The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, August 11, 1901, Page 7

HERE is talk of our having & whip- Ping post where husbands may be trained up in the way they should go. The thing has been hammered over time and sgain in the Past. Here on our coast it was for & young attorney 2nd & young husbend to throw the bomb- =hell proposition into our midst very late- Sald Prosecuting Attorney A. P. Leach of Oakland, better known as Abe: “J¢ T hed my way, the whipping post *ghould be used with all the public dis- grace and physical punishment its ser- vies fnvolves upon such men as this who beat tle women, particularly their wives.” It was Jean Latrille that he was talk- ing about. Jean keeps a French laundry, 2 dog and a wife, and they are all his. ¥e considers it his privilege to do with them &s be pleases, and it is no concern of the court if he shower upon one of them delicate little attentions with po- tato masher or stove lid. ral Mr. Leach was extremely warm when he said it. He has been Prosecuting At- torney in Oakland court for three that time he has had some- five wife-beating cases, haif vears, and thing 1i Of these he has seen all but some dozen dismissed e twent “Tt makes me mad,” he said. saw him it was several davs he was entirely cool, but his not changed In the least. “It makes me so mad,” he repeated, “not to to do anything with those great tes that take clubs and pokers red-pound women." he says, all arises from which wives cannot be testify against their hus- e trouble law by to They back down every time,” he went g as he talked. “T've seen the ing happen so many times I'm “A wife rushes into court, erying out for protection against a brutal husband. The matter is taken up, the case is pre- nothing 18 wanting except the wife's prosecution. Then, after she has ade all the fuss, she backs down. She walks out arm in arm with the man who g her. She won’t prose- cute. “When injured wives of this class come to me I say, ‘Oh, you're wrathyjust now, but you won't prosecute when thé time comes.’ “ “The idea” they always say. ‘Do you suppose I'm going to stand any more of this?” Very indignantly, of course. “Yes, I suppose you'll go back to your husband and stand it, just like all the others,’ I reply, and then they raise their eyebrows and pucker their mouths firmly and answer, ‘Others may, but you don't krow me.’ They always say, ‘You don't know me.’ Heavens, don’t I? I know every one of them. They’re all altke.” Mr. Leach is a rattling good talker and mot an amateur actor for nothing. I had been g0 absorbed in ching how they “rolled their ey and “puckered their mouths” that I had to remind myself that 1 know yet how the whipping post was golng to correct all t It seems that the arguments run this way: If imprisonment is the penalty for wife-beating, the wife cools before she and into comfortable jafl quarters while she has to work to sup- port the family. If a big fine is the pen- 2lty she is too ®ood an economist upon second thought to rid the family coffers of ten, fifty or a hundred dollars, But if & whipping be the penalty she is nothing out of pocket by the transaction and the chances are good that her lord and mas- ter will leave flatirons end bootjacks to their legitimate uses, at any rate for a while after he has felt how it feels him- self. sends her “T don’t see any other way to teach these brutes that they must not use a wite Jike a dog,” Mr. Leach wound up with vim, king doesn’t make any impression on They believe that they have a per. right to do as the whim directs, There who shuffied into the J feeling in his pocket as was one struck your wife? inquired king the gold. Bhe's my wife.” struck that little defenseless sure, T hit her. She's my wife.’ t ten dollars for? r hittin’ her.’ e price for hitting wives has since you were here before. will cost you just one hundred dollars 1d feel the Judge chuck- stammered indignantly and out the ten dollars. ‘But, vife.” ing e’s my > 8 ile After 1 had Joft v thi Mrs. C tance- Mr Leach { came hack *he tay and sought yut 1 had to seek some dis- a door and a stenographer end several waRing clients an1 another a Follz. door. And when 1 got her pinned down at last she said that her head was %o full of clients and oil lLusiness and suffrage that she really couldn’t turn it in the di- rection of the whipping post discussion. I started to go then. I never knew it to fail. “But in a off-hand discussion,” she pro- ceeded, settiing herself while I followed suit, “I should say ‘that I don’t believe in a whipping post for-the same reason that I don’t believe in forcing criminals' to walk vpon broken glass. I don’t believe in reviving the tortures of the inquisition. I don’t believe in returning in this day of enlightenment to things that are primi- tive and barbarous. *“Whipping would be degrading, would it not? It's in a line with capital punish- ment. Those that look on at such an ex- hibition are degraded, those that read of it in the papers are. Just because the criminal has descended so low as to com- mit a brutal act is no reason why the law should do the same.” “But the object is to deter the crime,” I offered joyfully, for I was posted on the arguments and I couldn’t have stood it not to air my new knowledge. *“‘And if fine and imprisonment won't do ite—" *“No, they don't always accomplish the object, of course. I don’t believe in long terms of imprisonment or in heavy fines. I don’t believe much in punishment, any- way. Let us be gentle. Let us get at the root of the matter. Let us eradicate evil * THE SUNDAY CALL, by teaching good. If any man has done 50 horrible a thing as to beat a helpless wife, I say, he is morally diseased. He ought to be put to bed and nursed to bet- ter moral health. That’s what he needs— not punishment of a nature with his own crime.” 