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 selfish indulgence, and a double-dyed and idealised
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 everyone 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--offers to him a licence for the indulgence of
those points of his original character which in all other relations
he would have found it necessary to repress and conceal, and the
repression of which would in time have become a second nature. I
know that there is another side to the question. I grant that the
wife, if she cannot effectually resist, can at least retaliate;
she, too, can make the man's life extremely uncomfortable, and by
that power is able to carry many points which she ought, and many
which she ought not, to prevail in. But this instrument of
self-protection--which may be called the power of the scold, or the
shrewish sanction--has the fatal defect, that it avails most
against the least tyrannical superiors, and in favour of the least
deserving dependents. It is the weapon of irritable and self-willed
women; of those who would make the worst use of power if they
themselves had it, and who generally turn this power to a bad use.
The amiable cannot use such an instrument, the high minded disdain
it. And on the other hand, the husbands against whom it is used
most effectively are the gentler and more inoffensive; those who
cannot be induced, even by provocation, to resort to any very harsh
exercise of authority. The wife's power of being disagreeable
generally only establishes a counter-tyranny, and makes victims in
their turn chiefly of those husbands who are least inclined to be
tyrants. 

What is it, then, which really tempers the corrupting effects of
the power, and makes it compatible with such amount of good as we
actually see? Mere feminine blandishments. though of great effect
in individual instances, have very little effect in modifying the
general tendencies of the situation; for their power only lasts
while the woman is young and attractive, often only while her charm
is new, and not dimmed by familiarity; and on many men they have
not much influence at any time. The real mitigating causes are, the
personal affection which is the growth of time in so far as the
man's nature is susceptible of it and the woman's character
sufficiently congenial with his to excite it; their common
interests as regards the children, and their general community of
interest as concerns third persons(to which however there are very
great limitations); the real importance of the wife to his daily
comforts and enjoyments, and the value he consequently attaches to
her on his personal account, which, in a man capable of feeling for
others, lays the foundation of caring for her on her own; and
lastly, the influence naturally acquired over almost all human
beings by those near to their persons (if not actually disagreeable
to them): who, both by their direct entreaties, and by the
insensible contagion of their feelings and dispositions, are often
able, unless counteracted by some equally strong personal
influence, to obtain a degree of command over the conduct of the
superior, altogether excessive and unreasonable. Through these
various means, the wife frequently exercises even too much power
over the man; she is able to affect his conduct in things in which
she may not be qualified to influence it for good--in which her
influence may be not only unenlightened, but employed on the
morally wrong side; and in which he would act better if left to his
own prompting. But neither in the affairs of families nor in those
of states is power a compensation for the loss of freedom. Her
power often gives her what she has no right to, but does not enable
her to assert her own rights. A Sultan's favourite slave has slaves
under her, over whom she tyrannises; but the desirable thing would
be that she should neither have slaves nor be a slave. By entirely
sinking her own existence in her husband; by having no will (or
persuading him that she has no will) but his, in anything which
regards their joint relation, and by making it the business of her
life to work upon his sentiments, a wife may gratify herself by
influencing, and very probably perverting, his conduct, in those of
his external relations which she has never qualified herself to
judge of, or in which she is herself wholly influenced by some
personal or other partiality or prejudice. Accordingly, as things
now are, those who act most kindly to their wives, are quite as
often made worse, as better, by the wife's influence, in respect to