THE USE OF THE LASH.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume VII, Issue 2151, 21 November 1885, Page 2

THE USE OF THE LASH.

The Sydney Bulletin says Advocates of the lash must grind their teeth tumacy like this. Prisoner Rico was brought out to be flogged in the yard of the Wooloomooloo lock-up a few days ago. About a dozen police officials, a medical man, and some members of the Press were present. ' Rice was stripped and tied up to the triangles. Then lie was asked by an official: ' Would. you like a glass of brandy?" Advocates of flogging should take an opportunity of explaining why they offer brandy to a man about to be flogged. Is it to quicken his sensibilities, so that he shall have a keoner consciousness of pain ? Is it to dull them so that he°shall be less conscious? In either case there is no legal reason for the exhibition of the drugl It is likely, however, that it is administered under the conviction that it helps to carry a man over a trying occasion. But, there is a subsequent corresponding relapse, Is it legal to raise a man into an abnormal state bo as to run him through a punishment judicially inflicted on him in his normal state 1 In Rice's case this question was irrelevant. He declined the brandy. "It was drink brought me here," he said, "and I want no more of it." The flogging went on. Blood oozed profusely from the red stripes on his back. The end came, He was untied, Another official approached, and asked " Will you have a drop of brandy ?" " No," replied Rice, "I have had enough of that." Then lie added, "Is that wink you call flogging ? I could stand that on my^end,' 1 The incident urges two reflections, The first nialjes the advocates of flogging gush from their teeth at the way the gory victim scouts their fetish. Tlio second drives the public mind to enquire whether it islegal, and, if legal, whether it is moral to whip a criminal with one hand and with the other hold to his mouth a brandy flask, from which, in every likelihood, the inspiration of the criine lio suffers for sprantf, If a man before being flogged may have brandy, where is the logical reason for not giving him ether, or chloroform, or (tiorphia ?