Newspaper Page Text
I
1
Hon. Charles R. Miller, Gover
nor of Delaware Who Tells
Here How Whipping
Prevents Crime.
By Hon. Charles R. Miller,
Governor of Delaware.
D ELAWARE has Whipped crimi
nals of certain types since 1656
and will continue to whip them
until the statutes under which cor-
J>oreaI punishment is Inflicted shall
be repealed.
Congress cannot, and certainly will
not, interfere in the exercise of
proper authority under the law, and
nL f l hlpp ng post ,s a " integral
Part of the criminal law of Delaware
every law officer must consent to its
use regardless of any personal views
he may have in the matter. Hysteri
cal women, weak men, bullies, cranks
and blackguards in all parts of the
country have written to me demand
ing that I set aside the law and pro
hibit whippings for crime in Dela
ware. These good souls give no
heed to the fact that the whippings
are quite as legal in Delaware as im
prisonment. Their demands amount
to anarchy, so far as law enforce
ment goes. They cry, “Down with
the law!” without knowing whereof
they speak.
I want every criminal, every
sharper and every moral leper to
know that if he comes to Delaware
andi violates the law he will not only
serve a long term .in our none too
comfortable jails, but that he will be
whipped in public on his bare back
before he enters his cell. I wish this
fact could be spread to the uttermost
corners of the country.
Delaware wants no undesirable
citizen This State offers nothing
but the whip and the workhouse for
the gunmen, white slavers, panders,
highwaymen and common thieves
which people the underworld of some
of our larger cities and who seem to
get a certain amount of applause for
their more daring performances from
the same type of people who demand
that 1 shall set aside a fundamental
law of my State and defy the decrees
of our High Court.
Delaware houses one-half of her
population in the city of Wilmington.
All the rest of the State is strictly
rural. Our people are of the soil.
They are typical farmers—plain,
wholesome, God-fearing people who
obey the law and who punish crime
with severity. We have neither the
means nor the machinery with which
•to patrol our rural districts with
armed officers. It follows, then, that
we must have laws carrying severe
penalties and rigidly enforce them.
Half the people in Delaware south
of Wilmington never lock their doors
at night window fasteners are un
common, and thought of burglars is
totally absent from the minds of our
people. Once in a long while some
half-drunken loon will enter a house
at night. When he is not kicked out
as a mere intruder he is locked up,
tried, convicted and whipped accord
ing to law, and then locked up long
enough to think it over himself and
to deter all others from a like
offense.
Those who criticise the whipping
post adversely overlook the fact that
Delaware is the broad highway be
tween four chief American cities.
Our unthinking critics include
those who do not know that time or
the loss of time means nothing at all
to a very large proportion of our
A Defense of the Lash as a
Crime Preventive and a Defiance to the
“Sentimentalists” Who Would Abolish It
population. A day. or a week, or a
month, more or less, costs a low-
grade negro nothing at all in oppor
tunity or in money. The native ne
groes of Delaware know their place
and make no trouble. They are far
above the average in habits and in
intelligence, but we have a floating
negro population which is definitely
bad, and we must safeguard our peo
ple, white and black, against those
who come from all parts of the Short-
country to the canneries, work a few
weeks or months and then pass on,
only to give place to another lot just
as bad, or even worse.
The negro with city habits is a
worse proposition than the farm
trained hand, who is usually law
abiding and useful. Delaware can
handle her own negroes with little or
no force, but the passing throng of
bad men needs attention, and they
file by with eyes front on the whip
ping posts. Cells mean nothing at all
to such men, white or black.
Delaware is absolutely free from
all forms of white slavery. This par
ticular form of crime is punished
here without recourse to the Mann
Act or aid from the Federal authori
ties. Did the whipping post do
naught else but keep cadets out. of
Delaware it proves its eternal value
here. In every other State in the
Union in which there is a large city
the white slave problem comes up
with a degree of regularity. The
same people who condemn the whip
ping post wring their hands and won
der what to do about the cadets and
their wretched victims. Delaware
answers, “Whip the cadet!”
Years ago a gang of desperadoes
undertook to rob a Wilmington bank.
They tunneled under the building,
and would have carried Off $500,000
in negotiable securities but for the
suspicions of an alert watchman.
They were arrested, and on trial paid
one attorney* a very large fee solely
to the end that they might be saved
from the public whipping. The late
great Chief Justice Ix>re sentenced
them to long terms in prison and to
the utmost limit of the law as to
pillory and lashes.
There has never been a bank
robbery attempted in Delaware from
that day to this by professional bur
glars. These men were bank rob
bers of the first grade; the same men
who managed one of the sensational
robberies in New York—the Metro
politan Bank, I think. That type of
criminal never considers Delaware
now for a second. v rt
A prison term means nothing tft all
to him. but he would never dare show
hfe face in his usual haunts after the
lash fell on his bare back in a Dela
ware jail.
