That there are numbers of persons who would be quite willing to bring back, if it were possible, the medieval forms of torture cannot for a moment be doubted by any one who, like myself, has had the experience of working for over twenty-five years for the discontinuance of flogging. There are, of course, many reasonable advocates of corporal punishment in one or another of its forms; but there are many more to whom the cry for flogging, and for more and yet more flogging, has become a veritable craze, as was seen when, in the agitation for the lashing of “white slavers” in 1912, a frenzied shriek of passion went up from a large section of the people. “We know,” said a Member of Parliament at the time, “the extraordinary hysterical emotion which this Bill has aroused throughout England. We get letters from all sorts of people, chiefly women, ‘flog them,’ ‘crucify them,’ and anything else you like. It is a cry we have had all down the ages.”[31] That there has been such a cry all down the ages is likely enough; but the age which tolerates it can hardly claim to be a civilized one. In _The Flogging Craze, a Statement of the Case against Corporal Punishment_,[32] a book published for the Humanitarian League in 1916, with a preface by my friend Sir George Greenwood, I availed myself of the large amount of material amassed by the League during its long campaign against flogging, in the hope that such a work--the first of its kind, if pamphlets be excepted--might prove useful to many social reformers, who, though instinctively opposed to the use of the lash, are often silenced by confident assertions of its efficacy, and are unaware that in this, as in similar discussions, humanity and reason go hand in hand.