Home Office very wisely accepted an amendment to the White Slave Bill when it was before the Standing Committee, providing for the birching of offenders, and this has called down a storm of abuse and protest from a hysterical section of the 1 .community which is pleased to regard this form of punishment as "an antiquated, barbarity." But the weight of •seasoned and ripe judicial experience is tall against these delicate protestants. Thus the Dean of Lincoln, supported by two diocesan conferences, has lately ■urged that assaults on young girls should be punished by flogging in addition to imprisonment, while the Daily Express is anxious to extend the use of the lash to armed burgjars. Mr. Montague Sharpe and Sir Robert Anderson express similar views, and the Bishop of Chester has added'the weight of his influence by pointing out that the crime of garrotting was only suppressed by flogging. Mr. A. L. Lawrie, a well-known London magistrate, quite recently ordered a young man of eighteen to receive twenty-five strokes of the berch for "frequenting Hyde Park with an immoral •purpose." Mr. Fordham expressed his regret that he could not order a young Italian who had grossly insulted an English girl to be whipped, and Mr. Justice Scrutton similarly expressed his regret that he could not order "a good flog|ging" for a man who had abducted a girl of the age of fifteen. The weight of this evidence is singularly impressive, j and should go far to disabusing the public mind of the impression that prison hogging is a form of uncivilised torture. Anybody who knows anything at all about human nature must realise that there are criminals to whom imprisonment is only a luxury, and who are so mentally decadent that they can only })e stirred to a realisation of their delinquencies "through their hides." It would be just as easy and just as logical to argue that imprisoment itself is a torture in the case of some temperaments. The use of the birch must, of course, be surrounded by the most ample

safeguards, but it is emphatically justified in the case of offences against morality. There was a time when such offences were punishable even more severely, and if the use of the birch will assist in stopping the nefarious White Slave Traffic—and there is ample testimony to show that it will do so—it should by all means be embodied in the Bill. We are, apparently, less squeamish about this matter in the colonies than many of our friends at Home are, and perhaps our comparative immunity from crime is due in a measure-to this attitude. Solomon's "spare the rod and spoil the child" wisdom has, after all. withstood the test of many centuries.