Page:Future of England - Peel.djvu/95

Rh mitigated form, prevailed at one time among ourselves, with whom, for instance, the married woman was deprived, until quite recently, of some of the most essential rights of property, while the child, far into the nineteenth century, was a person scarcely known to the law. For our fathers, in winning freedom at Naseby or Worcester, forgot to bring it home.

The other flaw inherent in the human family concerns the child and the woman rather than the man. The human mammal is peculiar and perhaps unique in the unusual length of its period of childhood or dependence. The reason for this may be the complexity and potential excellence of our capacities, which need an excessive time for development and co-ordination; at any rate, we commence our lives with a period of helplessness which is abnormally long. The parent, on the other hand, has, to some degree, lost the instinct for dealing adequately with childhood, acquiring instead, in the long ascent of humanity, the compensating gift of intelligence. For instinct knows, but can learn nothing; whereas intelligence knows nothing, yet can learn all. The loss of instinct is the price which man has had to give for mind, the premium which this mortal has had to pay for immortality.

In a word, nature has left a definite gap, a wide hiatus, between infantile needs and parental knowledge.

It is evident, then, that the family possesses, as it were, an unstable constitution. For it inclines