Flogging : The Real Scandal The so-called Mayfair men who
were recently sentenced at the Old Bailey to flogging as well as imprisonment were guilty of a brutal crime, and if the use of the " cat " were either redemptive or deterrent it would be justified here. But the real scandal, and the decisive reason for the abolition of this penalty, is the loathsomely degrading treatment of the subject in a section of the daily Press. In the interval between delivery of the sentence and the infliction of the penalty readers of certain journals have had laid before them detailed accounts of the manner of a prison flogging and the physical results of it, while on Wednesday at least two papers, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, published what purported to be actual descriptions of the flogging that had taken place the day before. The value of their versions is sufficiently demonstrated by a comparison of the two. According to the Mail Harley. and Wilmer " took their full flogging without a whimper. Harley received zo strokes, Wilmer is." The Express alleges that Wilmer " received five strokes and then collapsed." It reported, a little less categorically, " statements " that " Harley received six strokes before he collapsed and was taken to hospital." Whatever the intention of such descriptions (and whether they correspond with fact or not), they, can appeal only to sadists br people who find utter beastliness congenial. The one redeeming feature is the prospect that such journalistic exhibitions will do more than anything else to bring the infliction of the " cat " by judges to an end.
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