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 of
fellow-creatures to whom God has not been so merciful as he has to
themselves. 

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political
absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are
always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are
presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one
side, loving submission to it on the other--superior wisdom
ordering all things for the greatest good of the dependents, and
surrounded by their smiles and benedictions. All this would be very
much to the purpose if anyone pretended that there are no such
things as goodmen. Who doubts that there may be great goodness, and
great happiness, and great affection, under the absolute government
of a good man? Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be
adapted, not to good men, but to bad. Marriage is not an
institution designed fora select few. Men are not required, as a
preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials that
they are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power. The
tie of affection and obligation to a wife and children is very
strong with those whose general social feelings are strong, and
with many who are little sensible to any other social ties; but
there are all degrees of sensibility and insensibility to it, as
there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men, down to
those whom no ties will bind, and on whom society has no action but
through its ultima ratio, the penalties of the law. In every grade
of this descending scale are men to whom are committed all the
legal powers of a husband. The vilest malefactor has some wretched
woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity except
killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can do that without much
danger of the legal penalty. And how many thousands are there among
the lowest classes in every country, who, without being in a legal
sense malefactors in any other respect, because in every other
quarter their aggressions meet with resistance, indulge the utmost
habitual excesses of bodily violence towards the unhappy wife, who
alone, at least of grown persons, can neither repel nor escape from
their brutality; and towards whom the excess of dependence inspires
their mean and savage natures, not with a generous forbearance, and
a point of honour to behave well to one whose lot in life is
trusted entirely to their kindness, but on the contrary with a
notion that the law has delivered her to them as their thing, to be
used at their pleasure, and that they are not expected to practise
the consideration towards her which is required from them towards
everybody else. The law, which till lately left even these
atrocious extremes of domestic oppression practically unpunished,
has within these few years made some feeble attempts to repress
them. But its attempts have done little, and cannot be expected to
do much, because it is contrary to reason and experience to suppose
that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent with
leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner. Until a
conviction for personal violence, or at all events a repetition of
it after a first conviction, entitles the woman ipso facto to a
divorce, or at least to a judicial separation, the attempt to
repress these "aggravated assaults " by legal penalties will break
down for want of a prosecutor, or for want of a witness. 

When we consider how vast is the number of men, in any great
country, who are little higher than brutes, and that this never
prevents them from being able, through the law of marriage, to
obtain a victim, the breadth and depth of human misery caused in
this shape alone by the abuse of the institution swells to
something appalling. Yet these are only the extreme cases. They are
the lowest abysses, but there is a sad succession of depth after
depth before reaching them. In domestic as in political tyranny,
the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution
by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur
under it if the despot pleases, and thus setting in a strong light
what must be the terrible frequency of things only a little less
atrocious. Absolute fiends are as rare as angels, perhaps rarer:
ferocious savages, with occasional touches of humanity, are however
very frequent: and in the wide interval which separates these from
any worthy representatives of the human species, how many are the
forms and gradations of animalism and selfishness, often under an
outward varnish of civilisation and even cultivation, living at
peace with the law, maintaining a creditable appearance to all who
are not under their power, yet sufficient often to make the lives
of all who are so, a torment and a burthen to them ! It would be
tiresome to repeat the commonplaces about the unfitness of men in
general for power, which, after the political discussions of
centuries, everyone knows by heart, were it not that hardly anyone
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