sary, make them
binding upon all who of right come under their sway; and let us see an
honest Commodore, duly authorised by Congress, condemning to the lash a
transgressing Captain by the side of a transgressing sailor. And if the
Commodore himself prove a transgressor, let us see one of his brother
Commodores take up the lash against _him_, even as the boatswain's
mates, the navy executioners, are often called upon to scourge each
other.

Or will you say that a navy officer is a man, but that an American-born
citizen, whose grandsire may have ennobled him by pouring out his blood
at Bunker Hill--will you say that, by entering the service of his
country as a common seaman, and standing ready to fight her foes, he
thereby loses his manhood at the very time he most asserts it? Will you
say that, by so doing, he degrades himself to the liability of the
scourge, but if he tarries ashore in time of danger, he is safe from
that indignity? All our linked states, all four continents of mankind,
unite in denouncing such a thought.

We plant the question, then, on the topmost argument of all.
Irrespective of incidental considerations, we assert that flogging in
the navy is opposed to the essential dignity, of man, which no
legislator has a right to violate; that it is oppressive, and glaringly
unequal in its operations; that it is utterly repugnant to the spirit
of our democratic institutions; indeed, that it involves a lingering
trait of the worst times of a barbarous feudal aristocracy; in a word,
we denounce it as religiously, morally, and immutably _wrong_.

No matter, then, what may be the consequences of its abolition; no
matter if we have to dismantle our fleets, and our unprotected commerce
should fall a prey to the spoiler, the awful admonitions of justice and
humanity demand that abolition without procrastination; in a voice that
is not to be mistaken, demand that abolition today. It is not a
dollar-and-cent question of expediency; it is a matter of _right and
wrong_. And if any man can lay his hand on his heart, and solemnly say
that this scourging is right, let that man but once feel the lash on
his own back, and in his agony you will hear the apostate call the
seventh heavens to witness that it is _wrong_. And, in the name of
immortal manhood, would to God that every man who upholds this thing
were scourged at the gangway till he recanted.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

FLOGGING NOT NECESSARY.

But White-Jacket is