Corporal Punishment
Children’s diseases are a logical result of children’s beatings ❦ To shock, pain, grieve, anger or violently suppress a human being is to run a grave risk of lowering that individual’s physical vitality to a point where the person is an easy prey for any disease that happens along. That which interferes with the vital functions, even in a transient way, is not wise nor good. ¶ Extreme anger is apt to be followed by lassitude or some marked physical disturbance. In fact, it is well known that hate secretes a toxin which manifests itself in the breath, and in the tissues ❦ What we call a disease is a symptom of vitalitydecreased to a point where the forces of dissolution are active. A shock which will blanch the cheek disturbs the circulation, and interferes with the digestion. ¶ Perhaps the whipping did not mutilate, but it angered and shocked until a fever followed. Dyspepsia is a matter of the nerves. Much of our bad theology, if we could trace it, would be found to have its rise in indigestion. And that it has caused pathological disturbances of countless varieties, from catarrh to acute mania, is known to every thinking physician. ¶ And of all causes of sickness, I know of none that has borne a greater crop of cosmic cockleburs than the old-time plan of whipping children. When Solomon put forth that unwise saying, “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” an extent of harm was done the human race that no pen can compute. That one statement should have convinced every intelligent person that the Bible was just like every other book—good and bad in spots.If accepted literally, the Bible is an atrocious book, false, obscene and misleading, tending to insanity, disease and death. Fortunately, we are now allowed to take the Bible as the garbled literature of a barbaric and superstitious past, collected from many sources, and good and bad, wise and silly, sublime and vicious—all as the case may be. ¶ That millions of parents have bolstered their brutal tendency to punish and inflict pain by that remark about sparing the rod, every one knows. And always the tendency to beat the little thing, too weak to strike back, was more to ease the feelings of the parent than to improve and benefit the child. Moreover, it was educating the child, for the youngster grew up and inflicted upon its own children all the horror that it had, itself, endured. It was heir to the brutality, heir to the Bible, heir to the strap, birch, rod, ferrule and hairbrush, so these were in daily use in all Christian homes. ¶ In my childhood, I remembera Baptist preacher who lived neighbor to us ❦ This man was loud, lacrimose, brutal, a devout Christian, and a preacher of power, snatching many souls from the burning. The way that gospel sharp used to pass out his tidings of great joy broke in on my childish fancies, so I became convinced that if God was really just, that pious, bawling beast who fed fat on our chickens would go to hell, sure. But I kept my suspicions to myself. This preacher had a strap cut from a side of sole-leather—a strap three feet long, with tails, with which he used to beat up one of his nine or ten children every day ❦ From the baby wearing diapers to a big boy of sixteen, and a girl full-grown, they all got it. I have heard their cries for mercy ring out on a winter’s night when they would run out into the yard to escape their pious parent intent on saving their souls. ¶ Once, one of his daughters, a girl of fifteen, spent ten cents for a blue ribbon, and appeared in church with the ribbonin her hair. Her father saw her from his place in the pulpit. He noted her mark of pride ❦ He denounced her before the congregation, and expressed a hypocritical, pious pain that his own flesh and blood should be guilty of such devilish frivolity. Then he ordered her out of the church. When he got home after the service, he fell upon her with the strap. It pained him, but he felt it was his duty to correct her. The mother was a sick and undone little creature, who twice had twins, and bore at least one baby a year, except the year when her lord and master crossed the plains and got alkalied. And this woman really believed, too, that the children should be punished, and so she had a way of reporting them, thus, “I’ll tell your father on you when he comes home!” She, too, believed in Solomon, and she believed also in her husband’s religion. Poor thing, she was too busy bearing babies to really think anything out for herself ❦ But that Sunday afternoon,when her husband felt it his duty to whip the daughter, the girl ran to the mother and demanded protection. The good man was laying on the strap, anywhere, over the girl’s head, shoulders, her arms and hands, although usually he picked out some choice portion of anatomy and did an artistic job. ¶ Yet this time the girl fought back, and she was only a slim slip of a thing. But now, the womanhood in her was aroused. She felt insulted. She struck, she bit, she scratched, she screamed. And then she ran to her mother ❦ Something in the little yellow mother was now aroused. Her child was being abused. Well, what of it! Hadn’t she seen these whippings going on daily for twenty years? But this was different ❦ The adolescent girl had only given way to her innocent and natural desire to put forth a little color and be beautiful. Now it was brute man against woman. The mother seized the strap. It was jerked through her clenched hands withsuch violence that it took the skin with it. The preacher had backed the girl into a corner, and with one hand clutching her hair was laying on the strap with the other, in the name of the Lord. The mother was behind. Suddenly she seized a long-handled skillet that was on the kitchen-stove, she swung it with both hands, and it landed square on the man’s head ❦ He was dazed, and turned half-around. Then he got another one. He was getting a kitchen shower. One sharp edge of the skillet skinned one of his ears and cut it half-off, as Peter touched up the servant of the High Priest. The blood ran in a stream. The woman seeing the gore, and amazed at her own temerity, fell in a dead swoon. The girl escaped and ran over to our house. My father and mother hurried over, and, kid-like, I followed. We found the preacher on his knees, praying over his wife, begging God for her recovery ❦ He told us he had stumbled and fallen against the cook-stove.My father took a stitch in the ecclesiastic souse, and washed off the blood of the lamb ❦ The woman soon recovered and was put to bed. The girl took care of herself. She told my mother the truth of the incident, but was cautioned not to repeat it to others, and she didn’t. ¶ The next Sunday the holy man preached as usual, unctuous and oily, smiling and smirking, thundering ponderously betimes, warning us to flee the wrath to come. ¶ This daughter died at eighteen, of galloping consumption. One of the boys achieved considerable local fame as a horse-thief. I believe he was the only one of that big family who reached maturity, and this was because he had a pachyderm hide and a heart of gneiss ❦ Several of the children died in babyhood, the rest ran the gamut of about all the diseases in the books. And finally, the Lord’s will was done. A long row of little white headstones in the village graveyard marks where they sleep, freed from thestrap, awaiting a glorious resurrection at the Last Great Day. ¶ What killed them? The strap, I should say, carried to its logical limit, with a plentiful lack of love. Spare the rod and save the child, for love is life, and hate is death. Love is better than a cat-o’-nine-tails, and Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, was a lobster—at least part of the time.