All prison reformers and all hu
manitarians agree that the object of
all punishment is to prevent crime—
remotely to cure the criminal. We
are not discussing the cure of crim
inals. We are discussing the whip
ping post per se, and I submit that
the whipping post has prevented two
of the most terrible of all crimes
short of murder—white slavery and •
burglary. There is a grave doubt
in my mind if there has been a single
burglary in Delaware within twenty-
years committed by a man who was
entirely sane and wholly sober, and
J do not recall any second offenders.
It will not be seriously questioned
that society has a right tip protect
itself. If the whipping post proves
to be a perpetual and potential pro
tector against the burglar, the high
wayman and the cadet, why cry down
its effectiveness? New York had an
epidemic of gunmen: Chicago had an
epidemic of highwaymen: Boston and
Philadelphia made war on cadets
Delaware simply painted her whip
ping posts and multiplied school
houses.
Within recent weeks, in Philadel
phia, Judge Norris S. Barratt de
clared from the bench that nothing
except a thoroughly good whipping
at a public post would serve to ade-
T HE State of Delaware is the only one of the United States that whips ils
criminals at public whipping posts and also pillories them. It has done this
ever since it became a State. There have been periodical waves of agitation
throughout the nation for the abolition of these forms of punishment. The most
violent wave of the kind culminated recently in a demand before Congress for
Federal action compelling Delaware to discontinue its whipping post.
Here Governor Charles R. Miller of Delaware explains why his State believe*
in whipping criminals, why it is prepared to resist any proposed Federal or private
interference with its whippings and why he believes whipping is more efficacious
as a preventive of crime than the penal systems in other States.
mows
y
quately punish a wife beater before
him. This learned jurist is intimately
familiar with social and political con
ditions in Delaware and, before the
Sons of Delaware, most ably de
fended the whipping post as an aid
to crime prevention.
Solitary confinement has been
proved a failure. It rots out the
prisoner, destroys all ambition, and
when his hour of freedom comes he
is without initiative, without occu
pation and without hope. Trades
are now taught these men, but day
after day they are “lined up” as pro
fessionals, and their lives become a
misery to them.
Now I repeat that the basic idea
most earnest advocate of any and
every method that prevents crime,
and this the whipping post does to
a marked degree.
The sense of shame that follows
a public whipping Is quite a differ
ent matter from the innermost feel
ings of the same man flogged in
privacy. In the underworld, where
there exist strata of preferment
just as there are social equations in
organized society, a man who has
done “a bit” of long duration lives
in a degree of reflected glory. A
yeggman who has served ten or
twelve years in Cherry Hill, Sing
Sing, Joliet or any one of the other
notorious prisons has a certain
•JSf
orders the whip
ping. It is the ef
feet upon the mind
of the man whip
ped and the result
of the whipping
upon the minds ol
other criminals
that count. It is
purely psychic,
but it is none the
less effective.
None of the men
whipped in Dela
ware is punished
to the point that
very great physical torture follows.
Such a lashing would create a martyr -
of a criminal, and this must be
avoided.
Criminals of the type (hat hold up
trains, raid banks and rob Govern
ment buildings are jealous of their
reputations in the underworld. Once
w'hipped they become objects of de
rision and contempt in their own cir
cles. Some of these men are inor
dinately vain. It is quite likely that
this vanity, affectation or love o'
| '■>
v.SWt
A Thief in Pillory—Jeered at
by the Crowd Just as He
Was 100 Years Ago.
of punishment has to do with the
protection of society against the
criminal. It would be a little beyond
me to explain the psychological
effect of a public whipping upon the
mind of a professional criminal, but
of course I had ideas. The fact re
mains, however, that the mere pros
pect of such a whipping keeps men
out of Delaware who would not hesi
tate a second to “shoot up” a dance
hall in New York or Chicago.
It is a fact of common knowledge
that ship masters of undoubted
courage, of tested and proved valor,
are as timid as little children when
ashore; that firemen who never give
a thought to personal peril at a con
flagration bawl and make an awful
to-do about having a tooth filled.
Frank Gotch, the wrestler, who could
tear an ordinary man apart with his
hands, bows with absolute submis
sion. I am told, to the will of Mrs.
Gotch.
Doubtless the men of science, the
psychologists, have a definite name
for this phenomenon of the mind. I
do not know this word, but l do
know that burglars and highwaymen
who would brave the police force of
Philadelphia or any other large city
will not even consider a “job” in Del
aware, and that these men when
asked why, invariably reply that they
will take no chance of the whipping
post, it may be a display of vanity
more than fear. I do not quite know.
I have no quarrel with those who
want to reform prisons, but I am a
' ;■
At the Whipping Post in Dover Jail, “Thirty Lashes on thu
Bare Back.”
