Authority 215 



eludes several related broods under autocratic patriarchal 

 control, it may still retain an essential moral character. The 

 heredity of the governed is then the direct product of the 

 governor, their needs and physical ambitions are but re- 

 newals of his, and when morality assumes form, that form 

 first appears in the conduct of experienced age, and is trans- 

 mitted from age to youth as naturally, and received as 

 readily, as are the baser bodily habits. Education in the 

 home, of the child by the parent, is in fact an extension of 

 heredity itself. It is the supply, to certain physical capaci- 

 ties, of the knowledge most exactly suited to those capacities, 

 which no other than the parent can have. That knowledge 

 is the experience of a life organism of certain peculiar indi- 

 viduality, and the offspring which has those same peculiari- 

 ties, profits by and needs, that experience, more than any 

 other experience. 



Therefore so far as this parental and patriarchal control 

 can extend over its own heredity, and so long as heredity 

 continues to need extension by education; such control is 

 and will ever remain essentially despotic in nature, although 

 qualified more and more, as the rights of others in a com- 

 munity, mingle with and modify even parental rights. 



But this despotism remains moral only so long as its base 

 rests in heredity; and the paternal sympathies and infantile 

 needs show community of origin and of purpose. When 

 many families enlarge into environment of new conditions 

 and new contacts, that sympathy lessens, and new ones arise 

 of the same nature, but of different condition; and a union 

 of these many clans is no longer a group of dependents, with 

 a naturally superior leader, but an association of such groups 



