each one of us something that invites us to
resist personal power, and this something is very respectable. For at
bottom we are equal, and there is no one who has the right to exact
obedience from me because he is he and I am I: if he does so, his
command degrades me, and I have no right to suffer myself to be
degraded.

One must have lived in schools, in work-shops, in the army, in
Government offices, he must have closely followed the relations between
masters and servants, have observed a little everywhere where the
supremacy of man exercises itself over man, to form any idea of the
injury done by those who use power arrogantly. Of every free soul they
make a slave soul, which is to say the soul of a rebel. And it appears
that this result, with its social disaster, is most certain when he who
commands is least removed from the station of him who obeys. The most
implacable tyrant is the tyrant himself under authority. Foremen and
overseers put more violence into their dealings than superintendents and
employers. The corporal is generally harsher than the colonel. In
certain families where madam has not much more education than her maid,
the relations between them are those of the convict and his warder. And
woe everywhere to him who falls into the hands of a subaltern drunk with
his authority!

We forget that the first duty of him who exercises power is humility.
Haughtiness is not authority. It is not we who are the law; the law is
over our heads. We only interpret it, but to make it valid in the eyes
of others, we must first be subject to it ourselves. To command and to
obey in the society of men, are after all but two forms of the same
virtue--voluntary servitude. If you are not obeyed, it is generally
because you have not yourself obeyed first.

The secret of moral ascendancy rests with those who rule with
simplicity. They soften by the spirit the harshness of the fact. Their
authority is not in shoulder-straps, titles or disciplinary measures.
They make use of neither ferule nor threats, yet they achieve
everything. Why? Because we feel that they are themselves ready for
everything. That which confers upon a man the right to demand of another
the sacrifice of his time, his money, his passions, even his life, is
not only that he is resolved upon all these sacrifices himself, but that
he has made them in advance. In the command of a man animated by this
spirit of renunciation, there is a mysterious force which co