1 rose to go. “I mustn’t keep you any longer,” I sald. “And yod may add,” she went on, “that Mrs. Foltz says that any wofman who per- mits the first beating from her husband— well, she deserves the second.” « s Kansas City has a whipping -ost in active operation. It does not limit its scope to wife beaters. The other day word came of the whipping of a pumpkin- colored young lady. “For the first time since his whipping post gas been established,” ran the dis- patch,\“Justice Walts has had a girl whipped in his court. Before this the lash has been used on boys only. A number of them have been whipped for minor of- fenses, principally theft. The Judge was unwilling to punish a girl In this manner, and it took a good deal of pleading to convince him that such a course was a good one. The girl's lawyer and her mother both asked to- have the girl whipped rather than sent to jail. Finally the Judge yielded and her mother gave the child the best whipping she has had for some time. It was, however, so the mother said, only a forerunner of what was to come. “Last Monday Lillle Thomas, 13 years old and very black, found herself suffer-’ ing from ennui. Her mother was away from home, and in looking about for a good time, Lillle took $3 from a neighbor. Soda water, lemonade and candy made rapid inroads upon this capital and by the time the neighbor had told the girl's mother of the affair Lillie had not a cent left. She was a very much scared girl when she sat in court and was told the gravity of the offense. “Mrs. Thomas, who persisted In calling the Judge ‘Boss,’ was pleased when he told her she might whip her girl and then take her home. “ “When niggahs get bad, you have to use de rawhide,’ was her comment, L ‘It was when Mra. Themas had hes daughter under the influence of the whip that she began to talk at length. “ ‘Lillfe! Lillfe!" she shouted, again and again, ‘aln’t you ‘shamed? I've treated you so well. Heah you've dlsgraced me by making me bring you to dis notorfous co’t and dis notorious whippin’ post.’ ““All this was punctuated with blows. “The Judge stopped the woman when he thought the girl had been whipped enough, and mother and daughter left the court together.” ey . In 1887 the American Bar Assoclation de- voted hours at their convention to the dis- cussion of the problem. Nothing in par- ticular came of it all, but a great deal of arguing was done. The pros said that ap- propriateness in punishment was the great thing; that when their sinful little sons pincheq a sister’s arm they must be pinched themselves, and so with wife- beaters. They also argued that men like sixty days or so when the landlady is ur- gent and no cash is in sight; but they never like to be whipped. The cons talked about returning to bar- barism. Some New England lawyer remarked that he would approve of the revival of whipping when he indorsed the burning of witches. He seems to volce a good many people’s sentiment. However, thers is no telling how fashionable whipping may be- come before the century is over. It may be reviveq along with the old brass and- frons and clawfoot tables. Maryland re- vived it in the latter part of the last cen- tury; and who knows that California ‘won’t be following suit? It is certainly enough of an antique to be made a fad of. It dates back to the Bible times and those of the Zend Avesta. It was more popular than golf among the anclent Greeks and Romans. Any little boys of Old England who said a naughty word that rhymes with “lamb” were whipped by command of the law. It is re- ported, too, that In the same Old Eng- land—Merrie Englande—‘“gentlemen ar- ranged partles of pleasure to Bridewell for the purpose of seeing the wretched women who beat hemp thers whipped.” During the colonfal and revolutionary periuis whipping posts flourished like green bay trees. They were to be seen in the market places of county capitals. Tn 1840, the famous reform year, many of the States individually abolished whipping, and the United Stutes “rid its statute books of the matter in February, 1339." It was little Delaware alone of all the States that made itself famous by stick- ing to its post. It was Maryland, some- where along In the '80’s, that made itself famous by starting a new one. It was in defense of this move that a lawyer sald he was in favor of abolishing whipping in the same way that a certain French- man was in favor of abolishing capital punishment. “I am in favor of abolishing capital punishment,” said this Frenchman, “when the criminals set the example. They re- gard the possession of a watch on my part as a good reason for perpetrating capital punishment. Now, when they abolish 1t and set the example we will follow." —_— As the Rarth and the Moon Rre to Bach Cther HE earth revolves on its axis once in twenty-four hours. Millions of years ago the day was twenty-two hours; millions of years before it was twenty-one. As we look backward into time we find the earth revolving faster and faster. There was a time, ages ago, long before geology begins, when the earth was rotating in a day of five or six hours in length. In the remotest past the carth revolved In a day of about flve hours. It could revolve no faster than this and remain a single unbroken mass, ys Professor E. S. Holden In Harper's Magazine. It was at this time that the moon was porn—separated, broken off, from the parent mass of the earth. The earth was <hen a moiten, flattened sphere of lava. Its whole body was fluid. ‘The tides, which are now small, superficial, and so to say, local, were then universal and Im- mense. They occurred at short Intervals. The whole surface of our globe was af- fected. And the corresponding lunar tides in the molten moon were Indefinitely greater still. Our day is now twenty-four hours: the distance of the moon Is now 240,000 miles. ‘When our day was about flve hours long the moon was In contact with the earth's surface. It had just broken away from its parent mass. As the length of the terrestrial day Increased, so did the dis- tance of the moon. The two quantities are connected by Inexorable equations. If one varies, so must the other. When- ever the rotation time of a planet is shorter than the period of revolution of its satellite, the effect of their mutual ac- tion Is to accelerate the motion of the satellite and to force it to move in a larger orbit—to increase its distance, therefore. The day of the earth is now shorter than the month—the period of revolution —of the moon. The moon is therefors slowly receding from us, and it has been receding for thousands of centurfes. But the day of the earth is, as we have seen, slowly growing longer. The finger of the tides is always pressing upon the rim of our huge flywheel, and slowly but surely lessening the speed of fits rotation. So long as the terrestrial day is shorter than the lunar month the moon will continue %o recede from us, ok =