Many a wife goes down to her grave a dulled and dispirited woman simply because her good and faithful husband has lived by her side without talking to her!  There have been days when one word of praise, or one word even of simple good cheer, would have girded her up with new strength.  She did not know, very likely, what she needed, or that she needed any thing; but she drooped.

Many a child grows up a hard, unimpressionable, unloving man or woman simply from the uncheered silence in which the first ten years of life were passed.  Very few fathers and mothers, even those who are fluent, perhaps, in society, habitually talk with their children.

It is certain that this is one of the worst shortcomings of our homes.  Perhaps no other single change would do so much to make them happier, and, therefore, to make our communities better, as for men and women to learn to speak.

Private Tyrants.

We recognize tyranny when it wears a crown and sits on an hereditary throne.  We sympathize with nations that overthrow the thrones, and in our secret hearts we almost canonize individuals who slay the tyrants.  From the days of Ehud and Eglon down to those of Charlotte Corday and Marat, the world has dealt tenderly with their names whose hands have been red with the blood of oppressors.  On moral grounds it would be hard to justify this sentiment, murder being murder all the same, however great gain it may be to this world to have the murdered man put out of it; but that there is such a sentiment, instinctive and strong in the human soul, there is no denying.  It is so instinctive and so strong that, if we watch ourselves closely, we shall find it giving alarming shape sometimes to our secret thoughts about our neighbors.

How many communities, how many households even, are without a tyrant?  If we could “move for returns of suffering,” as that tender and thoughtful man, Arthur Helps, says, we should find a far heavier aggregate of misery inflicted by unsuspected, unresisted tyrannies than by those which are patent to everybody, and sure to be overthrown sooner or later.

An exhaustive sermon on this subject should be set off in three divisions, as follows:—­

  PRIVATE TYRANTS.

  1st. Number of—­
  2d. Nature of—­
  3d. Longevity of—­

First.  Their number.  They are not enumerated in any census.  Not even the most painstaking statistician has meddled with the topic.  Fancy takes bold leaps at the very suggestion of such an estimate, and begins to think at once of all things in the universe which are usually mentioned as beyond numbering.  Probably one good way of getting at a certain sort of result would be to ask each person of one’s acquaintance, “Do you happen to know a private tyrant?”

How well we know beforehand the replies we should get from some beloved men and women,—­that is, if they spoke the truth!