days and
school-masters makes me know that Mr. Crayshaw was not a common type of
pedagogue. He was not a common type of man, happily; but I have met
other specimens in other parts of the world in which his leading quality
was as fully developed, though their lives had nothing in common with
his except the opportunities of irresponsible power.

The old wounds are scars now, it is long past and over, and I am grown
up, and have roughed it in the world; but I say quite deliberately that
I believe that Mr. Crayshaw was not merely a harsh man, uncultured and
inconsiderate, having need and greed of money, taking pupils cheap,
teaching them little or nothing, and keeping a kind of rough order with
too much flogging,--but that the mischief of him was that he was
possessed by a passion (not the less fierce because it was unnatural)
which grew with indulgence and opportunity, as other passions grow, and
that this was a passion for cruelty.

One does not rough it long in this wicked world without seeing more
cruelty both towards human beings and towards animals than one cares to
think about; but a large proportion of common cruelty comes of
ignorance, bad tradition and uncultured sympathies. Some painful
outbreaks of inhumanity, where one would least expect it, are no doubt
strictly to be accounted for by disease. But over and above these common
and these exceptional instances, one cannot escape the conviction that
irresponsible power is opportunity in all hands and a direct temptation
in some to cruelty, and that it affords horrible development to those
morbid cases in which cruelty becomes a passion.

That there should ever come a thirst for blood in men as well as tigers,
is bad enough but conceivable when linked with deadly struggle, or at
the wild dictates of revenge. But a lust for cruelty growing fiercer by
secret and unchecked indulgence, a hideous pleasure in seeing and
inflicting pain, seems so inhuman a passion that we shrink from
acknowledging that this is ever so.

And if it belonged to the past alone, to barbarous despotisms or to
savage life, one might wisely forget it; for the dark pages of human
history are unwholesome as well as unpleasant reading, unless the mind
be very sane in a body very sound. But those in whose hands lie the
destinies of the young and of the beasts who serve and love us, of the
weak, the friendless, the sick and the insane, have not, alas! this
excuse for ignoring the black records of m