Ancient Law
by Henry Maine
1861


Chapter 5

Primitive Society and Ancient Law

    The necessity of submitting the subject of jurisprudence to
scientific treatment has never been entirely lost sight of in
modern times, and the essays which the consciousness of this
necessity has produced have proceeded from minds of very various
calibre, but there is not much presumption, I think, in asserting
that what has hitherto stood in the place of a science has for
the most part been a set of guesses, those very guesses of the
Roman lawyers which were examined in the two preceding chapters.
A series of explicit statements, recognising and adopting these
conjectural theories of a natural state, and of a system of
principles congenial to it, has been continued with but brief
interruption from the days of their inventors to our own. They
appear in the annotations of the Glossators who founded modern
jurisprudence, and in the writings of the scholastic jurists who
succeeded them. They are visible in the dogmas of the canonists.
They are thrust into prominence by those civilians of marvellous
erudition, who flourished at the revival of ancient letters.
Grotius and his successors invested them not less with brilliancy
and plausibility than with practical importance. They may be read
in the introductory chapters of our own Blackstone, who has
transcribed them textually from Burlamaqui, and wherever the
manuals published in the present day for the guidance of the
student or the practitioner begin with any discussion of the
first principles of law, it always resolves itself into a
restatement of the Roman hypothesis. It is however from the
disguises with which these conjectures sometimes clothe
themselves, quite as much as from their native form, that we gain
an adequate idea of the subtlety with which they mix themselves
in human thought. The Lockeian theory of the origin of Law in a
Social Compact scarcely conceals its Roman derivation, and indeed
is only the dress by which the ancient views were rendered more
attractive to a particular generation of the moderns; but on the
other hand the theory of Hobbes on the same subject was purposely
devised to repudiate the reality of a law of nature as conceived
by the Romans and their disciples. Yet these two theories, which
long divided the reflecting politicians of England into hostile
camps, resemble each other strictly in their fundamental
assumption of a non-historic, unverifiable, condition of the
race. Their authors differed as to the characteristics of the
prae-social state, and as to the nature of the abnormal action by
which men lifted themselves out of it into that social
organisation with which alone we are acquainted, but they agreed
in thinking that a great chasm separated man in his primitive
condition from man in society, and this notion we cannot doubt
that they borrowed, consciously or unconsciously, from the
Romans. If indeed the phenomena of law be regarded in the way in
which these theorists regarded them -- that is, as one vast
complex whole  -- it is not surprising that the mind should often
evade the task it has set to itself by falling back on some
ingenious conjecture which (plausibly interpreted) will seem to
reconcile everything, or else that it should sometimes abjure in
despair the labour of systematization. 
    From the theories of jurisprudence which have the same
speculative basis as the Roman doctrine two of much celebrity
must be excepted. The first of them is that associated with the
great name of Montesquieu. Though there are some ambiguous
expressions in the early part of the Esprit des Lois, which seem
to show its writer's unwillingness to break quite openly with the
views hitherto popular the general drift of the book is certainly
to indicate a very different conception of its subject from any
which had been entertained before. It has often been noticed
that, amidst the vast variety of examples which, in its immense
width of survey, it sweeps together from supposed systems of
jurisprudence, there is an evident anxiety to thrust into
especial prominence those manners and institutions which astonish
the civilised reader by their uncouthness, strangeness, or
indecency. The inference constancy suggested is, that laws are
the creatures of climate, local situation, accident, or imposture
-- the fruit of any causes except those which appear to operate
with tolerable constancy. Montesquieu seems, in fact, to have
looked on the nature of man as entirely plastic, as passively
reproducing the impressions, and submitting implicitly to the
impulses, which it receives from without. And here no doubt lies
the error which vitiates his system as a system. He greatly
underrates the stability of human nature. He pays little or no
regard to the inherited qualities of the race, those qualities
which each generation receives from its predecessors, and
transmits but slightly altered to the generation which follows
it. It is quite true, indeed, that no complete account can be
given of social phenomena, and consequently of laws, till due
allowance has been made for those modifying causes which are
noticed in the Esprit des Lois; but their number and their force
appear to have been overestimated by Montesquieu. Many of the
anomalies which he parades have since been shown to rest on false
report or erroneous construction, and of those which remain not a
few prove the permanence rather than the variableness of maw's
nature, since they are relics of older stages of the race which
have obstinately defied the influences that have elsewhere had
effect. The truth is that the stable part of our mental, moral,
and physical constitution is the largest part of it, and the
resistance it opposes to change is such that, though the
variations of human society in a portion of the world are plain
enough, they are neither so rapid nor so extensive that their
amount, character, and general direction cannot be ascertained.
