between the sexes and in relationship of men
and women to society-at-large is fully accepted by a majority of the
enlightened. What is before us is the slow and in some respects
difficult task of working out that ideal in social adjustments. While
at work on this task it behooves us to go over the past experience
more carefully than many have yet done, to note what the patriarchal
family gave to society and through society to wife and children as
well as what of their just due it took from or refused to give to wife
and children.

=Special Protection of Women Needed in Ancient Times.=--It seems not
too much to say that in the time and place where men in general first
attained power of property rights, of military supremacy, and of
religious priesthood, most women needed some special protection from
particular men. In such period and condition the sex-relationship
itself had not attained its present spiritual quality. There was
apparently required the sense of ownership on the part of one man to
safeguard those women most generally desired from exploitation by all
men. Some legal order in the oppression of women by society had to
precede, apparently, the abolition of oppression of women itself; just
as to-day the effort is to "humanize war" before we can become wise
and strong enough to abolish it. No social device that the imagination
can conceive could be so well fitted to protect motherhood, in an age
before justice could give power of self-protection, as was that of the
patriarchal family. The religious aspect of ancestor-worship, the
political aspect of the building up of great families from which the
state could derive its power and the economic necessity of having the
industrial system develop more highly all vocations, combined in the
patriarchal system to make the family the main expression of social
order and the chief heir of social privilege. It seems apparent,
therefore, that a socially delegated power of absolute control by the
father was highly useful in the period when the state was growing, and
the school was separating itself from the hearth-stone, and the
economic system was changing from barter to the complicated exchange
of the present time, and religion itself was merging its ideals from
the innumerable private ceremonials of noble families into the worship
of one chief, emperor, or despot who must receive the homage of all,
and so on to the incarnation of divine power in one King and Lord of
Heave