Corporal punishment, long tenaciously vindicated, by those who ruled masses of men, was held indispensible, and no severe reproach can be due to the government which authorised, or the magistrates who ordered, its infliction. It seems, indeed, to be essential to every social system that denies the ordinary rewards of labor. The rebel slave, to deprive his master, will dare any suffering which suspends or terminates his service. But beside those who employed the lash from conviction, there were others of a different stamp: it is quietly observed by Messrs. Backhouse and Walker, that they found its greatest advocates "among persons given to profane swearing." The violent temper, prone to break out in imprecations, would find another and congenial relief in scenes of torture and debasement. There were modes of punishment which no prejudice could extenuate: among these, the infliction of the lash in a form which degraded society more than it debased the sufferer. Thus, at Hobart Town, men, for mere faults, have been sentenced to _exposure_ and the scourge, in the view of hundreds: the flagellator extinguished the last feeling of the man, and roused the temper of the demon. An old compositor, within a month of his freedom, was charged with some trifling breach of convict discipline, and though the father of grown up children, was ordered by a chief police magistrate, this cruel disgrace. He is dead--and his oppressor is dead! Such cases were not uncommon, but they are past, and they may be left to oblivion. Whether it is possible, in the present state of penal discipline, to withdraw the scourge from the hands of authority, it might be difficult to decide: it should not, however, be forgotten, that its present comparative disuse, was once pronounced impossible; and that when flogging decreased, crimes of savage violence became unusual.