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.
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