Too little has been said upon this point.  The opponents of corporal punishment usually approach the subject either from the sentimental or the moral standpoint.  The argument on either of these grounds can be made strong enough, one would suppose, to paralyze every hand lifted to strike a child.  But the question of the direct and lasting physical effect of blows—­even of one blow on the delicate tissues of a child’s body, on the frail and trembling nerves, on the sensitive organization which is trying, under a thousand unfavoring conditions, to adjust itself to the hard work of both living and growing—­has yet to be properly considered.

Every one knows the sudden sense of insupportable pain, sometimes producing even dizziness and nausea, which follows the accidental hitting of the ankle or elbow against a hard substance.  It does not need that the blow be very hard to bring involuntary tears to adult eyes.  But what is such a pain as this, in comparison with the pain of a dozen or more quick tingling blows from a heavy hand on flesh which is, which must be as much more sensitive than ours, as are the souls which dwell in it purer than ours.  Add to this physical pain the overwhelming terror which only utter helplessness can feel, and which is the most recognizable quality in the cry of a very young child under whipping; add the instinctive sense of disgrace, of outrage, which often keeps the older child stubborn and still through-out,—­and you have an amount and an intensity of suffering from which even tried nerves might shrink.  Again, who does not know—­at least, what woman does not know—­that violent weeping, for even a very short time, is quite enough to cause a feeling of languor and depression, of nervous exhaustion for a whole day?  Yet it does not seem to occur to mothers that little children must feel this, in proportion to the length of time and violence of their crying, far more than grown people.  Who has not often seen a poor child receive, within an hour or two of the first whipping, a second one, for some small ebullition of nervous irritability, which was simply inevitable from its spent and worn condition?

It is safe to say that in families where whipping is regularly recognized as a punishment, few children under ten years of age, and of average behavior, have less than one whipping a week.  Sometimes they have more, sometimes the whipping is very severe.  Thus you have in one short year sixty or seventy occasions on which for a greater or less time, say from one to three hours, the child’s nervous system is subjected to a tremendous strain from the effect of terror and physical pain combined with long crying.  Will any physician tell us that this fact is not an element in that child’s physical condition at the end of that year?  Will any physician dare to say that there may not be, in that child’s life, crises when the issues of life and death will be so equally balanced that the tenth part of the nervous force lost in such fits of crying, and in the endurance of such pain, could turn the scale?