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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: other methods of maintaining order than those they had always seen
practised and approved of. From children and animals it extended to
slaves and criminals. In the days of Moses it was limited to 39
lashes. In the early nineteenth century it had become an open
madness: soldiers were sentenced to a thousand lashes for trifling
offences, with the result (among others less mentionable) that the
Iron Duke of Wellington complained that it was impossible to get an
order obeyed in the British army except in two or three crack
regiments. Such frantic excesses of this disgusting neurosis provoked
a reaction against it; but the clamor for it by depraved persons never
ceased, and was tolerated by a nation trained to it from childhood in
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