The infliction of corporal punishment implies the inability of the parent to govern the child without it. It must be predicated on the belief of the parent in its superior merits, which causes him to submerge its humanitarian aspects beneath its supposedly utilitarian effectiveness, or because he is unacquainted with other methods. It would be difficult to conceive a parent who would beat a child from personal choice when there were other corrective methods at hand which he believed to be of equal efficiency. The author recalls a man of high standing in the financial world--successful in business, but cold, stern, austere and puritanical in his personal code, who thrashed his son, from his tenth to his fifteenth year, frequently as often as once a week. Then the boy ran away from home to escape the tyranny and is now a wanderer over the earth, his heart filled with bitter hatred toward his father, while the latter deems himself a much abused parent and his son an ungrateful and wayward boy. At no time during the many hundred beatings which he administered did it occur to him that bodily punishment was not a salutary corrective; he failed to realize the futility of a means which did not accomplish the desired results. Had an analogous problem arisen in his business, he would quickly have discarded any plan which so thoroughly demonstrated its uselessness. This man had a profound and earnest desire to rear his son to perfect manhood. He adopted the method which seemed to him best designed to accomplish that result. Today he is a broken-hearted man grieving over his lost son. Again we hark back to the wayward parent. “Fathers, provoke not your children to anger lest they be discouraged.” Col. 3:21. The average child does not rebel against authority but only against authority which he thinks is unjustly or harshly exercised. He invariably revolts against corporal punishment because he believes any degree of it to be excessive. From the boy’s point of view he is a Lilliputian whom the Gargantuan parent abuses because of greater brute strength. A fourteen-year-old boy who was being beaten by his father for failure to perform some chore shouted in his face, “You wouldn’t dare do that if I was as big as you.” And the boy spoke the truth. The father who is addicted to the corporal form of punishment is deterred, when his son approaches maturity, as much by fear of being vanquished in the contest as by a realization of its futility as a corrective of the later adolescent. This form of punishment is commonly adopted to “break the will” of the disobedient and rebellious boy. If breaking the will of the boy means making it conform to that of the physically stronger father, the attempt is as ineffective as it is brutal, for acquiescence under such circumstances never is evidence of mental consent. Servile subjection of will is out of harmony with that growth of will-power which is necessary to the ideal development of the adolescent.