It is an amusing fact, and far too little known, that the text which has long lent a sanctity to the use of corporal punishment, is not taken, as supposed, from the _Proverbs_ of Solomon, but from a passage, and a rather unseemly one, in Butler’s _Hudibras_ (1663):[30] this, however, is as it should be, for it is fitting that an indecent practice should claim authority from an indecent source. Thus encouraged, and with this divine precept in their thoughts, parents and schoolmasters, and magistrates, and judges, and all governors and rulers, have felt that in wielding the rod they were discharging a religious obligation, and not, as might otherwise have been suspected, gratifying some very primitive instincts of their own. For “the Wisdom of Solomon” has been quoted as our guide, in the correction of the old as well as of the young; indeed, as a writer in the _People_ sagely remarked, “the older the evildoer, the more his need of the birch.” On this principle, aged vagrants have on various occasions been sentenced to be corrected with the rod; but it is to the young that the blessings of the birch more properly belong. Our British boys, from shore to shore, Two priceless boons may find: The Flag that’s ever waved before, The Birch that’s waved behind. In its campaign against flogging in the Royal Navy, the Humanitarian League gained not only a considerable success, but an amount of entertainment which of itself would have more than repaid the labour expended on the work. To begin with, there was the technical quibble, very characteristic of officialdom, that though the backs of boys, or rather of young men, might be cut into ribbons with the birch, there was no “flogging” in the Navy, for “flogging” meant the infliction not of the birch but of the “cat.” With Mr. Swift MacNeill conducting the attack in the House of Commons, it may be imagined that such prevarications--and there were many similar instances--fared but badly; and it was no surprise when “these degrading practices,” as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman described them, were brought to an end in 1906, though the use of the cane, to the discredit of the Admiralty, is still permitted and defended. In this long controversy the League was brought into conflict with all sorts of opponents, among them several Admirals, of whom the “breeziest” were the Hon. V. A. Montagu and Sir William Kennedy. With the latter especially we had great fun, as we found in him an antagonist of the utmost heartiness and good humour. “Of what use is it,” he wrote to me, “sending me all this rubbish, except to fill the waste-paper basket? I don’t care a damn for Admiral----’s opinion.” On another occasion he sent me a formal challenge to meet him “at any time and place, when pistols and coffee will be provided.” At a later date we had his support, equally emphatic, in our protest against the practice of feeding snakes on live prey at the “Zoo.”