Yet, it is important to realise, although the husband’s domestic throne has been in appearance elegantly re-covered and in substance has become worm-eaten, it still stands and still retains its ancient shape and structure.  There has never been a French Revolution in the home, and that Revolution itself, which modified society so extensively, scarcely modified the legal supremacy of the husband at all, even in France under the Code Napoleon and still less anywhere else.  Interwoven with all the new developments, and however less obtrusive it may have become, the old tradition still continues among us.  Since, also, the husband is, conventionally and in large measure really, the economic support of the home,—­the work of the wife and even actual financial contributions brought by her not being supposed to affect that convention,—­this state of things is held to be justified.

Thus when a man enters the home as a husband, to seat himself on the antique domestic throne and to play the part assigned to him of old, he is involuntarily, even unconsciously, following an ancient tradition and taking his place in a procession of husbands which began long ages before he was born.  It thus comes about that a man, even after he is married, and a husband are two different persons, so that his wife who mainly knows him as a husband may be unable to form any just idea of what he is like as a man.  As a husband he has stepped out of the path that belongs to him in the world, and taken on another part which has called out altogether different reactions, so he is sometimes a much more admirable person in one of these spheres—­whichever it may be—­than in the other.

We must not be surprised if the husband’s position has sometimes developed those qualities which from the modern point of view are the less admirable.  In this respect the sovereign husband resembles the Sovereign State.  The Sovereign State, as it has survived from Renaissance days in our modern world, may be made up of admirable people, yet as a State they are forced into an attitude of helpless egoism which nowadays fails to commend itself to the outside world, and the tendency of scientific jurists to-day is to deal very critically with the old conception of the Sovereign State.  It is so with the husband in the home.  He was thrust by ancient tradition into a position of sovereignty which impelled him to play a part of helpless egoism.  He was a celestial body in the home around which all the other inmates were revolving satellites.  The hours of rising and retiring, the times of meals and their nature and substance, all the activities of the household—­in which he himself takes little or no part—­are still arranged primarily to suit his work, his play, and his tastes.  This is an accepted matter of course, and not the result of any violent self-assertion on his part.  It is equally an accepted matter of course that the wife should be constantly occupied in keeping this little solar system in easy harmonious movement, evolving from it, if she has the skill, the music of the spheres.  She has no recognised independent personality of her own, nor even any right to go away by herself for a little change and recreation.  Any work of her own, play of her own, tastes of her own, must be strictly subordinated, if not suppressed altogether.