The Rod In And Out Of School.

Everyone has heard of the cruel extent to which it was carried in America especially in connection with slavery , now happily abolished . It is , however , in the Celestial Empire that flogging has attained its highest perfection . Offences not punishable by death are dealt with by means of the rod . Its use is not confined to the poor ; there are no first-class demeanants in China . The noble as well as the peasant is subjected to

castigation . A Chinese general may be sentenced to receive fifty lashes as readily as a common soldier . If a theft occur and the culprit he discovered the birch is applied , but should the thief not be found out , the officers who ought to have detected the delinquent are unlikely to escape without a sound thrashing . Breaches of law such as in England would he punished by fine or a few days ' imprisonment , in China are settled with the bastinado . The bamboo seems in that country to be lord paramount . Any infringement of the code is dealt with on the spot , and often with a lavishment that to us is alarmins-.

The ramifications of authority are such as to render a person in a measure responsible for the conduct of his neighbour . Officers of State are liable to be suddenl y brought to book for irregularities and receive from forty to a hundred strokes of the bamboo . The Rev . W . M . Cooper , B . A ., in his interesting book , " A History of the Rod , " to which we are indebted for many of our facts , says : — - "The husband beats the wifeand the wife beats the husband when she canbut the . woman

, , . is almost always the sufferer . In some parts of the country it is so much the fashion to fustigate a wife that a man would hardly like not to do so , as to show himself negligent on this point would be to forfeit his marital dignity , and proclaim himself a simpleton who understood nothing of his prerogative . A young husband almost thrashed his wife to death . Being asked what crime she had committed to deserve such treatment , he replied , ' None ; she never

deserved any punishment ; we have only been married two years , and you know we have always lived in peace . But for some clays I have had something on my mind . I thought people were laughing at me because I had never . beaten my wife ; and this morning I gave way to a had thought . ' The bad thou ght ultimately cost his wife her life . " In England , too , the rod was long thought to be a useful instrument of correction . In the army and navy the lash has been the chief legal means of disci pline since 1689 , and terrible have been the consequences on many occasions .

It was once common in this country for criminals to be publicly whipped , often with cruel severity . Taylor , the " water-poet , " says : — " In London and within a mile , I ween , There are of gaols or prisons full eighteen ; And sixty whipping-posts and stocks and cages . " When monasteries were dissolvedthere being no other resort for the

, poor , people wandered from place to place begging their sustenance . Doubtless this grew to be a great evil , and it was deemed necessary to take steps to put a stop to it . According to "Burns'Justice , " an Act passed in the twentysecond Henry VIII . decreed that vagrants were to be " carried to some market town , or other place , and there tied to the end of a cart naked and beaten with whips throughout such market town or other lacetill the bodshould be

p , y blood y b y reason of such whipping . " In the thirty-ninth of Elizabeth this rule was slightl y altered ; vagrants were only to be " stripped naked from the middle upwards and whipped until the body should be bloody . " ( To be concluded . )