tions.

Let us cast a brief glance backward over the way that we have
travelled.

Our most primitive ancestors, half-men, half-brutes, lived in small,
solitary and hostile family groups, held together by a common
subjection to the strongest male, who was the father and the owner of
all the women, and their children. There was no promiscuity, for there
could be no possible union in peace. Here was the most primitive form
of jealous ownership by the male, as he killed or drove off his
rivals; his fights were the brutal precursors of all sexual
restrictions for women. These customs of brute ownership are still in
great measure preserved among the least developed races. This explains
how there are many rude peoples that exhibit no traces at all of the
system of mother-descent. In the lowest nomad bands of savages of the
deserts and forests we find still these rough paternal groups, who
know no social bonds, but are ruled alone by brute strength and
jealous ownership. With them development has been very slow; they have
not yet advanced to the social organisation of the maternal clan.

From these first solitary families, grouped submissively around one
tyrant-ruler, we reach a second stage out of which order and
organisation sprang. In this second stage the family expanded into the
larger group of the communal clan. The upward direction of this
transformation is evident; the change was from the most selfish
individualism to a communism more or less complete--from the
primordial patriarchate to a free social organisation, all the members
of which are bound together by a strict solidarity of interests. The
progress was necessarily slow from the beginning to this first phase
of social life. Yet the change came. With the fierce struggle for
existence, association was the only possible way, not only to further
progress, but to prevent extermination.

It has been shown that the earliest movements towards peace came
through the influence of the women, for it was in their interest to
consolidate the family, and, by means of union, to establish their own
power. Collective motives were more considered by women, not at all
because of any higher standard of feminine moral virtue, but because
of the peculiar advantages arising to themselves and to their
children--advantages of freedom which could not exist in a society
inspired by individual inclination. And for this reason the clan
system may be considered as a feminine creation, wh