The old question of corporal punishment comes up in 1880 and 1881, but in a new light. There was "one law for the rich and another for the poor," but here, at any rate, it could not be maintained that the poor were oppressed. Already flogging was only commonly resorted to in the schools for the upper classes, and _Punch_ emphasizes the contrast in his dialogue between the Peer and the Peasant. The Peasant observes that when he is tapped over the head with a cane, his mother goes and bashes the teacher over the head with the poker and gets him fired for assaulting her son. The Peer, on the other hand, owns to having been "swished" four times in a fortnight without attempting reprisals. Whereupon the Peasant suggests that he should have sent _his_ mother to go and bang his old master. If _Punch_ is to be believed, conflicts between teachers and parents were pretty frequent at this time. They are not unknown even to-day; but parents are less inclined to take the law into their own hands. [Sidenote: _Literature and Crime_] The education of the million, however, was not confined to school hours, and with the decline of illiteracy the growth of the reading habit brought its perils as well as its privileges. Juvenile criminality was no longer the result of ignorance and neglect--at least to the same extent. _Punch_ was inclined to trace the evil largely to the low tone of the cheap literature provided for the young. In the Diary of a Boy Burglar in 1886, his downfall is ascribed to his putting into practice the principles imbibed by a perusal of _Jack Sheppard_. A somewhat alarmist article in the _Fortnightly Review_ on "What Boys Read" declared that while many boys' books were healthy and helpful, the majority of the journals supplied for the children of the working classes were devoid of every element of sweetness and light. "They are filled with stories of blood and revenge, of passion and cruelty, as improbable and almost impossible in plot as they are contemptible in literary execution." The solution of the matter by Press censorship, advocated by the writer, presented difficulties which _Punch_ did not shirk, and his own views, though strong, are tempered by sound common sense:--