Convicts in One of the Delaware Pillories—-This Form of
Punishment Is Now Rarely Used.
standing among his fellows in crime.
But it is a curious yet certain fact
that the man who is whipped in pub
lic loses cijste at once and forever.
It seems to be that in having been
sentenced to be whipped, the scene
in the court room, the display in the
jailyard and the final flogging—all
produce a profound and a lasting
mental shock.
This is not true when a mere
warder calls a man out of his> cell,
beats him and then throws him in a
dark hole. This performance is
followed by mere resentment. The
victim of this system, and the
prisoner is very often a victim,
merely promises himself to kill the
warder if he ever has a chance, or
some like foolish threat. Not so
when a High Court, a Chief Justice,
amid scenes of dignity and decorum.
even doubtful glory deters them
from invading Delaware and daring
the post. /
Notice how the arrest of a
notorious yeggman is always fol
lowed by accurate reports of his
record. Study these records and yon
will seldom see that the prisoner
was whipped in Delaware: It is idle
to assume that thebe men are afraid
to come to Dela ware because we have
police, a militia and all the other
agencies for the enforcement of law
These are common to all communi
ties. They are not in any degree
ifraid of the physical punishment in
volved in a Delaware whipping.
Many of them in friendly boxing
bouts are more thoroughly be'aten
up every few days while exercising.
It is the preliminaries, the mental
picture of the trial, the solemnity of
the sentence, the Ignominy of the
performance, and. last of all, the
contempt, ridicule anti humiliation at
the hands of their consorts, male and
female, that produce the result fir3t
on the individual whipped, and ulti
mutely upon all of his kind.
If there was nothing to it but a
mere flogging by a prison warder of
doubtful authority; Simply one man
In brief authority beating up another
man but temporarily in his keeping,
there would be, could be, no such
result, and the whipping of criminals
would probably degenerate into re
volting performances with attending
scandals. The Delaware system pre
cludes any such possibility.
The women of the nation lead in
all humanitarian work as they
should. In every large city in the
United States, except Wilmington,
Deleware, some brute is sent to jail
every day or so for wife beating
liicago has had to establish a Court
of Domestic Relations for the almost
exclusive benefit of women who have
been whipped by beasts who swore
to love and honor them. Delaware
-.will never need any such court so
long as the whipping post is so near
the court house and in such great
favor with our judiciary. There is no
Judge sitting in Delaware who does
not strongly favor the last for wife
beaters.
Some of our good friends who call
themselves penologists, philanthrop
ists, humanitarians and prison re
formers overlook one all importan-
matter in their crusades. This e.
sentiai is the prevention of crime.
Without discussion T will agree to
everything that any of them propose
for the health and education and re
formation of a criminal, but I still
insist that he is best off when he is
kept from crime.
The people of Delaware are not
barbarians. In education, in culture,
in true charity and in man's love for
man the people of Delaware rank
with the best in the land and in
patriotism second to none. It is ab
surd to attempt the indictment of a
people of a sovereign State. Dela
ware has a proud place in the his
tory of the country and is prepared
to meet every proper issue as it
arises and Congressmen from the
wilds of Montana will do well to
study the practical results follow
ing legislation in Delaware before
asking for Federal interference in a
purely State matter.
Let every professional criminal in
all the world know that Delaware is
no field for his operation; that crime
here means public whippings on the
bare back, the ultimate of public dis
grace, absolute enforcement of the
law and Delaware will he well
served. Other States may toy with
the criminal; experiment with crime
and multiply the police, but Dela
ware will continue to prevent crime
and thus save the criminal from
himself and protect the public from
the criminal.
There is no considerable sentiment
against the whipping post in Dela-
Another Pretty Song and Dance Actress to Join the British Nobility
London, December 15.
T -frlE Hon. Richard Brinsley Norton, oldest son and heir of
, i iruntley, a British peer of high position and ancient
family, has become engaged to Miss Maggie Jarvis, a
t lit!'e s<ing and dance artist on the British stage.
‘u s likely that before this appears the wedding of the dancer
„ l the voung heir of nobility will have been celebrated Vtung
, v ? i ,I,.stilled to be one of the hereditary legislators of
ingland provided the House of Lords is not abolished before his
k n'he engagement has excited some attention because of the corn
. , v bumble position of the bride. Until recently the
aiatl ' e * .. MIH i lords of England were marrying star* of thf*
%nL®tre aid actresses of the first rank. Miss Jarvis is
•aietj 1l ' eat e . ()f the chorus, who dances and sings a lit
jst a modest m dlgnitv of a star, or even an actress.
