It seems as if this one suggestion, candidly considered, might be enough to open all parents’ eyes to the enormity of whipping.  How many a loving mother will, without any thought of cruelty, inflict half-a-dozen quick blows on the little hand of her child, when she could no more take a pin and make the same number of thrusts into the tender flesh, than she could bind the baby on a rack.  Yet the pin-thrusts would hurt far less, and would probably make a deeper impression on the child’s mind.

Among the more ignorant classes, the frequency and severity of corporal punishment of children, are appalling.  The facts only need to be held up closely and persistently before the community to be recognized as horrors of cruelty far greater than some which have been made subjects of legislation.

It was my misfortune once to be forced to spend several of the hottest weeks of a hot summer in New York.  In near neighborhood to my rooms were blocks of buildings which had shops on the first floor and tenements above.  In these lived the families of small tradesmen, and mechanics of the better sort.  During those scorching nights every window was thrown open, and all sounds were borne with distinctness through the hot still air.  Chief among them were the shrieks and cries of little children, and blows and angry words from tired, overworked mothers.  At times it became almost unbearable:  it was hard to refrain from an attempt at rescue.  Ten, twelve, twenty quick, hard blows, whose sound rang out plainly, I counted again and again; mingling with them came the convulsive screams of the poor children, and that most piteous thing of all, the reiteration of “Oh, mamma! oh, mamma!” as if, through all, the helpless little creatures had an instinct that this word ought to be in itself the strongest appeal.  These families were all of the better class of work people, comfortable and respectable.  What sounds were to be heard in the more wretched haunts of the city, during those nights, the heart struggled away from fancying.  But the shrieks of those children will never wholly die out of the air.  I hear them to-day; and mingling with them, the question rings perpetually in my ears, “Why does not the law protect children, before the point at which life is endangered?”

A cartman may be arrested in the streets for the brutal beating of a horse which is his own, and which he has the right to kill if he so choose.  Should not a man be equally withheld from the brutal beating of a child who is not his own, but God’s, and whom to kill is murder?

The Inhumanities of Parents—­Needless Denials.

Webster’s Dictionary, which cannot be accused of any leaning toward sentimentalism, defines “inhumanity” as “cruelty in action;” and “cruelty” as “an act of a human being which inflicts unnecessary pain.”  The word inhumanity has an ugly sound, and many inhuman people are utterly and honestly unconscious of their own inhumanities; it is necessary therefore to entrench one’s self behind some such bulwark as the above definitions afford, before venturing the accusation that fathers and mothers are habitually guilty of inhuman conduct in inflicting “unnecessary pain” on their children, by needless denials of their innocent wishes and impulses.