hape, however, it
gets its cruelest dominion over strong and generous and tender people.
This kind of tyranny builds up and fortifies its bulwarks on and out of
the very virtues of its victims; it gains strength hourly from the very
strength of the strength to which it appeals; each slow and fatal
encroachment never seems at first so much a thing required as a thing
offered; but, like the slow sinking inch by inch of that great, beautiful
city of stone into the relentless Adriatic, so is the slow, sure going
down and loss of the freedom of a strong, beautiful soul, helpless in the
omnipresent circumference of the selfish nature to which it is or believes
itself bound.

That the exactions never or rarely take shape in words is, to the
unbiassed looker-on, only an exasperating feature in their tyranny. While
it saves the conscience of the tyrant,--if such tyrants have any,--it
makes doubly sure the success of their tyranny. And probably nothing short
of revelation from Heaven, in shape of blinding light, would ever open
their eyes to the fact that it is even more selfish to hold a generous
spirit fettered hour by hour by a constant fear of giving pain than to
coerce or threaten or scold them into the desired behavior. Invalids, all
invalids, stand in deadly peril of becoming tyrants of this order. A
chronic invalid who entirely escapes it must be so nearly saint or angel
that one instinctively feels as if their invalidism would soon end in the
health of heaven. We know of one invalid woman, chained to her bed for
long years by an incurable disease, who has had the insight and strength
to rise triumphant above this danger. Her constant wish and entreaty is
that her husband should go freely into all the work and the pleasure of
life. Whenever he leaves her, her farewell is not, "How soon do you think
you shall come back? At what hour, or day, may I look for you?" but, "Now,
pray stay just as long as you enjoy it. If you hurry home one hour sooner
for the thought of me, I shall be wretched." It really seems almost as if
the longer he stayed away,--hours, days, weeks even,--the happier she
were. By this sweet and wise unselfishness she has succeeded in realizing
the whole blessedness of wifehood far more than most women who have
health. But we doubt if any century sees more than one such woman as she
is.

Another large class, next to that of invalids the most difficult to deal
with, is made up of people who are by nature or