An approximation to truth may be all that is attainable with our
present knowledge, but there is no reason for thinking that is so
remote, or (what is the same thing) that it requires so much
future correction, as to be entirely useless and uninstructive. 
    The other theory which has been adverted to is the historical
theory of Bentham. This theory which is obscurely (and, it might
even be said, timidly) propounded in several parts of Bentham's
works is quite distinct from that analysis of the conception of
law which he commenced in the "Fragment on Government," and which
was more recently completed by Mr John Austin. The resolution of
a law into a command of a particular nature, imposed under
special conditions, does not affect to do more than protect us
against a difficulty -- a most formidable one certainly -- of
language. The whole question remains open as to the motives of
societies in imposing. these commands on themselves, as to the
connexion of these commands with each other, and the nature of
their dependence on those which preceded them, and which they
have superseded. Bentham suggests the answer that societies
modify, and have always modified, their laws according to
modifications of their views of general expediency. It is
difficult to say that this proposition is false, but it certainly
appears to be unfruitful. For that which seems expedient to a
society, or rather to the governing part of it, when it alters a
rule of law is surely the same thing as the object, whatever it
may be, which it has in view when it makes the change. Expediency
and the greatest good are nothing more than different names for
the impulse which prompts the modification; and when we lay down
expediency as the rule of change in law or opinion, all we get by
the proposition is the substitution of an express term for a term
which is necessarily implied when we say that a change takes
place. 
    There is such wide-spread dissatisfaction with existing
theories of jurisprudence, and so general a conviction that they
do not really solve the questions they pretend to dispose of, as
to justify the suspicion that some line of inquiry necessary to a
perfect result has been incompletely followed or altogether
omitted by their authors. And indeed there is one remarkable
omission with which all these speculations are chargeable, except
perhaps those of Montesquieu. They take no account of what law
has actually been at epochs remote from the particular period at
which they made their appearance. Their originators carefully
observed the institutions of their own age and civilisation, and
those of other ages and civilisations with which they had some
degree of intellectual sympathy, but, when they turned their
attention to archaic states of society which exhibited much
superficial difference from their own, they uniformly ceased to
observe and began guessing. The mistake which they committed is
therefore analogous to the error of one who, in investigating the
laws of the material universe, should commence by contemplating
the existing physical world as a whole, instead of beginning with
the particles which are its simplest ingredients. One does not
certainly see why such a scientific solecism should be more
defensible in jurisprudence than in any other region of thought.
It would seem antecedently that we ought to commence with the
simplest social forms in a state as near as possible to their
rudimentary condition. In other words, if we followed the course
usual in such inquiries, we should penetrate as far up as we
could in the history of primitive societies. The phenomena which
early societies present us with are not easy at first to
understand, but the difficulty of grappling with them bears no
proportion to the perplexities which beset us in considering the
baffling entanglement of modern social organisation. It is a
difficulty arising from their strangeness and uncouthness, not
from their number and complexity. One does not readily get over
the surprise which they occasion when looked at from a modern
point of view; but when that is surmounted they are few enough
and simple enough. But even if they gave more trouble than they
do, no pains would be wasted in ascertaining the germs out of
which has assuredly been unfolded every form of moral restraint
which controls our actions and shapes our conduct at the present
moment. 
