calculated to strengthen the discipline of our schools, or to assist the masters in the performance of what must be at best extremely difficult duties. So long, therefore, as we lack the safeguard to discipline that would be provided by extensive powers of expelling undesirables, I consider that corporal punishment is essential to the discipline of our schools. Unquestionably it would be a good thing if we could entirely dispense with the use of corporal punishments, or at least dispense with them in all cases in which there might be any possibility of their doing harm, as by giving rise to sexual stimulation. But unfortunately we have no means of ascertaining beforehand what are the cases in which corporal punishment is likely to do harm. There is no possibility of withholding the right to inflict corporal punishment from those masters in especial who might use it to gratify their own sexual passions--if only for the reason that we have no means of finding out who these persons are. For it is not the masters with free views about sexual questions who are especially open to suspicion from the point of view we are now considering; nor is it the masters who are morally defective or irreligious. Indeed, I am acquainted with some extremely pious schoolmasters who, according to their own admissions to me, have experienced sexual excitement when chastising children; and some of these have in other respects had admirable characters. Cases recorded, not merely in erotic literature, but also in historical literature, show that religion affords no safeguard against such temptations; we learn, for instance, that in the cloister, monks and nuns have utilised their right to inflict punishment in order to procure sexual excitement. For these reasons, it is inadmissible to infer, because a schoolmaster is a religious man, that therefore he is the one to whom the right to inflict corporal punishment may safely be entrusted.