with additional humility, are
always the few, and the best few. The rest are only inspired with
pride, and the worst sort of pride, that which values itself upon
accidental advantages, not of its own achieving. Above all, when the
feeling of being raised above the whole of the other sex is combined
with personal authority over one individual among them; the
situation, if a school of conscientious and affectionate forbearance
to those whose strongest points of character are conscience and
affection, is to men of another quality a regularly constituted
Academy or Gymnasium for training them in arrogance and
overbearingness; which vices, if curbed by the certainty of
resistance in their intercourse with other men, their equals, break
out towards all who are in a position to be obliged to tolerate them,
and often revenge themselves upon the unfortunate wife for the
involuntary restraint which they are obliged to submit to elsewhere.

The example afforded, and the education given to the sentiments, by
laying the foundation of domestic existence upon a relation
contradictory to the first principles of social justice, must, from
the very nature of man, have a perverting influence of such
magnitude, that it is hardly possible with our present experience to
raise our imaginations to the conception of so great a change for the
better as would be made by its removal. All that education and
civilization are doing to efface the influences on character of the
law of force, and replace them by those of justice, remains merely on
the surface, as long as the citadel of the enemy is not attacked. The
principle of the modern movement in morals and politics, is that
conduct, and conduct alone, entitles to respect: that not what men
are, but what they do, constitutes their claim to deference; that,
above all, merit, and not birth, is the only rightful claim to power
and authority. If no authority, not in its nature temporary, were
allowed to one human being over another, society would not be
employed in building up propensities with one hand which it has to
curb with the other. The child would really, for the first time in
man's existence on earth, be trained in the way he should go, and
when he was old there would be a chance that he would not depart from
it. But so long as the right of the strong to power over the weak
rules in the very heart of society, the attempt to make the equal
right of the weak the principle of its outward actions