For a short time, while five or six years old, and living at Mrs. Eaton's, I was sent to a school of boys of all ages, kept by a man named Eastburn, in Library Street, whom I can only recall as a coarse, brutal fiend. From morning to night there was not a minute in which some boy was not screaming under the heavy rattan which he or his brother always held. I myself--infant as I was--for not learning a spelling-lesson properly, was subjected to a caning which would have been cruel if inflicted on a convict or sailor. In the lower story this man's sister kept a girls' school, and the ruffian was continually being called downstairs to beat the larger girls. My mother knew nothing of all this, and I was ashamed to tell that I had been whipped. I have all my life been opposed to corporal punishment, be it in schools or for criminals. It brings out of boys all that is evil in their nature and nothing that is good, developing bullying and cruelty, while it is eminently productive of cowardice, lying, and meanness--as I have frequently found when I came to hear the private life of those who defend it as creating "manliness." It was found during the American war that the soldiers who had been most accustomed to beating and to being beaten were by far the greatest cowards, and that "Billy Wilson's" regiment of pugilists was so absolutely worthless as to be unqualified for the field at any time. One thing is very certain, that I have found that boys who attend schools where there is no whipping, and little or no fighting, are freest from that _coarseness_ which is so invariably allied to meanness, lying, and dishonesty. I had about 2000 children in the _public schools_ of Philadelphia pass under my teaching, and never met with but one instance of direct rudeness. There was also only one of dishonesty or theft, and that was by a fighting boy, who looked like a miniature pugilist. Philadelphia manners were formed by Quakers. When I visited, in 1884, certain minor art-work classes established in the East End of London, Mr. Walter Besant said to me that I would find a less gentle set of pupils. In fact, in the first school which I examined, the girls had, the week before, knocked down, kicked, and trampled on an elderly lady who had come to teach them art-work out of pure benevolence. I am often told that whipping put an end to garroting. If this be true, which it is _not_ (for garroting was a merely temporary fancy, which died out in America without whipping), it only proves that the garotters, who were all fighting and boxing roughs, were mere cowards. Red Indians never whip children, but they will die under torture without a groan.