If that case had come before me, I
should have punished the boy's father, unless he could show that the best
authorities are mistaken (as indeed they too generally are), and that
under more favourable circumstances the boy would have been able to lie,
and would have lied accordingly.
"There is no occasion for you to send your child to a deformatory. I am
always averse to extreme measures when I can avoid them. Moreover, in a
deformatory she would be almost certain to fall in with characters as
intractable as her own. Take her home and whip her next time she so much
as pulls about the salt. If you will do this whenever you get a chance,
I have every hope that you will have no occasion to come to me again."
"Very well, sir," said the father, "I will do my best, but the child is
so instinctively truthful that I am afraid whipping will be of little
use."
There were other cases, none of them serious, which in the old days would
have been treated by a straightener. My father had already surmised that
the straightener had become extinct as a class, having been superseded by
the Managers and Cashiers of the Musical Banks, but this became more
apparent as he listened to the cases that next came on. These were dealt
with quite reasonably, except that the magistrate always ordered an
emetic and a strong purge in addition to the rest of his sentence, as
holding that all diseases of the moral sense spring from impurities
within the body, which must be cleansed before there could be any hope of
spiritual improvement.
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