ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how the natural family manifests itself as part of the created order, as imprinted on our natures, as the source of bountiful joy, as the fountain of new life, and as the bulwark of ordered liberty. Writing in 1869, the influential liberal thinker John Stuart Mill reemphasized the oppressive nature of the traditional family, which he described as "a school of willfullness, overbearingness, unbounded selfish-indulgence, and a doubled-dyed and idealized selfishness." Speaking for the liberal tradition, he concluded, "The family is a school of despotism." Most analysts have seen this phase as a fairly insignificant substitution of "happiness" for the pursuit of "property" found in John Locke's earlier list of mankind's inalienable rights. Before the industrial revolution, before the rise of great cities, virtually all humankind lived in family-centered economies. The Great Depression of the 1930s was as much a family crisis as an economic crisis. Both American marriage and fertility rates fell sharply in 1930s.
