OBLIGA TION IN PARENTHOOD. \ 57 



naturally not so strong. Men and women were 

 struggling, and very rightly, for what unjustly was 

 withheld from them ; for though men had united in 

 communities for self-interest and self-defence, wealth 

 and its transmission had set up barriers between 

 those who felt their equality as men, and who re- 

 sented social disqualifications due probably to the 

 ill fortune of their ancestors ; under these circum- 

 stances men thought and talked more about their 

 rights than about their obligations. 



Long ago, when the family or clan formed a unit, 

 the right of the father over the children and the 

 women was a part of a very necessary discipline 

 upon which probably the existence of all depended. 

 These ideas have very naturally survived, for custom 

 clings with wonderful pertinacity, and we have had 

 the strange spectacle of the house divided against 

 itself, the father clinging to his old rights, the wife 

 and children clamouring for their new ones. As an 

 instance which illustrates how long the woman con- 

 tinued to be viewed as part of the property of her 

 husband, it is but necessary to recall the fact that 

 only since the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1858 was 

 it rendered impossible for a husband after deserting 

 his wife to return to her and lawfully possess himself 

 of all the property she had herself acquired during 

 the time of his desertion. So too with our old ideas 

 regarding parental rights, which were so tenacious a 



