Nature’s retributions, like her rewards, are cumulative.  Because her sentences against evil works are not executed speedily, therefore the hearts of the sons of men are fully set in them to do evil.  But the sentence always is executed, sooner or later, and that inexorably.  Your son, O unthinking mother! may fall by the way in the full prime of his manhood, for lack of that strength which his infancy spent in enduring your hasty and severe punishments.

It is easy to say,—­and universally is said,—­by people who cling to the old and fight against the new, “All this outcry about corporal punishment is sentimental nonsense.  The world is full of men and women, who have grown up strong and good, in spite of whippings; and as for me, I know I never had any more whipping than I deserved, or than was good for me.”

Are you then so strong and clear and pure in your physical and spiritual nature and life, that you are sure no different training could have made either your body or your soul better?  Are these men and women, of whom the world is full, so able-bodied, whole-souled, strong-minded, that you think it needless to look about for any method of making the next generation better?  Above all, do you believe that it is a part of the legitimate outworking of God’s plan and intent in creating human beings to have more than one-half of them die in childhood?  If we are not to believe that this fearful mortality is a part of God’s plan, is it wise to refuse to consider all possibilities, even those seemingly most remote, of diminishing it?

No argument is so hard to meet (simply because it is not an argument) as the assumption of the good and propriety of “the thing that hath been.”  It is one of the devil’s best sophistries, by which he keeps good people undisturbed in doing the things he likes.  It has been in all ages the bulwark behind which evils have made stand, and have slain their thousands.  It is the last enemy which shall be destroyed.  It is the only real support of the cruel evil of corporal punishment.

Suppose that such punishment of children had been unheard of till now.  Suppose that the idea had yesterday been suggested for the first time that by inflicting physical pain on a child’s body you might make him recollect certain truths; and suppose that instead of whipping, a very moderate and harmless degree of pricking with pins or cutting with knives or burning with fire had been suggested.  Would not fathers and mothers have cried out all over the land at the inhumanity of the idea?

Would they not still cry out at the inhumanity of one who, as things are to-day, should propose the substitution of pricking or cutting or burning for whipping?  But I think it would not be easy to show in what wise small pricks or cuts are more inhuman than blows; or why lying may not be as legitimately cured by blisters made with a hot coal as by black and blue spots made with a ruler.  The principle is the same; and if the principle be right, why not multiply methods?