    The rudiments of the social state, so far as they are known
to us at all, are known through testimony of three sorts accounts
by contemporary observers of civilisations less advanced than
their own, the records which particular races have preserved
conceding their primitive history, and ancient law. The first
kind of evidence is the best we could have expected. As societies
do not advance concurrently, but at different rates of progress,
there have been epochs at which men trained to habits of
methodical observation have really been in a position to watch
and describe the infancy of mankind. Tacitus made the most of
such an opportunity; but the Germany, unlike most celebrated
classical books, has not induced others to follow the excellent
example set by its author, and the amount of this sort of
testimony which we possess is exceedingly small. The lofty
contempt which a civilised people entertains for barbarous
neighbours has caused a remarkable negligence in observing
therein, and this carelessness has been aggravated at times by
fear, by religious prejudice, and even by the use of these very
terms -- civilisation and barbarism -- which convey to most
persons the impression of a difference not merely in degree but
in kind. Even the Germany has been suspected by some critics of
sacrificing fidelity to poignancy of contrast and picturesqueness
of narrative. Other histories too, which have been handed down to
us among the archives of the people to whose infancy they relate,
have been thought distorted by the pride of race or by the
religious sentiment of a newer age. It is important then to
observe that these suspicions, whether groundless or rational, do
not attach to a great deal of archaic law. Much of the old law
which has descended to us was preserved merely because it was
old. Those who practised and obeyed it did not pretend to
understand it; and in some cases they even ridiculed and despised
it. They offered no account of it except that it had come down to
them from their ancestors. If we confine our attention, then, to
those fragments of ancient institutions which cannot reasonably
be supposed to have been tampered with, we are able to gain a
clear conception of certain great characteristic of the society
to which they originally belonged. Advancing a step further, we
can apply our knowledge to systems of law which, like the Code of
Menu, are as a whole of suspicious authenticity; and, using the
key we have obtained, we are in a position to discriminate those
portions of them which are truly archaic from those which have
been affected by the prejudices, interests, or ignorance of the
compiler. It will at least be acknowledged that, if the materials
for this process are sufficient, and if the comparisons be
accurately executed, the methods followed are as little
objectionable as those which have led to such surprising results
in comparative philology. 
    The effect of the evidence derived from comparative
jurisprudence is to establish that view of the primeval condition
of the human race which is known as the Patriarchal Theory. There
is no doubt, of course, that this theory was originally based on
the Scriptural history of the Hebrew patriarchs in Lower Asia;
but, as has been explained already, its connexion with Scripture
rather militated than otherwise against its reception as a
complete theory, since the majority of the inquirers who till
recently addressed themselves with most earnestness to the
colligation of social phenomena, were either influenced by the
strongest prejudice against Hebrew antiquities or by the
strongest desire to construct their system without the assistance
of religious records. Even now there is perhaps a disposition to
undervalue these accounts, or rather to decline generalising from
them, as forming part of the traditions of a Semitic people. It
is to be noted, however, that the legal testimony comes nearly
exclusively from the institutions of societies belonging to the
Indo-European stock, the Romans, Hindoos, and Sclavonians
supplying the greater part of it; and indeed the difficulty at
the present stage of the inquiry, is to know where to stop, to
say of what races of men it is not allowable to lay down that the
society in which they are united was originally organised on the
patriarchal. model. The chief lineaments of such a society, as
collected from the early chapters in Genesis, I need not attempt
to depict with any minuteness, both because they are familiar to
most of us from our earliest childhood, and because, from the
interest once attaching to the controversy which takes its name
from the debate between Locke and Filmer, they fill a whole
chapter, though not a very profitable one, in English literature.
The points which lie on the surface of the history are these: --
The eldest male parent the eldest ascendant -- is absolutely
supreme in his household. His dominion extends to life and death,
and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over
his slaves; indeed the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to
differ in little beyond the higher capacity which the child in
blood possesses of becoming one day the head of a family himself.
