Explore "Private Tyrants" by Helen Hunt Jackson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
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.