Note 1037 — Chapter XIX · School-Management.

On this point modern views, at least in Northern countries, are different, and a punishment inflicted by a servant is considered especially disgraceful. Therefore, the unpleasant task devolves on the Prefect of Discipline.—In some Jesuit colleges punishment was administered at fixed hours, and it was left to the lad that had offended to go to apply for castigation. In this way he had an opportunity of showing his manliness and taking his punishment with a sense of having deserved it. An English writer in the St. James’s Gazette calls it “evidence of the skill and tact of the Order to have devised this method.” Littell’s Living Age, Boston, 1886, vol. 170, p. 248.—Of the ferula, the instrument used at Stonyhurst, the same writer says: “Few things are more disagreeably painful and at the same time more harmless and transitory in its effects than the application of this instrument.”