THE MYSTERY OF CRUELTY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR:1 SIB,—Your article of last week under the above heading had a profound fascination for me. For every word of it came home to me as true. I, at a very tender age, between nine and ten, was the victim of a woman of the Mrs. Rushworth type. I was not deformed, nor imbecile, nor dirty, and I worked, by her own admission, like a little steam-engine ; yet I was beaten with a rope every day, plunged occasionally into a tub of icy water and held under almost to the drowning point, taken out into the snow naked in the depth of winter
at midnight and scrubbed till the blood flowed with a coir brush, and tortured in other ingenious ways which do not bear repetition in print. As a result of this I hate cruelty in every form, except as punishment to professors of cruelty. I am stupefied with amazement at the so-called humanitarian who would spare the inflicter of cruelty any painful reminder of his or her cruelty and never has a word of sympathy for the hapless victim. Thus, had one of those children died as a direct result of the cruelties inflicted upon her by Mrs. Rushworth, and the latter had been justly sentenced to death —an easy, instantaneous death—I should have expected to see, and should certainly not have been disappointed, a huge petition engineered by the humanitarian, so-called, to get the vile criminal off. And in this petition no word of sympathy for the hapless victim would have appeared. As a victim of deliberate and persistent cruelty I hate cruelty naturally, and protest with all my soul against the namby.pambyism that has no sympathy for the tortured and wishes the torturer to go
entirely unpunished.—I am, Sir, &c., F. T. BIILLEN.
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