n.

"Order" is not only, as we were once told, "Heaven's first law," but
social order, human experience declares, comes before the recognition
of equality of personal rights within that order. The great lady of
the Middle Ages who begged of her King a "new Lord" within a month
after the death of her husband because her "lands were being taken and
her estate defrauded by hostile lords who surrounded her castle," and
only a husband for herself, a new father for her children and a new
owner for the inherited property could protect from this robbery,
realized the social advantages of the patriarchal system in
appropriate social conditions.

To-day, when so much of the community protection surrounds the family
and so much in education, law, and social custom aids the wife and
mother toward independent action, we are naturally horrified at the
thought of life and death power of the husband and father and shocked
at recital of the humiliations and privations of women's subject
condition in the past. We have to remember, however, that social
history seems to indicate that no system of human association has
grown up and persisted without great need for some, at least, of its
dominant features. The protection of wife and child, which rested for
so long upon man's conception of "property" to be defended from
outside attack, was a chief necessity in the rougher and coarser ages
of the world.

The main hindrance to social progress, however, is the tendency of
forms of institutional life and methods of social relationship to
persist after the need for them has ceased. This hindrance has been
shown perhaps most harmfully in the retention of the patriarchal power
of the father after his abdication from the throne was called for by
ethical and humane considerations. A form of family relationship
entrenched in institutions of age-long prestige and supported by the
triple influence of money, military power, and religion, lived on
after its work in securing social order had been accomplished and long
after its usefulness was entirely ended. After the father-headship
ceased to express the highest ideals of either sex-relationship or
parental devotion, its retention produced social evils and personal
wrongs which made a conscious and determined movement for "Woman's
Rights" necessary, and still makes necessary close and definite
attention to the equalizing of opportunities.

=The Social Value of the Patriarchal Family.=--It is well, how