Years ago a gang of desperadoes undertook to rob a Wilmington bank. They tunneled under the building, and would have carried off $500,000 in negotiable securities but for the suspicions of an alert watchman. They were arrested, and on trial paid one attorney a very large fee solely to the end that they might be saved from the public whipping. The late great Chief Justice Lore sentenced them to long terms in prison and to the utmost limit of the law as to pillory and lashes. There has never been a bank robbery attempted in Delaware from that day to this by professional burglars. These men were bank robbers of the first grade; the same men who managed one of the sensational robberies in New York—the Metropolitan Bank, I think. That type of criminal never considers Delaware now for a second. A prison term means nothing at all to him, but he would never dare show his face in his usual haunts after the lash fell on his bare back in a Delaware jail. All prison reformers and all humanitarians agree that the object of all punishment is to prevent crime—remotely to cure the criminal. We are not discussing the cure of criminals. We are discussing the whipping post per se, and I submit that the whipping post has prevented two of the most terrible of all crimes short of murder—white slavery and burglary. There is a grave doubt in my mind if there has been a single burglary in Delaware within twenty years committed by a man who was entirely sane and wholly sober, and I do not recall any second offenders. It will not be seriously questioned that society has a right to protect itself. If the whipping post proves to be a perpetual and potential protector against the burglar, the highwayman and the cadet, why cry down its effectiveness? New York had an epidemic of gunmen; Chicago had an epidemic of highwaymen; Boston and Philadelphia made war on cadets. Delaware simply painted her whipping posts and multiplied school houses. Within recent weeks, in Philadelphia, Judge Norris S. Barratt declared from the bench that nothing except a thoroughly good whipping at a public post would serve to adequately punish a wife beater before him. This learned jurist is intimately familiar with social and political conditions in Delaware and, before the Sons of Delaware, most ably defended the whipping post as an aid to crime prevention. Solitary confinement has been proved a failure. It rots out the prisoner, destroys all ambition, and when his hour of freedom comes he is without initiative, without occupation and without hope. Trades are now taught these men, but day after day they are “lined up” as professionals, and their lives become a misery to them.