Litchfield enquirer., 1877-03-15
THE DEPOSITION OF THE ROD.


 all generations.
 THE DEPOSITION OF THE ROD. .
 The people who believe that the rod and the lash have saving grace in almost every kind of sublunary discipline may be pretty vigorously divided into two classes. First, the very ancient conservatives of society, who long to ring in the old and ring out the new. Secondly, . tho sanguine people who hopelessly hope to startle the world with some fresh and original thought. We had not supposed that so keen and lively newspaper as the Louis vile Courier, Journal represented either of these classes, and we are still at loss to understand the motive or logic that prompts a recent article in which, under the title ''take down the rod;" it urges the need of corporeal correction for young Americans. We are told with gravity that emphatic spankings are the only real sedative for youthful excess; that "the men who won our independence were all whipped at school when they were boys" that ''a sound trouncing three times a week" will teach modern boys that there is superior authority, and make them grow up better citizens, and so on. Such  ly by the fact that the Courier-Journal is very Democratic and therefore little of Q bulldozer by habit, or else that the rich gloom of its recent. despatches from Washington has given it's thoughts an austere and purgatOrial turn.
 However, to answer the Courier Journal more seriously, there are undoubtedly cases wlfere' the rod in our day has it's uses. The boy and the youth are not al- ways so ready for reason and authority but that the discipline of the flesh must sometimes be the last argument of the parent. For the boy, as for the elder, the attempt to formulate a general rule is like an effort to answer. thes query, What sized coats do people in general wear? In like manner there are kinds of discipline for class of youth which are essential to the development of character and man hood; and which can never be obtained in the home. We can readily imagine, for instance. a boy petted and pampeFed by gentle parents in home of ease Go whom the experience of Tom Brown at Rugby, the trials of the flag" the persecution and knocks of life in the boarding school, are the sole condition of a healthful and symmetrical growth, But happily the cases where this sort of an ordeal is essen-''
 
 prove the rule that boy character can usually expand healthfully enough in gentler surroundings.
 In examining such proposition as that the rod and the whipping-p post have a con- stant and not an exceptional use in the community, we need only one poetulate, which rests on such universal experience that we feeljustifed in calling it postu- late rather than problem. It Is that the advance of the human race has been steas fly from the methods and notions of forc8 to these of reason. How far this is true islattested by the sublime and stupendous advance of humanity since the Homeric gods of force were superseded by the be- nign teachings of Christianity. The ex- pansion of jurisprudence. the recognition of international rights, the emancipation of the wife and of the slave, the decline of duelling, and che restriction of the pow CT of the family head until the father of to-day no more resembles the father of the feudal period than Queen Victoria resembles Nero, are few of many histor- ical instances which prove the direction in which society moves. We have evidence of the same kind on @ narrower scale in the fact that the rod and brutal methods of family discipline prevail chiefly in our | C1tD0SC6O rises from his debasement>he stops them. What also shall we say of the inference to be drawn from the circumstance that in naval and prison dicipline, in which the subject of punishment has been accorded most consecutive and scientific attention, in which authority has been necessarily urged to it's utmost limits, and in which scruples of sentiment have had the least possible play. whipping has declined al- most as rapidly and completely as in the family? It is barely possible. we grant, that among the varied forces that impel us away from violent and toward moral expedients, one has beeRmisdirected, and that the training of the child is that one. But we submit that the chances are almost sweepingly against such an hypothesis, unless the spirit and the results of what we call civilization have been greatly mis- l interpreted.
 A more subtitle but also a more direct philosophy, that touches on the very ca l pacity of man for improvement as a moral being, leads to like conclusion. Some of the keenest and most learned of English writers have given prominence to the ease with which the child of the present day reaches the mental power that in a youth of few centuries ago would have moved Gu0 WOuu0E OI HIS aSSOCldb0Ss 1E6Cl8cAI lOE the same reason the intellects of our day apprehend the nature of moral forces at a comparatively early age; and when their notion of right and wrong is once estab- lished the rod can no more convince them than it can convince an intellectual strip l ling, who revolts at the whip as he would at the biting insults of comrade, but listens and yields to argument or suasion. | We know there have -been-peFhaps there still are-families in New England where the Westminster Catechism has been taught on Sundays by the snap of the rod, but If it served to impress either the sane tity of the day or the spirit of divine truth it was because children were such grotesque and abnormal beings that. like the old sectarians, they could illustrate divine grace by burning John Rogers. It is precisely because our children are not of this kind-because they so soon become the fathers of the man; because they very early dissociate violence and justice; be- cause they learn quickly to apply such distractions as reason and right-that the rod has lost it's potency, and has given
 way to intelligence as the efficient weapon of family discipline; and we believe, and
 we delight to believe, that this deposition F of the rod and lash is only one of the signs
 that the world moves on and ub, and that
 mankind IS more and more inspired by the spirit that came from the manager
 where the Young Child lay.
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