The flocks and herds of the children are the flocks and herds of
the father, and the possessions of the parent, which he holds in
a representative rather than in a proprietary character, are
equally divided at his death among his descendants in the first
degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share under
the name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no
hereditary advantage beyond an honorary precedence. A less
obvious inference from the Scriptural accounts is that they seem
to plant us on the traces of the breach which is first effected
in the empire of the parent. The families of Jacob and Esau
separate and form two nations; but the families of Jacob's
children hold together and become a people. This looks like the
immature germ of a state or commonwealth, and of an order of
rights superior to the claims of family relation. 
    If I were attempting for the more special purposes of the
jurist to express compendiously the characteristics of the
situation in which mankind disclose themselves at the dawn of
their history, I should be satisfied to quote a few verses from
the Odyssee of Homer : 


"They have neither assemblies for consultation nor themistes, but
every one exercises jurisdiction over his wives and his children,
and they pay no regard to one another." These lines are applied
to the Cyclops, and it may not perhaps be an altogether fanciful
idea when I suggest that the Cyclops is Homer's type of an alien
and less advanced civilisation; for the almost physical loathing
which a primitive community feels for men of widely different
manners from its own usually expresses itself by describing them
as monsters, such as giants, or even (which is almost always the
case in Oriental mythology) as demons. However that may be, the
verses condense in themselves the sum of the hints which are
given us by legal antiquities. Men are first seen distributed in
perfectly insulated groups, held together by obedience to the
parent. Law is the parent's word, but it is not yet in the
condition of those themistes which were analysed in the first
chapter of this work. When we go forward to the state of society
in which these early legal conceptions show themselves as formed,
we find that they still partake of the mystery and spontaneity
which must have seemed to characterise a despotic father's
commands, but that at the same time, inasmuch as they proceed
from a sovereign, they presuppose a union of family groups in
some wider organisation. The next question is, what is the nature
of this union and the degree of intimacy which it involves. It is
just here that archaic law renders us one of the greatest of its
services and fills up a gap which otherwise could only have been
bridged by conjecture. It is full, in all its provinces, of the
clearest indications that society in primitive times was not what
it is assumed to be at present, a collection of individuals. In
fact, and in the view of the men who composed it, it was an
aggregation of families. The contrast may be most forcibly
expressed by saying that the unit of an ancient society was the
Family, of a modern society the Individual. We must be prepared
to find in ancient law all the consequences of this difference.
It is so framed as to be adjusted to a system of small
independent corporations. It is therefore scanty because it is
supplemented by the despotic commands of the heads of households.
It is ceremonious, because the transactions to which it pays
regard. resemble international concerns much more than the quick
play of intercourse between individuals. Above all it has a
peculiarity of which the full importance cannot be shown at
present. It takes a view of life whol1y unlike any which appears
in developed jurisprudence. Corporations never die, and
accordingly primitive law considers the entities with which it
deals, i.e. the patriarchal or family groups, as perpetual and
inextinguishable. This view is closely allied to the peculiar
aspect under which, in very ancient times, moral attributes
present themselves. The moral elevation and moral debasement of
the individual appear to be confounded with, or postponed to, the
merits and offences of the group to which the individual belongs.
If the community sins, its guilt is much more than the sum of the
offences committed by its members; the crime is a corporate act.
and extends in its consequences to many more persons than have
shared in its actual perpetration. If, on the other hand. the
individual is conspicuously guilty, it is his children, his
kinsfolk, his tribesmen, or his fellow-citizens, who suffer with
him, and sometimes for him. It thus happens that the ideas of
moral responsibility and retribution often seem to be more
clearly realised at very ancient than at more advanced periods,
for, as the family group is immortal, and its liability to
punishment indefinite, the primitive mind is not perplexed by the
questions which become troublesome as soon as the individual is
conceived as altogether separate from the group. One step in the
transition from the ancient and simple view of the matter to the
theological or metaphysical explanations of later days is marked
by the early Greek notion of an inherited curse. The bequest
received by his posterity from the original criminal was not a
liability to punishment, but a liability to the commission of
fresh offences which drew with them a condign retribution; and
thus the responsibility of the family was reconciled with the
newer phase of thought which limited the consequences of crime to
the person of the actual delinquent.
