But they would not.  That is the saddest thing about these private tyrannies.  They are in many cases borne in such divine and uncomplaining silence by their victims, perhaps for long years, the world never dreams that they exist.  But at last the fine, subtle writing, which no control, no patience, no will can thwart, becomes set on the man’s or the woman’s face, and tells the whole record.  Who does not know such faces?  Cheerful usually, even gay, brave, and ready with lines of smile; but in repose so marked, so scarred with unutterable weariness and disappointment, that tears spring in the eyes and love in the hearts of all finely organized persons who meet them.

Secondly.  Nature of private tyrants.  Here also the statistician has not entered.  The field is vast; the analysis difficult.

Selfishness is, of course, their leading characteristic; in fact, the very sum and substance of their natures.  But selfishness is Protean.  It has as many shapes as there are minutes, and as many excuses and wraps of sheep’s clothing as ever ravening wolf possessed.

One of its commonest pleas is that of weakness.  Here it often is so inextricably mixed with genuine need and legitimate claim that one grows bewildered between sympathy and resentment.  In this shape, however, it gets its cruelest dominion over strong and generous and tender people.  This kind of tyranny builds up and fortifies its bulwarks on and out of the very virtues of its victims; it gains strength hourly from the very strength of the strength to which it appeals; each slow and fatal encroachment never seems at first so much a thing required as a thing offered; but, like the slow sinking inch by inch of that great, beautiful city of stone into the relentless Adriatic, so is the slow, sure going down and loss of the freedom of a strong, beautiful soul, helpless in the omnipresent circumference of the selfish nature to which it is or believes itself bound.

That the exactions never or rarely take shape in words is, to the unbiassed looker-on, only an exasperating feature in their tyranny.  While it saves the conscience of the tyrant,—­if such tyrants have any,—­it makes doubly sure the success of their tyranny.  And probably nothing short of revelation from Heaven, in shape of blinding light, would ever open their eyes to the fact that it is even more selfish to hold a generous spirit fettered hour by hour by a constant fear of giving pain than to coerce or threaten or scold them into the desired behavior.  Invalids, all invalids, stand in deadly peril of becoming tyrants of this order.  A chronic invalid who entirely escapes it must be so nearly saint or angel that one instinctively feels as if their invalidism would soon end in the health of heaven.  We know of one invalid woman, chained to her bed for long years by an incurable disease, who has had the insight and strength to rise triumphant above this danger.  Her constant wish and entreaty is that