--COVENTRY PATMORE.

=The Experience of the Past.=--By many experiments, over many
differing "folk-ways," the modern family has arrived. We name it now
"monogamic," and mean by the name the union of one man and one woman,
in aim at least for life, and their children. Whereas once it was the
rule of a tribe or clan which determined every detail of
sex-relationship, a rule represented either by the mother or the
father, it is now an individualistic choice of two adult persons only,
socially legalized by a required certificate and ceremony. Whereas
once it was the basis of all social order and mutual aid, it is now
one of several institutions inherited from the past, and is itself
subject to the state, which is the chief heir to our social
inheritance. The family, however, is now, as it has always been, the
interior, vital, and so far indispensable social relationship,
beginning, as it does, at first hand the training of each individual
toward membership in society-at-large. In the past, under the
mother-rule, the social elements of the family were emphasized, since
her power was one delegated by the group of which she and her children
were a part and closely related to peaceful ways and to primitive
industrial arts. Under the father-rule, the political and legal
elements of the family were emphasized, since his was an autocratic
and personal control of wife and children, even of adult sons, and in
many cases of his own mother, and marked the beginning and worked
toward the power of the modern state. In all cases, however, it was as
a representative of the group-ideal and the group-control that the
parents held sway over the family; and if the family is to persist in
the future as an institution it will hold its authority over
individual lives as trustee of society-at-large. Name, line of
inheritance, rights and duties of one member toward other members and
to the family group as a whole, must all be determined in the last
analysis by the "mores" of the people and the time concerned.

=New Ideals Affecting the Family.=--To-day the ideal of equality of
rights for men and women, and the ideal of ministration to childhood's
needs, are stronger than the ideal of family control. The social
demand is, therefore, for standardization of family life and of
child-care on a high plane of physical, mental, and moral development
of each individual life rather than for an autocratic representation
of the power of what Professor Jam