    It would be a very simple explanation of the origin of
society if we could base a general conclusion on the hint
furnished us by the Scriptural example already adverted to, and
could suppose that communities began to exist wherever a family
held together instead of separating at the death of its
patriarchal chieftain. In most of the Greek states and in Rome
there long remained the vestiges of an ascending series of groups
out of which the State was at first constituted. The Family,
House, and Tribe of the Romans may be taken as the type of them,
and they are so described to us that we can scarcely help
conceiving them as a system of concentric circles which have
gradually expanded from the same point. The elementary group is
the Family, connected by common subjection to the highest male
ascendant. The aggregation of Families forms the Gens or House.
The aggregation of Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation of
Tribes constitutes the Commonwealth. Are we at liberty to follow
these indications, and to lay down that the commonwealth is a
collection of persons united by common descent from the
progenitor of an original family? Of this we may at least be
certain, that all ancient societies regarded themselves as having
proceeded from one original stock, and even laboured under an
incapacity for comprehending any reason except this for their
holding together in political union. The history of political
ideas begins, in fact, with the assumption that kinship in blood
is the sole possible ground of community in political functions;
nor is there any of those subversions of feeling, which we term
emphatically revolutions, so startling and so complete as the
change which is accomplished when some other principle -- such as
that, for instance, of local contiguity -- establishes itself for
the first time as the basis of common political action. It may be
affirmed then of early commonwealths that their citizens
considered all the groups in which they claimed membership to be
founded on common lineage. What was obviously true of the Family
was believed to be true first of the House, next of the Tribe,
lastly of the State. And yet we find that along with this belief,
or, if we may use the word, this theory, each community preserved
records or traditions which distinctly showed that the
fundamental assumption was false. Whether we look to the Greek
states, or to Rome, or to the Teutonic aristocracies in Ditmarsh
which furnished Niebuhr with so many valuable illustrations, or
to the Celtic clan associations, or to that strange social
organisation of the Sclavonic Russians and Poles which has only
lately attracted notice, everywhere we discover traces of
passages in their history when men of alien descent were admitted
to, and amalgamated with, the original brotherhood. Adverting to
Rome singly, we perceive that the primary group, the Family, was
being constantly adulterated by the practice of adoption, while
stories seem to have been always current respecting the exotic
extraction of one of the original Tribes and concerning a large
addition to the houses made by one of the early kings. The
composition of the state, uniformly assumed to be natural, was
nevertheless known to be in great measure artificial. This
conflict between belief or theory and notorious fact is at first
sight extremely perplexing; but what it really illustrates is the
efficiency with which Legal Fictions do their work in the infancy
of society. The earliest and most extensively employed of legal
fictions was that which permitted family relations to be created
artificially, and there is none to which I conceive mankind to be
more deeply indebted. If it had never existed, I do not see how
any one of the primitive groups, whatever were their nature,
could have absorbed another, or on what terms any two of them
could have combined, except those of absolute superiority on one
side and absolute subjection on the other. No doubt, when with
our modern ideas we contemplate the union of independent
communities, we can suggest a hundred modes of carrying it out,
the simplest of all being that the individuals comprised in the
coalescing groups shall vote or act together according to local
propinquity. but the idea that a number of persons should
exercise political rights in common simply because they happened
to live within the same topographical limits was utterly strange
and monstrous to primitive antiquity. The expedient which in
those times commanded favour was that the incoming population
should feign themselves to be descended from the same stock as
the people on whom they were engrafted; and it is precisely the
good faith of this fiction, and the closeness with which it
seemed to imitate reality, that we cannot now hope to understand.
