minds. For, among
right-feeling and well-bred people, the inequality is kept as much as
possible out of sight; above all, out of sight of the children. As
much obedience is required from boys to their mother as to their
father: they are not permitted to domineer over their sisters, nor
are they accustomed to see these postponed to them, but the contrary;
the compensations of the chivalrous feeling being made prominent,
while the servitude which requires them is kept in the background.
Well brought-up youths in the higher classes thus often escape the
bad influences of the situation in their early years, and only
experience them when, arrived at manhood, they fall under the
dominion of facts as they really exist. Such people are little aware,
when a boy is differently brought up, how early the notion of his
inherent superiority to a girl arises in his mind; how it grows with
his growth and strengthens with his strength; how it is inoculated by
one schoolboy upon another; how early the youth thinks himself
superior to his mother, owing her perhaps forbearance, but no real
respect; and how sublime and sultan-like a sense of superiority he
feels, above all, over the woman whom he honours by admitting her to
a partnership of his life. Is it imagined that all this does not
pervert the whole manner of existence of the man, both as an
individual and as a social being? It is an exact parallel to the
feeling of a hereditary king that he is excellent above others by
being born a king, or a noble by being born a noble. The relation
between husband and wife is very like that between lord and vassal,
except that the wife is held to more unlimited obedience than the
vassal was. However the vassal's character may have been affected,
for better and for worse, by his subordination, who can help seeing
that the lord's was affected greatly for the worse? whether he was
led to believe that his vassals were really superior to himself, or
to feel that he was placed in command over people as good as himself,
for no merits or labours of his own, but merely for having, as Figaro
says, taken the trouble to be born. The self-worship of the monarch,
or of the feudal superior, is matched by the self-worship of the
male. Human beings do not grow up from childhood in the possession of
unearned distinctions, without pluming themselves upon them. Those
whom privileges not acquired by their merit, and which they feel to
be disproportioned to it, inspire