training of mankind will never be adapted to the
conditions of the life for which all other human progress is a
preparation, until they practise in the family the same moral rule
which is adapted to the normal constitution of human society. Any
sentiment of freedom which can exist in a man whose nearest and
dearest intimacies are with those of whom he is absolute master, is
not the genuine or Christian love of freedom, but, what the love of
freedom generally was in the ancients and in the middle ages--an
intense feeling of the dignity and importance of his own personality;
making him disdain a yoke for himself, of which he has no abhorrence
whatever in the abstract, but which he is abundantly ready to impose
on others for his own interest or glorification.

I readily admit (and it is the very foundation of my hopes) that
numbers of married people even under the present law, (in the higher
classes of England probably a great majority,) live in the spirit of
a just law of equality. Laws never would be improved, if there were
not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the
existing laws. Such persons ought to support the principles here
advocated; of which the only object is to make all other married
couples similar to what these are now. But persons even of
considerable moral worth, unless they are also thinkers, are very
ready to believe that laws or practices, the evils of which they have
not personally experienced, do not produce any evils, but (if seeming
to be generally approved of) probably do good, and that it is wrong
to object to them. It would, however, be a great mistake in such
married people to suppose, because the legal conditions of the tie
which unites them do not occur to their thoughts once in a
twelvemonth, and because they live and feel in all respects as if
they were legally equals, that the same is the case with all other
married couples, wherever the husband is not a notorious ruffian. To
suppose this, would be to show equal ignorance of human nature and of
fact. The less fit a man is for the possession of power--the less
likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person with that
person's voluntary consent--the more does he hug himself in the
consciousness of the power the law gives him, exact its legal rights
to the utmost point which custom (the custom of men like himself)
will tolerate, and take pleasure in using the power, merely to
enliven the agreeable sense of possessing