One circumstance, however, which it is important to recollect, is
that the men who formed the various political groups were
certainly in the habit of meeting together periodically, for the
purpose of acknowledging and consecrating their association by
common sacrifices. Strangers amalgamated with the brotherhood
were doubtless admitted to these sacrifices; and when that was
once done we can believe that it seemed equally easy, or not more
difficult, to conceive them as sharing in the common lineage. The
conclusion then which is suggested by the evidence is, not that
all early societies were formed by descent from the same
ancestor, but that all of them which had any permanence and
solidity either were so descended or assumed that they were. An
indefinite number of causes may have shattered the primitive
groups, but wherever their ingredients recombined, it was on the
model or principle of an association of kindred. Whatever were
the fact, all thought, language, and law adjusted themselves to
the assumption. But though all this seems to me to be established
with reference to the communities with whose records we are
acquainted, the remainder of their history sustains the position
before laid down as to the essentially transient and terminable
influence of the most powerful Legal Fictions. At some point of
time -- probably as soon as they felt themselves strong enough to
resist extrinsic pressure -- all these states ceased to recruit
themselves by factitious extensions of consanguinity. They
necessarily, therefore, became Aristocracies, in all cases where
a fresh population from any cause collected around them which
could put in no claim to community of origin. Their sternness in
maintaining the central principle of a system under which
political rights were attainable on no terms whatever except
connexion in blood, real or artificial, taught their inferiors
another principle, which proved to be endowed with a far higher
measure of vitality. This was the principle of local contiguity
now recognised everywhere as the condition of community in
political functions. A new set of political ideas came at once
into existence, which, being those of ourselves, our
contemporaries, and in great measure of our ancestors, rather
obscure our perception of the older theory which they vanquished
and dethroned. 
    The Family then is the type of an archaic society in all the
modifications which it was capable of assuming; but the family
here spoken of is not exactly the family as understood by a
modern. In order to reach the ancient conception we must give to
our modern ideas an important extension and an important
limitation. We must look on the family as constantly enlarged by
the absorption of strangers within its circle, and we must try to
regard the fiction of adoption as so closely simulating the
reality of kinship that neither law nor opinion makes the
slightest difference between a real and an adoptive connexion. On
the other hand, the persons theoretically amalgamated into a
family by their common descent are practically held together by
common obedience to their highest living ascendant, the father,
grandfather, or great-grandfather. The patriarchal authority of a
chieftain is as necessary an ingredient in the notion of the
family group as the fact (or assumed fact) of its having sprung
from his loins; and hence we must understand that if there be any
persons who, however truly included in the brotherhood by virtue
of their blood-relationship, have nevertheless de facto withdrawn
themselves from the empire of its ruler, they are always, in the
beginnings of law, considered as lost to the family. It is this
patriarchal aggregate -- the modern family thus cut down on one
side and extended on the other which meets us on the threshold of
primitive jurisprudence. Older probably than the State, the
Tribe, and the House, it left traces of itself on private law
long after the House and the Tribe had been forgotten, and long
after consanguinity had ceased to be associated with the
composition of States. It will be found to have stamped itself on
all the great departments of jurisprudence, and may be detected,
I think, as the true source of many of their most important and
most durable characteristics. At the outset, the peculiarities of
law in its most ancient state lead us irresistibly to the
conclusion that it took precisely the same view of the family
group which is taken of individual men by the systems of rights
and duties now prevalent throughout Europe. There are societies
open to our observation at this very moment whose laws and usages
can scarcely be explained unless they are supposed never to have
emerged from this primitive condition; but in communities more
fortunately circumstanced the fabric of jurisprudence fell
gradually to pieces, and if we carefully observe the
disintegration we shall perceive that it took place principally
in those portions of each system which were most deeply affected
by the primitive conception of the family. In one all-important
instance, that of the Roman law, the change was effected so
slowly, that from epoch to epoch we can observe the line and
direction which it followed, and can even give some idea of the
ultimate result to which it was tending. And, in pursuing this
last inquiry, we need not suffer ourselves to be stopped by the
imaginary barrier which separates the modern from the ancient
world. For one effect of that mixture of refined Roman law with
primitive barbaric usage, which is known to us by the deceptive
name of feudalism, was to revive many features of archaic
jurisprudence which had died out of the Roman world, so that the
decomposition which had seemed to be over commenced again, and to
some extent is still proceeding. 
