After Dinner Gossip AND Echoes of the Week

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVI, Issue 3, 20 January 1906, Page 17

After Dinner Gossip AND Echoes of the Week

The Imprisoned and Sentenced Czar

IHowever Vriminally weak, however wickedly vacillating, one may consider the Tsar, it must be admitted by even the most rigorous of his censors, that the autocrat of all the Russias, is having meted out to him punishment, severe enough for any crime whatsoever, and intolerable for any human creature to bear. The system in connection with capital punishment in France, whereby the condemned is not given the smallest indication of when he has to face his fate till within a few moments of his deliverance to the hands of the executioner, has always seemed to the writer to add an almost inconceivable amount of horror to the dread sentence of death. As most people know, the condemned man may smoke, chat, and ojjten does, speculate with his warders for weeks on the ciranee of a reprieve. But each night he goes to sleep conscious that the morning may find the gaol governor standing at his bedside with the invariable formulas. “Conrage No. —. it is for to-day.” And as the days pass by. it becomes nightly more probable that it may be the last sleep he will have on earth. That chills the blood to think upon, but how much worse is the ease of the richest and (allegedly) most powerful monarch in Xue world! A dose prisoner in the palwee to which he ran away in craven panic from Rt. Petersburg, he is warned by his own police that despite every effort on their part towards prevention, the instant he dare,* to show his face outside his amazingly guarded pal ice, with its dozens of cordons of troops its hoards of body guards, spies, and secret agents, attempts on his life will be made from perchance a dozen quarters. That he. is in perpetual, dread of treachery from amongst his own friends and servants, that the fear of poison makes each dish a terror, we could guess had we not so been definitely informed, but the other mental tortures which -a ann of his temperament must suffer, are almost beyond conception. Which poor devil in the mines in Siberia is worse off than the august autocrat who sent him there? Nay, it the choice of the eoils were offered you w I, would we not take the mine, the rough prison fare, and security' of life, rather than that tainted luxury, the feared food, and the ceaseless terror of death, and death in some unknowable, unthinkably, ghastly guise, which haunts the waking and sleeping hours of the royal prisoner al Tzarkohe Selo. Nothing ever imagined in the realms of fiction, nothing -dreamed in the frightful phantasms of night-mare, can exceed the horrors of reality which are the constant portion of Niehotas It. XXhat torture of Tantalus could equal the being credited with power to order, or do anything whatsoever it is given to man to do or order, and to know that the power is a mere, myth, and that all effort is in vain. Even the domestic delights of fatherhood are denied this royal unfortunate, for bow can he joy in leaving brought into the world one •ho, if he lives, must follow in his own thorny path, or else, be an exile from his native land, and for who equally with himself the assassin s bomb or knife is ever in readiness. Tliat lie is not quite so weak and irresponsible as his severer judges insist is perhaps proved by the fact that he has bolted no further than Tzarkohe Selo. When you and I, oh, gentle reader, secure ,of life •nd liberty at all events, feel most in dined to roundly condemn, perhaps we •hall feel some sense of charity if we <Mk ourselves, “Would we have stuck to *he job so long as has the unfortunate Tzar?” .

The Punishment of Children Problem.

Since at the time of writing the management of the Waltham Home is still the subject of an undecided inquiry, one is by justice and etiquette alike prevented from any comment on the evidence: but arising therefrom a good deal of discussion has been heard during the week on the exceedingly difficult problem of how- to punish chi dren. At one time whipping more or less severe according to vircumstanies and the gravity of the erime, or more often the temper of the punisher, was the universal Nemesis which followed the peccadilloes of the juvenile: but for some considerable while, especially during the last ten years or so, corporal punishment has been less and less resorted to, save the cursory spank in infanthood. ar.d the days of the universal application of the tawse. birch and cane in all times of stress and trouble may he said to have gone probably for ever; and as most people will certainly agree, a good job too. While better understanding of the moods, thoughts and characteristics of children his re-ulted hi a more intellectual method of meting out the high, low and middle justice, it must lie admitted that we “grown ups” have not yet really mastered much, and" that the problem of punishment for children is one which is exceedingly difficult and far from satisfactory solution. Physical pain must, of course.always be the last resort, and so long as the cane er the strap is not abused it is unquestionably the best, and, in fact, in many eases the only puni-hinent for boys. At schools it is the worst disciplinarian who uses “the stick” most frequently, and the moral effect of a caning is in direct ratio to the rarity of its occurrence. The system in vogue in many 'English public schools of allowing certain offences of dishonour, dishonesty or worse, to be pun'shed by the sixth has much to recommend it. The writer well rimembers—not as.the culprit, lie it" understood —an instance at Clifton, where it was clearly demonstrated that- in an examination of importance one of two boys must have •'copied" from the other. This was a case, for ’•the Sixth” to tiy. They did. and as a result of a searching inquiry found A., as we will call him, guilty. Not satisfied, he used the right he possessed to appeal to the headmaster. That functionary—Dr. Perceval, now Bishop of Hereford—deciding against him, he was handed back to the decrees of the Sixth. Had he taken his senwhole of t he sulprit’s House, the flogging would have been done in the sixth form room in camera. As it was, the chastisement took place in front of the whole of the culprit’s house, the flogging being six strokes each by the three senior members of the Sixth in the House. The moral effect was, I remember, infinitely stronger than any possible flogging by a master would have been, and probably for this reason it was the only public flogging by the Sixth which occurred within six years at the school. Affairs in the sixth room were more frequent, but still wholesomely uncommon and exceedingly severe and of an immense value as a deterrent. But where whipping be caning is not permissible, what is one 1 to do? For example, you find some youngsters at the practically universal crime of adolescence, picking your fruit, which is not So much the offence, and breaking and ruining your trees, which is an aggr ivation exceedingly hard to bear. A whipping will ten to one in New Zealand at all events result in a summons from the parents, •nd you will be gibbetted in certain papers as a brutal bully to the execrated by all decent citizens. What is one to do then? To call in the legal protectors of one’s property, and to hand over these Duvals of the orchard to

the polie . is not really thinkable, let alone practicable, to any |«erson of common humanity, in days when children, even for children’s offences, arc stilt tried amid all the sordid surroundings of a police court. Yet—though one has known it succeed—magnanimity and an injunction to "go ami sin no more," is not always effi-ctive, and in the first moment of irritation is not a condition of mind every poor “grown up” can cultivate. But this is. after all, but one in-stance-—and a comic one—without real seriousness of any kind at that. The problem of punishment is only really grave when it comes to more intricate and daily matter*. Habitual untruth, and the infinitely less harmful but dangerously progressive habit of "romancing." apparent utter inability to understand obedience, respect for parents and elders, how is one to enforce these things when remonstrance scents useless, and when there exists that entire want oi moral responsibility which seems to exist in some children? Whipping is little or no good where it becomes, as it would in these cases, a custom. That was proved in the past generation, of which one spoke earlier. Yet what is to be done? Echo, one fears, answers, What ?