To-day, when so much of the community protection surrounds the family and so much in education, law, and social custom aids the wife and mother toward independent action, we are naturally horrified at the thought of life and death power of the husband and father and shocked at recital of the humiliations and privations of women's subject condition in the past. We have to remember, however, that social history seems to indicate that no system of human association has grown up and persisted without great need for some, at least, of its dominant features. The protection of wife and child, which rested for so long upon man's conception of "property" to be defended from outside attack, was a chief necessity in the rougher and coarser ages of the world. The main hindrance to social progress, however, is the tendency of forms of institutional life and methods of social relationship to persist after the need for them has ceased. This hindrance has been shown perhaps most harmfully in the retention of the patriarchal power of the father after his abdication from the throne was called for by ethical and humane considerations. A form of family relationship entrenched in institutions of age-long prestige and supported by the triple influence of money, military power, and religion, lived on after its work in securing social order had been accomplished and long after its usefulness was entirely ended. After the father-headship ceased to express the highest ideals of either sex-relationship or parental devotion, its retention produced social evils and personal wrongs which made a conscious and determined movement for "Woman's Rights" necessary, and still makes necessary close and definite attention to the equalizing of opportunities. =The Social Value of the Patriarchal Family.=--It is well, however, to consider not only the negative but the affirmative side of the social inheritance of the patriarchal family, in which has grown up and developed the ideal of monogamic marriage. What did the father gain, intellectually and ethically, from that patriarchal order, and what did he give, not only in protection of wife and children but toward their moral development in social life? The effect of unlimited power over another is generally worse for the one who wields than for the one who is subjected to that power, and the faults of men have their deepest origin in the family order that gave all its members into his complete control. Man's faults of dogmatism, of selfish domination, of sacrifice of personal life to further desired political or economic ends, have roots in the patriarchal family. Man's careless misuse of his own moral ideals for purposes of ambition was certainly fostered by this sense of ownership of women and children with legal power to use them for pleasure or profit.