The Raad had dealt with the case and sentenced the culprit, who had admitted his guilt, to receive three dozen with a "strop," which were immediately and energetically inflicted. The punishment, although illegal, had been richly deserved. I considered that the Raad had acted with propriety,--but it was necessary to be guarded in what I said. If the principle involved had been given formal official sanction, it might have been logically applied to more serious cases,--those, for instance, in which capital punishment would have been due. If, at some future time, the Vicar under my implied authority had erected a gallows and engaged the services of a Lord High Executioner, it would have been awkward, to say the least of it. Accordingly I temporised. Lothario of the shifty eye was informed that his case would be duly considered at head-quarters. So it would,--by the moths inhabiting the pigeonholes of the Record Office in Cape Town. Nevertheless I should have to deal cunningly with this episode so as to avoid raising a humanitarian howl. However, I meant, so far as I could to support the authority of the Raad. The result of discrediting that would have been to loosen the bonds of the moral law,--to hand the Richtersveld over to be exploited by the violent and lawless. This Raad interested me extremely; it was so wise and so conscientious. The Colonial Parliament might really have learnt quite a lot of useful things from it. We are a curious people. The solicitude we are apt to evince for the posterior of a blackguard is really marvellous--considering how little we have for the victims of an industrial system under which hundreds of thousands of men, women and children are leading lives of the most degrading slavery. We see, with complacency, whole generations growing stunted and vacant-eyed under stress of their bitter lot; we know--or should know, for we have been told it often enough--that one of the pillars in the edifice of our commercial prosperity is the sweated woman in the garret,--old, haggard and hopeless at thirty. She stitches or pastes for fourteen hours a day in the blind, numbing effort to keep her blighted soul in her stunted body, and we complacently draw the dividends her long-drawn torture helps to swell. But we forget it is that woman's grandchildren who may have to defend ours from the Huns. Yes,--a fatal habit of acquiescing in demoralising conditions permits us to look on at, without attempting to prevent, the slow, relentless murder of a race. But the blackguard's back--that is something sacred; the mere idea of its being defiled by the richly deserved lash fills us with horror. The divine force of indignation which is in the heart of every man,--a holy thing when used for the right purpose--is thus wasted, dissipated--fired off at a straw dummy held aloft, as it were, by Commercialism for the purpose of drawing our attention from its own foul works.