xi SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS 223 



rights and duties to the state as such and also to nationality 

 as such is, on the other hand, struggling for existence. It 

 is neither a mere ideal nor an admitted principle, but an 

 operative influence contending with immense forces of col- 

 lective egoism and passion. On the issue of the contest 

 may be said to depend the question whether it is possible 

 to form a true community of the world, and therefore the 

 question whether the work of modern civilisation will 

 endure. 



In the history of the family the power of the husband 

 and father has effects which in their way resemble those of 

 the element of force in the social structure. The earlier 

 history of the family meaning by the term the union of 

 husband, wife and children is not easily grasped owing 

 to the diversity of types with which anthropology presents 

 us. But alike of the system of mother-right, of polyandry 

 and of the many forms of union in which divorce is so 

 easy that the name of marriage is barely applicable, it would 

 seem true to say generally that they represent the family 

 (in our sense) in an incomplete form. From this point of 

 view the patriarchate is a step in advance. It represents 

 (like the military state as compared with a congeries of ill- 

 disciplined tribes) a closer, more compact, more efficient 

 form of organisation. This advance, however, is balanced 

 by the lowered status and unprotected condition of the 

 wife and children, the former of whom probably experiences 

 an actual loss of status in the decay of mother-right. It 

 is accordingly an ethical advance when the rights of wife 

 and children are brought under the full protection of the 

 state. Society in this stage stands in direct relation to the 

 members of the family as individuals, and from this basis it 

 is advancing in our own time to the position of 'over- 

 parent,' in which it supervises and at need supplements the 

 functions hitherto left to parental care. This position, it 

 may freely be allowed, raises problems of the relation of 

 parental to communal responsibility which are not yet 

 solved, but it has already developed far enough to enable 

 us to conceive the family as a unit organism contributory 

 to and dependent on the larger organism of the social life. 

 From this point of view then we may distinguish four 