    On a few systems of law the family organisation of the
earliest society has left a plain and broad mark in the lifelong
authority of the Father or other ancestor over the person and
property of his descendants, an authority which we may
conveniently call by its later Roman name of Patria Potestas. No
feature of the rudimentary associations of mankind is deposed to
by a greater amount of evidence than this, and yet none seems to
have disappeared so generally and so rapidly from the usages of
advancing communities. Gaius, writing under the Antonines,
describes the institution as distinctively Roman. It is true
that, had he glanced across the Rhine or the Danube to those
tribes of barbarians which were exciting the curiosity of some
among his contemporaries, he would have seen examples of
patriarchal power in its crudest form; and in the far East a
branch of the same ethnical stock from which the Romans sprang
was repeating their Patria Potestas in some of its most technical
incidents. But among the races understood to be comprised within
the Roman empire, Gaius could find none which exhibited an
institution resembling the Roman "Power of the Father," except
only the Asiatic Galatae. There are reasons, indeed, as it seems
to me, why the direct authority of the ancestor should, in the
greater number of progressive societies, very shortly assume
humbler proportions than belonged to it in their earliest state.
The implicit obedience of rude men to their parent is doubtless a
primary fact, which it would be absurd to explain away altogether
by attributing to them any calculation of its advantages; but, at
the same time, if it is natural in the sons to obey the father,
it is equally natural that they should look to him for superior
strength or superior wisdom. Hence, when societies are placed
under circumstances which cause an especial value to be attached
to bodily and mental vigour, there is an influence at work which
tends to confine the Patria Potestas to the cases where its
possessor is actually skilful and strong. When we obtain our
first glimpse of organised Hellenic society, it seems as if
supereminent wisdom would keep alive the father's power in
Persons whose bodily strength had decayed; but the relations of
Ulysses and Laertes in the Odyssee appear to show that, where
extraordinary valour and sagacity were united in the son, the
father in the decrepitude of age was deposed from the headship of
the family. In the mature Greek jurisprudence, the rule advances
a few steps on the practice hinted at in the Homeric literature;
and though very many traces of stringent family obligation
remain, the direct authority of the parent is limited, as in
European codes, to the nonage or minority of the children, or, in
other words, to the period during which their mental and physical
inferiority may always be presumed. The Roman law, however, with
its remarkable tendency to innovate on ancient usage only just so
far as the exigency of the commonwealth may require, preserves
both the primeval institution and the natural limitation to which
I conceive it to have been subject. In every relation of life in
which the collective community might have occasion to avail
itself of his wisdom and strength, for all purposes of counsel or
of war, the filius familias, or Son under Power, was as free as
his father. It was a maxim of Roman jurisprudence that the Patria
Potestas did not extend to the Jus Publicum. Father and son voted
together in the city, and fought side by side in the field;
indeed, the son, as general, might happen to command the father,
or, as magistrate, decide on his contracts and punish his
delinquencies. But in all the relations created by Private Law;
the son lived under a domestic despotism which, considering the
severity it retained to the last, and the number of centuries
through which it endured, constitutes one of the strangest
problems in legal history. 
    The Patria Potestas of the Romans, which is necessarily our
type of the primeval paternal authority, is equally difficult to
understand as an institution of civilised life, whether we
consider its incidence on the person or its effects on property.
