_Maternal Authority._--In the matter of love for the offspring the mother, for physiological reasons (pregnancy, parturition, and lactation), stands on a higher plane than the father. The intensity of her love for her children explains the fact that the mother neither needs nor exercises much parental authority. Moreover, inasmuch as hitherto the mother has always been in a state of greater or less subjection to the father, parental authority has at all times chiefly taken the form of paternal authority. But as time goes on, this paternal authority is, in fact, tending to be transformed very gradually into a true parental authority; that is to say, the mother begins to exercise the rights and to perform the duties of parental authority in a manner parallel with or subsidiary to that of the father. To-day we stand at the beginning of this development. Its chief cause is the profound transformation of economic life, as a result of which women are to an ever greater extent entering the arena as wage-earners, whilst the differences between the legal position of men and women continually diminish. _Fiduciary Character of Parental Authority._--Formerly, parental authority took the form mainly of a right of dominion over the child, subserving chiefly the interests of the head of the family--the patriarch. The more complete the social integration of any particular country, the more in that country does paternal authority assume a fiduciary character, the character of a protective authority, arising out of the child’s natural need for protection, and subserving its need for guardianship. Owing to their possession of parental authority, it is the duty and the right of the parents to exercise the guardianship over their children in every capacity; as the legal representatives of those of their children who are still under age, the parents are competent to act on behalf of and in the name of their children. Thus the second characteristic of the developmental tendency of parental authority is, that that authority involves the acceptance of an ever-increasing number of duties, and also that the State, through the intermediation of Boards of Guardianship[2] exercises a control over the parents which was almost unknown in former times.