d other punishments were always available: the choice of
this one betrayed the sensual impulse which makes the practice an
abomination. But when its viciousness made it customary, it was
practised and tolerated on all hands by people who were innocent of
anything worse than stupidity, ill temper, and inability to discover
other methods of maintaining order than those they had always seen
practised and approved of. From children and animals it extended to
slaves and criminals. In the days of Moses it was limited to 39 lashes.
In the early nineteenth century it had become an open madness: soldiers
were sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling offences, with the
result (among others less mentionable) that the Iron Duke of Wellington
complained that it was impossible to get an order obeyed in the British
army except in two or three crack regiments. Such frantic excesses of
this disgusting neurosis provoked a reaction against it; but the clamor
for it by depraved persons never ceased, and was tolerated by a nation
trained to it from childhood in the schools until last year (1913), when
in what must be described as a paroxysm of sexual excitement provoked by
the agitation concerning the White Slave Traffic (the purely commercial
nature of which I was prevented from exposing on the stage by the
Censorship twenty years ago) the Government yielded to an outcry for
flagellation led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and passed an Act
under which a judge can sentence a man to be flogged to the utmost
extremity with any instrument usable for such a purpose that he cares
to prescribe. Such an Act is not a legislative phenomenon but a
psychopathic one. Its effect on the White Slave Traffic was, of course,
to distract public attention from its real cause and from the people who
really profit by it to imaginary "foreign scoundrels," and to secure a
monopoly of its organization for women.

And all this evil is made possible by the schoolmaster with his cane and
birch, by the parents getting rid as best they can of the nuisance of
children making noise and mischief in the house, and by the denial to
children of the elementary rights of human beings.

The first man who enslaved and "broke in" an animal with a whip would
have invented the explosion engine instead could he have foreseen the
curse he was laying on his race. For men and women learnt thereby to
enslave and break in their children by the same means. These children,
grown up,