hey do not like
to do; while interference seeks no good for itself at all, but simply
prevents the exercise of free will for the mere pleasure to be had out
of such prevention. Again, the idea of tyranny is political rather than
domestic, but the curse of interference is seen most distinctly within
the four walls of home, where also it is felt the most. Very many people
spend their lives in interfering with others--perpetually putting spokes
into wheels with which they have really nothing to do, and thrusting
their fingers into pies about the baking of which they are not in any
way concerned; and of these people we are bound to confess that women
make up the larger number and are the greater sinners.

To be sure there are some men--small, fussy, finicking fellows, with
whom nature has made the irreparable blunder of sex--who are as
troublesome in their endless interference as the narrowest-minded and
most meddling women of their acquaintance; but the feminine
characteristics of men are so exceptional that we need not take them
into serious calculation. For the most part, when men do interfere in
any manly sense at all, it is with such things as they think they have a
right to control--say, with the wife's low dresses, or the daughter's
too patent flirtations. They interfere and prevent because they are
jealous of the repute, perhaps of the beauty, of their womankind; and
knowing what men say of such displays, or fearing their effect, they
stand between folly and slander to the best of their ability. But this
kind of interference, noble or ignoble as the cause may be, comes into
another class of motives altogether, and does not belong to the kind of
interference of which we are speaking.

Women, then, are the great interferers at home, both with each other and
with men. They do not tell us what we are to do, beyond going to church
and subscribing to their favorite mission, so much as they tell us what
we are not to do; they do not command so much as they forbid; and, of
all women, wives and daughters are the most given to handling these
check-strings and putting on these drag-chains. Sisters, while young,
are obliged to be less interfering, under pain of a perpetual round of
bickering; for brothers are not apt to submit to the counsel of
creatures for the most part as loftily snubbed as sisters are; while
mothers are nine times out of ten laid aside for all but sentimental
purposes, so soon as the son has ceased to be a