tears you make a more pleasing picture seen through the haze of a century than fierce my lady with her rod.

The many hundred pages of Judge Sewall's diary give abundant testimony of his tender affection for his children. In this record of his entire married life he but twice refers to punishing his children; once his son was whipped for telling a lie, a second time he notes the punishment thus:

"1692, Nov. 6. Joseph threw a knob of Brass, and hit his sister Betty upon the forehead so as to make it bleed; upon which, and for his playing at Prayer-time, and eating when Return Thanks I whip'd him pretty smartly. When I first went in, call'd by his Grandmother, he sought to shadow and hide himself from me behind the head of the Cradle, which gave me the sorrowful remembrance of Adam's carriage."

It was natural that Judge Sewall, ever finding symbols of religious signification in natural events, should see in his son Joseph's demeanor a painful reminder of original sin; and we can imagine with what sad sense of duty he whipped him.

It is the standard resort of ignorant writers upon Puritanism, and especially upon Puritanic severity, to give the name of Cotton Mather as a prime expositor of cruel discipline. I have before me a magazine illustration which represents him, lean,

lank,

lank, violent, and mean of aspect, with clipped head, raising a heavy bunch of rods over a cowering child. He was in reality exceedingly handsome, very richly bewigged, with the full, distinctly sensual countenance of the Cottons, not the severe ascetic features of the Mathers, and he as strongly opposed punishment by the rod as most of his friends and neighbors favored and practised it. His son wrote of him:

"The slavish way of education carried on with raving. and kicking and scourging, in schools as well as in families, he looked upon as a dreadful judgment of God on the world he thought the practice abominable and expressed a mortal aversion to it.

"The first chastisement which he would inflict for any ordinary fault, was to let the child see and hear him in an astonishment, and hardly able to believe that the child would do so base a thing. He would never come to give the child a blow, except in case of obstinacy, or something very criminal. To be chased for a while out of his presence he would make to be looked upon as the sorest punishment in his family."

There can be found episodes of colonial history where the disprejudiced modern mind can perceive ample need of the sharp whippings so freely bestowed upon dull or idle scholars and slow servants. Cotton Mather was too gentle and too forbearing toward

P

toward certain children with whom he had close relations. A "warm birch" applied in the early stages of that terrible tragedy, the Salem Witchcraft, to Ann Putnam, the protagonist of that drama, would doubtless so quickly have ended it in its incipiency as to obliter

ate it entirely from

the pages of

history.