n him and his children,
tends, in all save exceptional cases, to strengthen, instead of
conflicting with, the first. Because this is true; because men in
general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all the misery which could
be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the
man is legally invested were acted on; the defenders of the existing
form of the institution think that all its iniquity is justified, and
that any complaint is merely quarrelling with the evil which is the
price paid for every great good. But the mitigations in practice,
which are compatible with maintaining in full legal force this or any
other kind of tyranny, instead of being any apology for despotism,
only serve to prove what power human nature possesses of reacting
against the vilest institutions, and with what vitality the seeds of
good as well as those of evil in human character diffuse and
propagate themselves. Not a word can be said for despotism in the
family which cannot be said for political despotism. Every absolute
king does not sit at his window to enjoy the groans of his tortured
subjects, nor strips them of their last rag and turns them out to
shiver in the road. The despotism of Louis XVI. was not the despotism
of Philippe le Bel, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula; but it was bad
enough to justify the French Revolution, and to palliate even its
horrors. If an appeal be made to the intense attachments which exist
between wives and their husbands, exactly as much may be said of
domestic slavery. It was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome
for slaves to submit to death by torture rather than betray their
masters. In the proscriptions of the Roman civil wars it was remarked
that wives and slaves were heroically faithful, sons very commonly
treacherous. Yet we know how cruelly many Romans treated their
slaves. But in truth these intense individual feelings nowhere rise
to such a luxuriant height as under the most atrocious institutions.
It is part of the irony of life, that the strongest feelings of
devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are
called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power
entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from
using that power. How great a place in most men this sentiment fills,
even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire. We daily
see how much their gratitude to Heaven appears to be stimulated by
the contemplation