8 “SPARE THE ROD?” … “spare the rod and spoil the child,” sometimes to his complete undoing. In the “absence of the birch behind the door,” say some students of criminology, lies the explanation of why so many “young hopefuls” go wrong and end their days in prison… a writer in The New York Herald quotes Judge Alfred J. Talley, of the Court of General Sessions, New York, as saying that “there is just one kind of discipline that does work and that is corporal punishment. Lax parents make boy criminals…” Physical punishment has gone out of fashion; “moral suasion has taken the place of a whipping.” But “what does one of the little fellows care about moral suasion? He would care a good deal about a sound thrashing… old-fashioned ideas of parental authority should be insisted on, and where it

