I had found the clue that I was seeking. All I had been reading now had a clear meaning for me. In my delight, I laughed aloud. I saw the egoism of the solitary male; I knew the meaning of the females’ retreat; they were guarding the young from the feared attacks of the father. I realised how the male’s unsocial conduct towards his offspring had forced the females to unite with one another. The cock’s strength, the gorgeous display of sex-charms, were powerless before this peaceful combination. He was alone, a tyrant--the destroyer of the family. But I saw, too, that his polygamous jealousy served as a means to the end of advance in progress. It was the male’s non-social conduct that had forced social conduct upon the females. And I understood that the patriarchal tyrant was just the one thing I had been looking for. My belief in mother-power had gained a new and, as I felt then in the first delight of that discovery, and as I still feel, a much surer, because a simpler and more natural foundation. Having now defined my position, and having related how such conviction came to me, let me proceed to examine the causes that would lead to the assertion of women’s power, in the aboriginal family group. From what has been said, the following conditions acting on the women, may, it is submitted, be fairly deduced. 1. In the group, which comprised the mothers, the adult daughters, and the young of both sexes, the women would live on terms of association as friendly hearth-mates. 2. The strongest factor in this association would arise from the dependence of the children upon their mothers; a dependence that was of much longer duration than among the animals, on account of the pre-eminent helplessness of the human child, which entailed a more prolonged infancy. 3. The women and their children would form the group, to which the father was attached by his sexual needs, but remained always a member apart--a kind of jealous fighting specialisation. 4. The temporary hearth-home would be the shelter of the women; and it was under this shelter that children were born and the group accumulated its members. Whether cave, or hollow tree, or some frail shelter, the home must have belonged to the women. 5. And this state would necessarily attach the mothers to the home, much more closely than the father, whose desire lay in the opposite direction of disrupting the home. Moreover this attachment always would be present and acting on the female children, who, unless captured, would remain with the mothers, while it could never arise in the case of the sons, whose fate was to be driven from the home. Such conditions must, as time went on, have profoundly modified the women’s outlook, bending their desires to a steady, settled life, conditions under which alone the germ of social organisation could develop.