We may agree with the LORD CHIEF JUSTICE that his mother was prompted by the highest motives, and yet also feel very strongly that she took an exaggerated view of her rights and raised an unfortunate discussion which, although it leaves no stain on the boy’s character, can hardly fail to render his future career as a schoolboy less happy than it otherwise might have been. The moral of it all is, perhaps, that parents, and especially mothers, should be less squeamish than they seem to be nowadays about the necessary punishments of a public school. We do not live in the days of BUSBY nor even in the days of KEATE, and perhaps it is as well that we do not. For this very reason the birch or cane in the hands of a modern schoolmaster is never an instrument of torture, though if certain fond and foolish mothers were to have their way it would soon cease to be an effective and salutary agency of discipline.
Caning from of the Times11
