Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/704

688 mere lust the basis of their life; it is rather their situation of dependence, whether from physical or from social and legal subjection, that has led to their acceptance of the wage-system of the family. It may be that this dependence can never be eliminated, as was polygamy. It shows itself, not only in prostitution, but also in many families, where marriage is contracted and maintained for the sake of support as well as affection.

The patria potestas covered also the children as the property of the father, including the power of sale and exposure. This was later restricted in Anglo-Saxon times by the marriage laws requiring the consent of the daughter, and by the general laws against homicide. The children were protected by the church and religion. In recent times, however, the social importance of training for citizenship and the higher ideas of human rights have led to compulsory education, factory legislation, and child-saving laws, which recognize rights of children against their parents, even to the extent of coercively finding them a new home. In the adoption of these laws and the administrative provisions for their enforcement the state has become a larger institution through the abstraction of important incidents from private property in the family, and the governmental structure has been correspondingly increased with newly devised machinery of coercion formerly controlled by the head of the family. The public-school system is held in law to be a branch of the family, the teachers and authorities standing in loco parentis; yet this system is at the same time a branch of the state. The state has here interfered in the private ordering of the household by taking the child from its parents for one-third of its waking hours, and has introduced order and system into the training of children, together with the assertion of rights on their part. The family becomes thereby less a coercive institution, where the children serve their parents, and more a spiritual and psychic association of parent and child based on persuasion. A more searching interference on the part of the state, together with a new set of governmental organizations for its enforcement, is found in the boards of children's guardians, the societies for the prevention of cruelty to children, orphans' asylums, state