if living under laws made specially for them
alone. Men get spoilt too in the same manner; but for the most part
there is a tougher fibre in them, which resists the flabby influences of
flattery and exaggerated attention better than can the morale of the
weaker sex; and, besides, even arbitrary men meet with opposition in
certain directions, and the most self-contented social autocrat knows
that his humblest adherents criticise though they dare not oppose.

A man who has been spoilt by success and a gratified ambition, so that
he thinks himself a small Alexander in his own way, and able to conquer
any obstacles which may present themselves, has a certain high-handed
activity of will about him that does not interfere with his duties in
life; he is not made fretful and impatient and exigeant as a woman
is--as if he alone of all mankind is to be exempt from misfortune and
annoyances; as if his friends must never die, his youth never fade, his
circumstances run always smoothly, protected by the care of others from
all untoward hitch; and as if time and tide, which wait for no one else,
are to be bound to him as humble servants dutifully observant of his
wishes.

The useful art of "finding his level," which he learnt at school and in
his youth generally, keeps him from any very weak manifestation of being
spoilt; save, indeed, when he has been spoilt by women at home, nursed
up by an adoring wife, and a large circle of wife's sisters almost as
adoring, to all of whom his smallest wishes are religious obligations,
and his faintest virtues godly graces, and who vie with each other which
of them shall wait upon him most servilely, flatter him most
outrageously, pet and coax and coddle him most entirely, and so do him
the largest amount of spiritual damage, and unfit him most thoroughly
for the worth and work of masculine life. A man subjected to this
insidious injury is simply ruined so far as any real manliness of nature
goes. He is made into that sickening creature, "a sweet being," as the
women call him--a woman's man, with flowing hair and a turn for poetry,
full of highflown sentiment, and morbidly excited sympathies; a man
almost as much woman as man, who has no backbone of ambition in him, but
who puts his whole life into love, just as women do, and who becomes at
last emphatically not worth his salt.

Bad as it is for a man to be _kowtowed_ by men, it is not so bad,
because not so weakening, as the domestic idolatry w