more carefully than many have yet done, to note what the patriarchal family gave to society and through society to wife and children as well as what of their just due it took from or refused to give to wife and children. =Special Protection of Women Needed in Ancient Times.=--It seems not too much to say that in the time and place where men in general first attained power of property rights, of military supremacy, and of religious priesthood, most women needed some special protection from particular men. In such period and condition the sex-relationship itself had not attained its present spiritual quality. There was apparently required the sense of ownership on the part of one man to safeguard those women most generally desired from exploitation by all men. Some legal order in the oppression of women by society had to precede, apparently, the abolition of oppression of women itself; just as to-day the effort is to "humanize war" before we can become wise and strong enough to abolish it. No social device that the imagination can conceive could be so well fitted to protect motherhood, in an age before justice could give power of self-protection, as was that of the patriarchal family. The religious aspect of ancestor-worship, the political aspect of the building up of great families from which the state could derive its power and the economic necessity of having the industrial system develop more highly all vocations, combined in the patriarchal system to make the family the main expression of social order and the chief heir of social privilege. It seems apparent, therefore, that a socially delegated power of absolute control by the father was highly useful in the period when the state was growing, and the school was separating itself from the hearth-stone, and the economic system was changing from barter to the complicated exchange of the present time, and religion itself was merging its ideals from the innumerable private ceremonials of noble families into the worship of one chief, emperor, or despot who must receive the homage of all, and so on to the incarnation of divine power in one King and Lord of Heaven. "Order" is not only, as we were once told, "Heaven's first law," but social order, human experience declares, comes before the recognition of equality of personal rights within that order. The great lady of the Middle Ages who begged of her King a "new Lord" within a month after the death of her husband because her "lands were being taken and her estate defrauded by hostile lords who surrounded her castle," and only a husband for herself, a new father for her children and a new owner for the inherited property could protect from this robbery, realized the social advantages of the patriarchal system in appropriate social conditions.