it has extended to both sexes, and it has ceased for both at the same time. Even the Oriental seclusion of women, perhaps the worst condition in which the sex has ever been, has its root, not in the slave-owning propensity so much as in jealousy, a passion which, though extravagant and detestable in its excessive manifestation, is not without an element of affection. The most beautiful building in the East is that in which Shah Jehan rests by the side of Nourmahal.
If the calm and philosophic nature of Mr. Mill is ever betrayed into violence, it is in his denunciations of the present institution of marriage. He depicts it as a despotism full of mutual degradation, and fruitful of no virtues or affections except the debased virtues and the miserable affections of the master and the slave. The grossest and most degrading terms of Oriental slavery are used to designate the relations of husband and wife throughout the whole book. A husband who desires his wife's love is merely seeking "to have, in the woman most nearly connected with him, not a forced slave, but a willing one—not a slave merely, but a favourite." Husbands have therefore "put everything in practice to enslave the minds of their wives," If a wife is intensely attached to her husband, "exactly as much may be said of domestic slavery." "It is part of the irony of life that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible are called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from using their power." Even children are only links in the chain of bondage. By the affections of women "are meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man." The Jesuit is an object of sympathy, because he is the enemy of the domestic tyrant, and it is assumed that the husband can have no motive but the love of undivided tyranny for objecting to being superseded by an intriguing interloper in his wife's affections. As though a wife would regard with complacency, say a female spiritualist
