The social clan organised around the mothers carried mankind a long way—a way the length of which we are only beginning to realise. But it could not carry mankind forward to the closer family ties and family life from which so much was afterwards to develop. The clan system was essential to the conditions of primitive life, owing to the fierce struggle to exist, and it could then limit and interfere with the family on every side. But as soon as life was easier, men wanted to establish a home with wife and children and to enjoy the possession of property. And women wanted this too. It was not possible for the family to be permanently absorbed. I must insist upon this again. The individual family—that is, the trinity composed of father, mother and child—is the older and the more lasting institution. I affirm, further, that of the two forms of the family, the individual limited form is the one that is the more natural and happy. Special circumstances may make necessary the enlarged social family, but such conditions are not really a step forward. With all the evils and restrictions that father-right and the individual family-group may, throughout the ages, have brought to women, we have got to remember that the woman owes the individual relationship in love and the protection of the man for herself and her children to the patriarchal system. The father’s right in his children (which, unlike the right of the mother, was not founded upon kinship, but rested on the quite different and insecure basis of property) had to be re-established. Without this being done, the family in its fairness and complete development was impossible. The survival value of the patriarchal family consists in the additional gain to the children of the father’s to the mother’s care. I do not think this gain can ever safely be lost. PART IV MOTHERHOOD AND THE RELATIONSHIPS OF THE SEXES “For the great majority of mankind at least it can be held that life resolves itself quite simply and obviously into three cardinal phases. There is a period of youth and preparation, a great insurgence of emotion and enterprise centring about the passion of Love; and a third period in which, arising amidst the warmth and stir of the second, interweaving indeed with the second, the care and love of offspring becomes the central interest in life.… Looking at this with a primary regard to its broadest aspect, life is seen essentially as a matter of reproduction; first a growth and training to that end, then commonly mating and actual physical reproduction, and finally the consummation of these things in parental nurture and education. Love, Home and Children, these are the heart-words of life.”—H. G. WELLS. CONTENTS OF CHAPTER VIII THE FAMILY AND THE HOME