The Spanking Writers

I return for a third and final time to our by-now-great-friend, the 19th century punishment enthusiast Mr. Henry M. Brooks.

The Salem Gazette of 6 February 1824 reproduced a wonderful extract entilted “The Schoolmaster’s Soliloquy’ from the Conneticut Centinel [sic]:

To whip, or not to whip?–that is the question.
Whether ’tis easier in the mind to suffer
The deaf’ning clamor of some fifty urchins,
Or take birch and ferule ‘gainst the rebels,
And by opposing end it? To whip–to flog–
Each day, and by a whip to say we end
The whispering, shuffling, and ceaseless buzzing
Which a school is heir to–’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To whip, to flog,
To whip, and not reform–aye, there’s the rub.

It continues in an equally silly way…

For by severity what ills may come,
When we’ve dismissed and to our lodging gone,
Must give us pain. There’s the respect
That makes the patience of a teacher’s life.
For who would bear the thousand plagues of a school,–
The girlish giggle, the tyro’s awkwardness,
The pigmy pedant’s vanity, the mischief,
The sneer, the laugh, the pouting insolence,
With all the hum-drum clatter of a school,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare hickory? Who would willing bear
To groan and sweat under a noisy life,
But that the dread of something after school
(That hour of rumor, from whose slanderous tongue
Few Tutors e’er are free) puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear _these_ lesser ills,
Than fly to _those_ of greater magnitude.
Thus error does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied over with undue clemency,
And pedagogues of great pith and spirit,
With this regard their _firmness_ turn away,
And lose the name of _government_.