The Restoration of Whipping as a Punishment for Crime

Abstract

About the middle of the last century a wave of humanitarian sentiment rolled over the civilized world. It began in the United States and ended in Europe. It brought with it many good things. It left behind it also a certain amount of sediment. Part of this sediment was a mushy conception of the relations of criminals to society. What was society to do with them? Were they, after all, very much in fault? Had they not been children of evil, by inheritance from ancestors for whose rascality or its consequences they ought not to be held responsible? What right had one man to punish another? Was that not an affair that belonged solely to God?