been our drawing-room carpet. Before long we shall be as particular
about our streets as we now are about our carpets; and their condition
in the nineteenth century will become as forgotten and incredible as the
condition of the corridors of palaces and the courts of castles was as
late as the eighteenth century. This foulness, we can plead, was imposed
on us as a necessity by the use of horses and of huge retinues; but
flogging has never been so imposed: it has always been a vice, craved
for on any pretext by those depraved by it. Boys were flogged when
criminals were hanged, to impress the awful warning on them. Boys were
flogged at boundaries, to impress the boundaries on their memory. Other
methods and other punishments were always available: the choice of
this one betrayed the sensual impulse which makes the practice an
abomination. But when its viciousness made it customary, it was
practised and tolerated on all hands by people who were innocent of
anything worse than stupidity, ill temper, and inability to discover
other methods of maintaining order than those they had always seen
practised and approved of. From children and animals it extended to
slaves and criminals. In the days of Moses it was limited to 39 lashes.
In the early nineteenth century it had become an open madness: soldiers
were sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling offences, with the
result (among others less mentionable) that the Iron Duke of Wellington
complained that it was impossible to get an order obeyed in the British
army except in two or three crack regiments. Such frantic excesses of
this disgusting neurosis provoked a reaction against it; but the clamor
for it by depraved persons never ceased, and was tolerated by a nation
trained to it from childhood in the schools until last year (1913), when
in what must be described as a paroxysm of sexual excitement provoked by
the agitation concerning the White Slave Traffic (the purely commercial
nature of which I was prevented from exposing on the stage by the
Censorship twenty years ago) the Government yielded to an outcry for