heads), of a household, is the true unit to whom the idea of property attaches, because he is the unit to which we normally ascribe an individualised will, a single {304} distinctive shape of the social mind. A child has not yet such a will; a group of mature persons has more than one. The change which is passing over the household in consequence of the recognition of married women as individual wills is highly instructive on this point. They can hold and manage their own property, because it is admitted that they can have their own view of life. It is not proposed that young children should hold and manage property, because every one knows that they have no mature individualised view of life. The corporate person of the household is so far dissolved by legal recognition of its more individual components; and it is most important, theoretically, to note that its unity is not diminished by the recognition, but is raised to a higher power. 4. It might seem fanciful to say that our district is to our family as space to time; but it would suggest something of the point of view from which it is well to look at the structure of our ethical ideas. It is desirable to realise how the simplest characters of our surroundings and their necessary connections are ethically important, not because they impose anything upon us, but because they respond to something within us, or rather, to a possibility which is to be realised by the world, as in us its variety strives towards unity. Parentage, we saw, was a universal animal fact, and from it, in an experience capable of unity and permanence, springs the family household and all that it implies for our lives. One’s district, as an element of life, implies, of course, some stability--a home, not merely permanent as a {305} home, like the Scythian’s waggon, but located on some spot of earth. The nomad, we must suppose, to a great extent carries his neighbourhood--his tribe--along with him, and for that very reason the fact of neighbourhood has not its full effect on him.