Pupils in a Class of their Own for Bad Behaviour55

The boys are now birched instead of being sent to gaol, with the result that juvenile crime is diminishing and that our prisons are half empty. But why should bad girls not be allowed the benefit of a smart caning? Prison is worse for girls even than for boys, and it is about time that some friend of the sex began an agitation for woman’s right to be flogged. We are not joking in the least. The rod is, as Mrs. Meredith says, “an instrument of culture,” which girls need as much as boys, and although we would limit the caning to the palms of the hands, Mrs. Meredith is quite right when she claims the right to be whipped as among the “blessings that it was our happy lot to have known in our own experience.” “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is a maxim which has often been invoked to excuse horrible cruelty, but the truth that it expresses applies to children regardless of sex. Why should men monopolize so all the useful things in this life, oven down to the birch rod’? – ‘Pall Mall Gazette.’