In the light of eventualities, it seems a great pity that Mr. Brockway should have been held up just as he was about to perfect balance of parts in a work to which he had given the best in him for fifty years; it does, because up to the time when he was so ruthlessly broken--literally broken--his "best" was incomparably better than any other man had dared in application. It will be recalled that Mr. Brockway's alleged capital sin consisted in the fact that he would not yield belief in corporal punishment as a means of "shocking"--as he had it--persistently refractory prisoners into at least respect for the major voice. Whether Mr. Brockway was right or wrong in the conviction to which he clung to his dying day, does not call for contention here. But it may be noted that certain forms of prison punishment that have supplanted corporal punishment, are infinitely less humane, and infinitely more destructive of the divinity in man, than is an honest spanking, inflicted in a fatherly way, out of a fatherly heart. Moreover, final reversal of public opinion in the matter further may be noted in editorials, such as are adumbrated in the following excerpt clipped from one of the papers that joined in the hue and cry for "investigation" of Mr. Brockway and his methods, to no other purpose than to break Mr. Brockway, and to abolish corporal punishment in the correctional plants of the State of New York: "How then is ruthlessness to be held securely in check? Not by making all nations humane, and scrupulous, and tender-hearted. It is the actual, not a millennial world with which we have to deal. _It is not conversion of evil men that must be aimed at, but their control._ A nation tempted to be brutal as Germany was, must be given to understand that the first display of barbarism in warfare would bring all other civilized countries on its back. In short, nothing but a solemn international agreement unitedly to oppose and to _punish_ the ruthless making of war can assuredly prevent it." The underscoring is the writer's.