Orleans County Monitor

Flogging Girls.
The authorized flogging of little girls or big girls is a piece of barbarism which, now that the subject has been definitely raised, will receive, we trust, no countenance from the home secretary. Mr. Riley says that girls in the elementary schools are caned, a bit of information which we commend to the immediate notice of Sir John Gorst. The public of London has outgrown the days of Mother Brownrigg, and Mother Brownrigg, as the Newgate "Calendar" informs us, was not sustained by judge, jury, public opinion or Jack Ketch in her theories and her practice as to the castigation of girls. There were philosophers, to be sure, who approved of the whipping of girls. Locke did, for one, and so did Dr. Johnson. Locke approved of a mother who whipped her little daughter nine times in order to compel the child to confess some error, and Johnson commended a mother who whipped her child in the interest of future truthfulness because the girl had said she came in through one door, when, in fact, she had come in through another. But those were days when children were supposed to be born only that they might be birched as far as possible out of their share of original sin. Women were publicly flogged at the cart's tail in the days of Locke and Johnson--and, of course, in the interest of discipline and order and morals. We cannot go back to those days, and any serious and public attempt to get back to them would be an absurdity as well as an outrage.--London News.