“Now for the first time the man founds his home; he is the master of the domestic herd, he is the priest of sacrifice at the domestic altar; his ancestors are present in the spirit; he honours them; the house is permeated by them. In his house nothing unclean shall exist; he teaches the children propriety and dependence on the family; and the wife, at the moment when, as a bride, she crosses the threshold of her husband’s house, or is carried across it, gives up her household gods; his home is now her home. Now, at the domestic hearth, the virtues flourish--those virtues which become the preliminaries of national greatness. In the bosom of his family the man gains power, which fits him for the most important functions, whether in the life of the State or in the life of science; and a township or an agricultural community based upon such conditions constitutes the necessary foundation upon which to erect the structure of ethical, scientific, and political life. The wife passes into the background, but in the house she develops new virtues; self-sacrifice to the family, a domestic sense, joy in the home, amiability in narrower circles, are the bright sides of her influence, for the wife knows how to develop everywhere beautiful traits of character, so long as her lot is not cast amidst rude or degenerating conditions.” The most ancient form of marriage under the father-right was polygamy, as, for example, we find it described in the Old Testament. Here we have a typical picture of the patriarchal order of family. The head of the house and of the family has a principal wife for the procreation of legitimate issue, but, in addition, numerous concubines. Among the Jews, the great stress laid upon father-right gave rise to the so-called “=Leviratsehe=”--that is to say, a widowed wife was compelled to marry the brother of her deceased husband, in order that the race of the dead man should be continued. Out of this patriarchal polygamy there gradually arose =monogamic= marriage, which down to the present time--let us insist on the matter once for all--has remained an ideal, never in reality attained, either by the Greeks or Romans or in the modern civilized world. For the modern civilized marriage is mainly a production of the father-right, and stands under the dominion of “man-made” morality, which, beside monogamy, legally established and assumed to be binding, tolerates “facultative polygamy”; hence =there is here concealed an element of lying and hypocrisy which has rightly brought into discredit the modern patriarchal marriage as a conventional form among those who regard as the true ideal of marriage in the future the enduring life in common of two free personalities endowed with equal rights=.