The flagellations which persons who live in Convents, are upon different occasions made to undergo, the obligation they are under, of receiving such corrections before the whole Brotherhood or Sisterhood, together with the companions which the holy Founders of religious Orders have made of them with naughty children, have drawn numerous jests upon them; but such jests can only come from persons who have not paid a sufficient attention to the subject. Politicians inform us, that it is absolutely necessary that, in all States, there should be Powers of different kinds, established to maintain the general harmony of the whole, and that Legislative, Executive, Military, and Judicial Powers, for instance, should be formed, and lodged in different hands. Hence we may conclude, that some power analogous to these, ought to exist in every numerous Society either of Men or Women, for the preservation of good Order, and that it is necessary that, in such Societies, a power of flagellation should be lodged somewhere. Nor are we to think that Convents are the only Societies in which some authority of this kind takes place. In the Eastern Seraglios, for instance, Societies which are by no means contemptible, and may very well bear a comparison with Convents, we are not to doubt, a power of occasionally inflicting flagellations, exists: nay, we are expressly informed that Empresses themselves are not always exempt from them. Thus M. de Montesquieu, in the 26th Chapter of the Book XIX. of his Spirit of Laws, relates, after the Historian of Justinian the Second, that the Empress, Wife of the Emperor, ‘was threatened, by the great Eunuch, with that kind of chastisement with which children are punished at School:’ a treatment certainly very severe, and from which one should be tempted to judge that Empresses, at least, ought to be exempt, if it were not that the advantages of peace and good order are such, as ought to supersede every other consideration. In the Palaces of the Western Sovereigns, though they have constantly borne a very different appearance either from Convents or Seraglios, we find that disciplines like those abovementioned were found extremely useful about two centuries ago (a time when Men had notions of decorum much superior to ours) and were in consequence employed as common methods of preserving good order, without much distinction of rank or sex.