Rensselaer Republican, Volume 13, Number 25, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 March 1881 — Ingersoll on the Whipping Post. [ARTICLE]

Ingersoll on the Whipping Post.

In the interview in the Chicago Times, the great Pagan talks like a Christian about this relic of barbarism. A’ better argument against its re-establlshment than the following cannot be made: “A cruel people make cruel laws. — The objection I have to the whippingpost is that it is a punishment which call not be inflicted by a gentleman.— The person who administers the punishment must, of necessity, be fully as degraded as the person who receives it. lam opposedto any kind of punishment that ean not be administered by a gentleman. I am opposed to corporal punishment everywhere. It should be taken from the asylums and penitentiaries, and any man who would apply the lash to the naked back of another is beneath the contempt of honest people.” “Have you seen that Henry Bergh has introduced in the New York LegA islature a bill providing for whipping) as apunisliment for wife-beating?” 1 “Tne objection I have mentioned is fatal to Mr. Bergh’s bill. •He will be able to get persons to beat wife-beaters who, under the same circumstances, would be wife-beaters themselves. If they are not wife-beaters when they commence the business of beating others, they soon will bo. )I think that wife-beating in great cities could be stopped by putting all the wifebeaters at work at some government employment; the value of the work, however, to go to their wives and children. The trouble now is that most of the wife-beating is among the extremely poor, so that the wife, by informing against her husband, takes the last crust out of her own mouth. If you substitute whipping or flogging for the prison here you will in the first place prevent thousands of wives from informing, and in many cases where the wife would inform she woulcLafterwards be murdered by the flogged brute. Tho brute would naturally resort to the same means to reform his wife tiiat the state had resorted to for the purpose of reforming him. Flogging would beget flogging. Mr. Bergh is probably a man or great kindness of heart. When he reads that a wife has been beaten, he says tlie husband deserves to be beaten himself. But if Mr. Bergh was to be the* executioner, I imagine you could not prove by the back of the man that the punishment had been inflicted. Another good remedy for wife-beating is the abolition of the idea that a marriage is a sacrament and that there is' any God who is rendered happy by seeing a husband and wife live together, although the husband ?;ets most of his earthly enjoyment rom whipping his wife. No woman should live with a man a moment after he has struck her.”