hands (with us they mostly fall into such hands) law becomes tyranny.
And what is a tyrant? Quite simply a person who says to another person,
young or old, "You shall do as I tell you; you shall make what I want;
you shall profess my creed; you shall have no will of your own; and
your powers shall be at the disposal of my will." It has come to this at
last: that the phrase "she has a will of her own," or "he has a will
of his own" has come to denote a person of exceptional obstinacy and
self-assertion. And even persons of good natural disposition, if
brought up to expect such deference, are roused to unreasoning fury,
and sometimes to the commission of atrocious crimes, by the slightest
challenge to their authority. Thus a laborer may be dirty, drunken,
untruthful, slothful, untrustworthy in every way without exhausting the
indulgence of the country house. But let him dare to be "disrespectful"
and he is a lost man, though he be the cleanest, soberest, most
diligent, most veracious, most trustworthy man in the county. Dickens's
instinct for detecting social cankers never served him better than when
he shewed us Mrs Heep teaching her son to "be umble," knowing that if he
carried out that precept he might be pretty well anything else he liked.
The maintenance of deference to our wills becomes a mania which will
carry the best of us to any extremity. We will allow a village of
Egyptian fellaheen or Indian tribesmen to live the lowest life they
please among themselves without molestation; but let one of them slay
an Englishman or even strike him on the strongest provocation, and
straightway we go stark mad, burning and destroying, shooting and
shelling, flogging and hanging, if only such survivors as we may leave
are thoroughly cowed in the presence of a man with a white face. In
the committee room of a local council or city corporation, the humblest
employees of the committee find defenders if they complain of harsh
treatment. Gratuities are voted, indulgences and holidays are pleaded
for, delinquencies are excused in the most sentimental manner provided