!e and does not use th * r a first-class musical comedy star
roX accept a lord to-day. unless she were madly in love with
‘The occurrence lends great, interest to the newly published
The occurr. which reference was made in these
hl y by Bernaid Sh,„ rem . irk(lble play Mr. Shaw makes alt
dIumils las character take place under the new social
pisode o f exactly t is cna 1( „ passt ng. General Mitch
ne^lTt’iie1 wr-his name evidently is'a slight disguise for Gen
noi in the I * • ,1 i nir *j lf > social questions of the day with
n,i to bM.ee. lore., and variety Maee performer,
C ” MITCHENER—Mrs. Farrell, how is your daughter?
imo f\RRELL—Which daughtre?
MITCHENER—The one who has made such a gratifying
success in the music halls
MRS. FARRELL—There's no music halls nowadays; they’re
variety theatres. She’s got an offer of marriage from a young
jook.
MITCHENER—Is it possible? What did you do?
MRS. FARRELL—I told his mother on him.
MITCHENER—Oh! What did she say?
MRS. FARRELL—She was as pleased as Punch. Thank
Heaven, she says, he’s got somebody that’ll be able to keep
him when the super-tax is put up to twenty shillings in the
pound.
M1TUHENER—But your daughter herself? What did she
say?
MRS. FARRELL—Accepted him, of course. What else
would a young fool like her do? He inthrojooced her to the
Miss Maggie Jarvis, a London Stage Favorite Who Will Marry Lord Grantley’s Heir.
Copyright, 1913, by the Star Company. Great Britain Rights Reserved.
Poet Laureate, thinking she’d inspire him.
MITCHENER—Did she?
MRS. FARRELL—Faitti 1 dunua. All I know is she walked
up to him as bold as brass an’ said, “Write me a sketch,
dear.” After all the trouble I took with that child’s manners
she's no more notion how to behave herself Ilian u pig
Some thoughtless persons may imagine that Mr. Shaw is
talking fantastical nonsense when he makes a scrubwoman dis
cuss matters with the leading general of England, and talk of her
daughter marrying a young duke, but we see from the news about
Maggie Jarvis that he is a perfectly sensible commentator. The
truth is that Bernard Shaw, far from being a dealer in absurdi
ties, has often shown himself an accurate prophet of impending
social changes.
Then the American critic of the play may think that if the
English make so little of their dukes and generals they will do
away with the whole system of rank, titles and distinctions alto
gether. Then, again, the critic would fail to understand the Eug
lish nature. The English have never made a clean sweep of tin.'
ancient institution, and there is no reason to believe they will
over do so.
There appears to be no desire to abolish the monarchy, but it
is very probable that some socialistic minister will propose to
make the king pay for himself. This could be done by allowing
every one of the 5,000,000 Americans who visit England annually
to have a peep at him sitting on his throne at twenty-five cents a
libad. The amount thus obtained would nearly equal that voted
annually by Parliament to the King.
A few words about the Hon. Richard Brinsley Norton, whose
engagement has called forth these remarks. His father. Lord
Grnntley. comes from an old Gloucestershire family. The tlth
was created In 1782. His lordship owns ”.000 acres and three
fine country estates. Ho is a descendant of Richard Brinsley
Sheridan, the most noted novelist of the eighteenth century
V
Grounds
jnse M Hod(|
‘Catch AH.*
k’a
5trt-mortem1
a new trial
> charge roj
e brief anc
id SaturdaJ
Hugh M.
upon the
ense.
ids for a im
defense D=j
“hodgepodge
licules the
as tried by i
tdge and Jur,
orneys will
mt before th!
■nday at 9 o
o be made
extension o'
arlly is gi\,
lg to the ini
is likely th2
he asked IjJ
Technicality.” ■
referring nil
at demons! i ifl
crowd wer “
aid lntlmid;
Frank’s 1.
.1 were lay. I
plea on wiocB
catching at e®
esented ltaelf.j
counsel to
spectators bd
In the trial. sh|
ns now being
were antic i pal
nch little In col
r
<e and techniq
lls covered,
som plain, be
4ty afflrmativF
ecord show ii
that they < J
rart for the :fl
some actio n.'J
i they sho v 1
i oourt some ]
never had enyl
ctlon he gave j
with the reqil
Ion.
h Complaint. I
n other *pos -r®
another trial*
if Judge K j
ltor Dorsey
there was not®
lance or coin
he court to
ind that the S
tnt's attorney™
it, or suggest.V
rt that aomet tl
done estops §
lng.”
rged that Fit.
Ifled theee cc
their real itn J
hat the fac
ed the motion j
conclusively fr
hat he did n< t
oe to the den i
as laid on the j
jrs that the'
tstratlons ref r:
»y Evldenee.
the brief are g i
n on the admi^
sy’s tertlmor
Ion of Frank fl
firm In his
committed in
>ny In the reel
e courts of Amfl
much great.'
of this sort t 1
ng and extern j
•pect, appretiatj
r in order to