At Troyes College, a few years before the Revolution, the teacher of rhetoric wanted to cane one of his pupils; the others were indignant and cried out—a student of rhetoric, eighteen years old, to be punished like a child! One voice was raised which thundered out above all the rest. This young orator, whose first triumph this was, was no other than Danton. The student whose part he had taken was Paré; the Minister of Justice of 1792 made him Home Secretary in 1793. College friendships are useful sometimes. There are two countries, neighbours of ours, where the rod still has a place of honour—we mean England and Germany. In America, flogging has received the development we should expect in the land of Edison. Some years ago the Chicago papers reported that the staff of the Denver Industrial School for Girls had installed an electric flogging machine. The apparatus consisted of a chair with an open seat on which the victim, suitably unclothed, was placed. The chair was high enough to allow four beaters, which were fixed under the seat, to revolve, more or less rapidly, according to the wish of the operator, who had only to press a button to set the machine in motion. The advantage of the beaters was that the action was regular and imposed no fatigue on the operator. Ingenious, but hardly likely to be used outside of America. A correspondent relates in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, March, 1883, that he saw a young man, six feet tall, flogged at an English college. This man had bought a commission in a cavalry regiment and was to leave in a few days to join up. Having copiously feted Bacchus to celebrate the occasion, he was brought in dead-drunk, and for this breach of the rules he was condemned to be flogged. Resigned to his fate, he was given twelve strokes, and then quitted the college on the best of terms with everyone. The head of this college, Dr. Goodford, was convinced that the whip was the best of teachers, and it was no kindness to youth to spare it. A tale is related bearing on this point which, if not very credible, is based on fact. A pupil who had refused to be flogged had been sent down. Sometime afterward, attacked by remorse, he went from Yorkshire to Eton to undergo his punishment. Dr. Goodford had just gone to Switzerland, and the young man asked where he could find him. He bought the regulation birch, packed it in his trunk, and set out to find his head-master. He missed him at Geneva, then at Lucerne, but at last caught him up at St. Bernard’s. There Goodford, touched by the recital of his odyssey, resolved to reward such praiseworthy perseverance. And it was in the refectory of the monastery, in presence of the monks who stood round gaping with wonder and admiration, that he flogged him soundly. That done, and with lips pursed up, he gave him a copy of Murray’s Guide as a present. Quite English, you know!