will be invalidated. So, beyond the day when industry will be far more fruitful than at present, there will be another day and a better, when the race will be far stronger too.
Thus, as the young man's first object is to be free to go his own way, and his next is to earn for himself, and then to provide his own home, so it is with nations, or at any rate with England. In the seventeenth century she attained to freedom; in the eighteenth and nineteenth she addressed herself to industrialism; in the twentieth she will consummate these two achievements by establishing the family on the basis of health and strength.
The writers who, from Plato to Locke, and thence onwards, have discoursed upon the family, have esteemed it as the central pivot in human affairs, yet perhaps these thinkers have alike failed to lay sufficient emphasis upon two important features in what may be termed its unwritten constitution or natural structure. The first of these is that, as the family consists normally of a man in his prime and of a woman and children, the balance of sheer power inclines in favour of the man. By consequence, throughout many epochs the temptation and the tendency has been for an autocracy to arise within the bosom of this tiny state. Of this the Romans furnish the classic example, where the patria potestas, the authority of the father, reached at one time to abnormal heights. It must be confessed that a similar ascendency, though, of course, in an entirely
