by heart, were it not that hardly any one
thinks of applying these maxims to the case in which above all others
they are applicable, that of power, not placed in the hands of a man
here and there, but offered to every adult male, down to the basest
and most ferocious. It is not because a man is not known to have
broken any of the Ten Commandments, or because he maintains a
respectable character in his dealings with those whom he cannot
compel to have intercourse with him, or because he does not fly out
into violent bursts of ill-temper against those who are not obliged
to bear with him, that it is possible to surmise of what sort his
conduct will be in the unrestraint of home. Even the commonest men
reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of
their character for those who have no power to withstand it. The
relation of superiors to dependents is the nursery of these vices of
character, which, wherever else they exist, are an overflowing from
that source. A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to
be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry
into submission. If the family in its best forms is, as it is often
said to be, a school of sympathy, tenderness, and loving
forgetfulness of self, it is still oftener, as respects its chief, a
school of wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded self-indulgence, and
a double-dyed and idealized selfishness, of which sacrifice itself is
only a particular form: the care for the wife and children being only
care for them as parts of the man's own interests and belongings, and
their individual happiness being immolated in every shape to his
smallest preferences. What better is to be looked for under the
existing form of the institution? We know that the bad propensities
of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed no
scope for their indulgence. We know that from impulse and habit, when
not from deliberate purpose, almost every one to whom others yield,
goes on encroaching upon them, until a point is reached at which they
are compelled to resist. Such being the common tendency of human
nature; the almost unlimited power which present social institutions
give to the man over at least one human being--the one with whom he
resides, and whom he has always present--this power seeks out and
evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his
nature--fans its faintest sparks and smouldering embers--offe