The Iron Rule

The Iron Rule, by T.S. Arthur

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Title: The Iron Rule
Author: T.S. Arthur
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
Release Date: November, 2003 [Etext #4628] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on February 20, 2002]
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The IRON RULE;
OR, TYRANNY IN THE HOUSEHOLD.
BY T. S. ARTHUR,
AUTHOR OF "LOVE IN HIGH LIFE," "LOVE IN A COTTAGE," "MARY MORETON; OR, THE BROKEN PROMISE," "AGNES; OR, THE POSSESSED," "INSUBORDINATION," "LUCY SANDFORD," "THE ORPHAN CHILDREN," "THE DEBTOR'S DAUGHTER," "THE DIVORCED WIFE," "PRIDE AND PRUDENCE," "THE TWO MERCHANTS," "CECILIA HOWARD," "THE BANKER'S WIFE," ETC. COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME.
Philadelphia:
1853

THE IRON RULE;
OR, TYRANNY IN THE HOUSEHOLD.
CHAPTER I.

ANDREW HOWLAND belonged to that class of rigid moralists who can tolerate in others no wanderings from the right way. His children were forced into the straight jacket of external consistency from their earliest infancy; and if they deviated from the right line in which they were required to walk, punishment was sure to follow.
A child loves his parent naturally. The latter may be harsh, and unreasonable; still the child will look up to him in weak dependence, while love mingles, like golden threads in a dark fabric, amid the fear and respect with which he regards him. Thus it was with the children of Andrew Howland. Their mother was a gentle, retiring woman, with a heart full of the best affections. When the sunshine fell upon her golden locks in the early days of innocence, it was in a home where the ringing laugh, the merry shout, and the wild exuberance of feeling ever bursting from the heart of childhood were rarely checked; or, if repressed, with a hand that wounded not in its firm contraction. She had grown up to womanhood amid all that was gentle, kind and loving. Transplanted, then, like a tender flower from a sunny border, to the cold and formal home of her husband, she drooped in the uncongenial soil, down into which her heart-fibres penetrated in search of nutrition. And yet, while drooping thus, she tenderly loved her husband, and earnestly sought to overcome in herself many true impulses of nature to which he gave the false name of weaknesses. It was less painful thus to repress them herself, than to have them crushed in the iron hand with which he was ever ready to grasp them.
Let it not be thought that Andrew Howland was an evil minded man. In the beginning we have intimated that this was not so. He purposed wrong to no one. Honest he was in all his dealings with the world; honest even to the division of a penny. The radical fault of his character was coldness and intolerance. Toward wrong-doing and wrong-doers, he had no forbearance whatever; and to him that strayed from the right path, whether