It is not alone the question of child labour that reveals the low standpoint taken by the civil authorities of Europe, but it is proved also by the introduction of corporal punishment. Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one, when the blow is delivered in cold blood long after the act occasioning it has been done. Most of the victims are so accustomed to blows already that the physical effect is little or nothing, but they awaken feelings of detestation against a society which so avenges its own faults. If the soul of the child is sensitive, corporal punishment can produce deep spiritual torment, as was the case with Lars Kruse, the hero of Skagen, who some years ago met his death by drowning. Everybody knows his story from the fine account of him by the Danish poet, Drachmann. Lars, in his childhood, had taken a plank, a piece of driftwood, and sold it. For this he was condemned to be punished. Till late in life, what he had suffered was ever present with him. He was not ashamed of his action but of his punishment--a punishment which embittered the whole life of a really great character. The blows administered by society are inflicted on children whose poverty and neglected education are in most cases responsible for their faults. The victims, often emaciated by hunger, and trembling with shame or terror, can experience no spiritual emotion fit to be the basis of moral shame. If the statistics of the life-history of those who are so disciplined were revealed, we should find that the majority come from, and return to, a home where the mother, as a result of working out of the home, is hindered from caring for her children. They have suffered from the custom of sleeping together, the result of overcrowded dwellings, with its demoralising influence. It may be the child has commenced to make his living on the street as messenger, cigar picker, or newspaper boy, or has been engaged in such like occupations, and so in his immediate neighbourhood has seen the luxurious living of the upper classes, which he strives to imitate. Hardly a week passes that the street youngster does not read about the embezzlements, fraudulent acts in the capitalistic classes, frequently committed by grey-headed men, whose childish impressions go back to the good old time, on whom the lax education of the present could not have any influence. No day passes in which he does not see how the representatives of the upper classes, old and young alike, satisfy their desires for pleasure. But from the child of the tenement and the street, people expect Spartan virtue or try to thrash it into him. It is hard to say which is greater here, stupidity or savagery.