The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1867-04-26

Nor will it do to assume that the perpetra- |
tors of these horrors were moral monsters. |
Some of them, we know, are men brutalized, |
or rather demonized, by habitual drunkenness;
but others were persons OF good habits fair
moral character and even of unexceptonal
church standing. The clergyman who killed
his little son at Medina N. Y, though men,
tally weak. had not previously been regarded
as depraved Had he known enough to stop
beating his child little short of killing him.
he might have lived out his own days under
the mantle of respectability and in the unmn-
gled odor of sanctity.
We deem him, with others of like unhappy
fortune and evil fame, victims of false con
ception of parental rights and duties. They
had been told that to 'spare the rod" was to
"spoil the child''-that it was their duty to
constrain him to obedience at any cost. He
had failed to do what was required of him-he
must be made to do it at any cost-and to
effect this the inilictiOn of physical pain was
his only resource. So he by turns beat and
exhorted Cor prayed), until the exhortations
having proved Intellectual, the beating did its
perfect work; achieving not subiugation, but
death. Can we wonder that the hapless
parent regards himself as rather unlucky than
depraved-as misjudging rather than criminall
The great mass of parents have yet to learn
that their displeasure with a child is no rea-
son and no excuse for beating it. Nor does the
simple fact that it has done wrong give them
warrant to subject it to physical torture.
Here, for instance, is child of five to ten
years, who, in the hope of thereby attaining
enjoyment or escaping punishment, has told
a lie. The father, naturally indignant, there
upon gives it a beating. What relation has
the penalty to the ofense ? or, rather, what
good result may be fairly expected from the
beating? Can you nationally expect it to love
and speak the truth because you have mauled
it Is it not far more likely to hate and
loathe you? That child will be a good deal
more apt henceforth to tell one lie to hide
another than to abhor and shun lying al
together.
-"But may not a parent justifiably use
force to restrain a child from evil doing ?"
Certainly. If the child insists on throwing
the hammer at the looking-gl glass, or doing any
wanton, malicious mischief the requisite
force may be employed to constrain it into
better behavior. But to restrain from evil
doing is one thing to inhict pain because evil
has been done is quite another. Many a
child has been hardened into inveterate de-
pravity by chastisements inflicted under the
mistaken notion that its evil prOpensities
might thus be subdued and eradi3ated.
We beg every parent who is prone to beat
ing his child to recall the experiences of his
own childhood, and consider what were the
effects on his moral nature of any and
every peudl luIllCllOn he ever endured. we
doubt that SO many as one in ten can fairly
say that the parental beating to which he
was subjected did him as much moral good as
harm.
We are not pleading for indulgence. Every
child should be taught to know the right and
to do it. What we urge is, that the rod, the
whip, the cudgel, are implements of parental
discipline which have, on the whole, done far
more evil than good-that more children have
been confirmed and strengthened in wrong
doing than rescued theretrom by the infiction
of physical pain. How many have been
bludgeOned into idiocy or permanent mental
intirmity by misjudging fathers, can never be
known till the sea shall give up her dead.
There are abundant means whereby parent
may evince his displeasure, his sorrow, in
view of the faults Of his child, without maui
ing it. Withdraw or withhold indulgences
which you would gladly have accorded, had
not your past confidence been abused-let
your child realize that your loss of faith in its
integrity inevitably subjects it to privations
and restrictions-shOw that yeur love for it
constrains you, most reluctantly to render it
less happy because of its transgressions-but
keep the lash for unreasoning brutes, and
beware of employing it to deface and disfgure
the image of God.