Who has
not often seen a poor child receive, within an hour or two of the first
whipping, a second one, for some small ebullition of nervous
irritability, which was simply inevitable from its spent and worn
condition?
It is safe to say that in families where whipping is regularly recognized
as a punishment, few children under ten years of age, and of average
behavior, have less than one whipping a week. Sometimes they have more,
sometimes the whipping is very severe. Thus you have in one short year
sixty or seventy occasions on which for a greater or less time, say from
one to three hours, the child's nervous system is subjected to a
tremendous strain from the effect of terror and physical pain combined
with long crying. Will any physician tell us that this fact is not an
element in that child's physical condition at the end of that year? Will
any physician dare to say that there may not be, in that child's life,
crises when the issues of life and death will be so equally balanced that
the tenth part of the nervous force lost in such fits of crying, and in
the endurance of such pain, could turn the scale?
Nature's retributions, like her rewards, are cumulative.
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