It is to be regretted that a chasm which exists in its history
cannot be more completely filled. So far as regards the person,
the parent, when our information commences, has over his children
the jus vitae necisque, the power of life and death, and a
fortiori of uncontrolled corporal chastisement; he can modify
their personal condition at pleasure; he can give a wife to his
son; he can give his daughter in marriage; he can divorce his
children of either sex; he can transfer them to another family by
adoption; and he can sell them. Late in the Imperial period we
find vestiges of all these powers, but they are reduced within
very narrow limits. The unqualified right of domestic
chastisement has become a right of bringing domestic offences
under the cognisance of the civil magistrate; the privilege of
dictating marriage has declined into a conditional veto; the
liberty of selling has been virtually abolished, and adoption
itself, destined to lose almost all its ancient importance in the
reformed system of Justinian, can no longer be effected without
the assent of the child transferred to the adoptive parentage. In
short, we are brought very close to the verge of the ideas which
have at length prevailed in the modern world. But between these
widely distant epochs there is an interval of obscurity, and we
can only guess at the causes which permitted the Patria Potestas
to last as long as it did by rendering it more tolerable than it
appears. The active discharge of the most important among the
duties which the son owed to the state must have tempered the
authority of his parent if they did not annul it. We can readily
persuade ourselves that the paternal despotism could not be
brought into play without great scandal against a man of full age
occupying a high civil office. During the earlier history,
however, such cases of practical emancipation would be rare
compared with those which must have been created by the constant
wars of the Roman republic. The military tribune and the private
soldier who were in the field three-quarters of a year during the
earlier contests, at a later period the proconsul in charge of a
province, and the legionaries who occupied it, cannot have had
practical reason to regard themselves as the slaves of a despotic
master; and all these avenues of escape tended constantly to
multiply themselves. Victories led to conquests, conquests to
occupations; the mode of occupation by colonies was exchanged for
the system of occupying provinces by standing armies. Each step
in advance was a call for the expatriation of more Roman citizens
and a fresh draft on the blood of the failing Latin race. We may
infer, I think, that a strong sentiment in favour of the
relaxation of the Patria Potestas had become fixed by the time
that the pacification of the world commenced on the establishment
of the Empire. The first serious blows at the ancient institution
are attributed to the earlier Caesars, and some isolated
interferences of Trajan and Hadrian seem to have prepared the
ground for a series of express enactments which, though we cannot
always determine their dates, we know to have limited the
father's powers on the one hand, and on the other to have
multiplied facilities for their voluntary surrender. The older
mode of getting rid of the Potestas, by effecting a triple sale
of the son's person, is evidence, I may remark, of a very early
feeling against the unnecessary prolongation of the powers. The
rule which declared that the son should be free after having been
three times sold by his father seems to have been originally
meant to entail penal consequences on a practice which revolted
even the imperfect morality of the primitive Roman. But even
before the publication of the Twelve Tables it had been turned,
by the ingenuity of the jurisconsults, into an expedient for
destroying the parental authority wherever the father desired
that it should cease. 
    Many of the causes which helped to mitigate the stringency of
the father's power over the persons of his children are doubtless
among those which do not lie upon the face of history. We cannot
tell how far public opinion may have paralysed an authority which
the law conferred, or how far natural affection may have rendered
it endurable. But though the powers over the person may have been
latterly nominal, the whole tenour of the extant Roman
jurisprudence suggests that the father's rights over the son's
property were always exercised without scruple to the full extent
to which they were sanctioned by law. There is nothing to
astonish us in the latitude of these rights when they first show
themselves. The ancient law of Rome forbade the Children under
Power to hold property apart from their parent, or (we should
rather say) never contemplated the possibility of their claiming
a separate ownership. The father was entitled to take the whole
of the son's acquisitions, and to enjoy the benefit of his
contracts; without being entangled in any compensating liability.
So much as this we should expect from the constitution of the
earliest Roman society, for we can hardly form a notion of the
primitive family group unless we suppose that its members brought
their earnings of all kinds into the common stock while they were
unable to bind it by improvident individual engagements. The true
enigma of the Patria Potestas does not reside here, but in the
slowness with which these proprietary privileges of the parent
were curtailed, and in the circumstance that, before they were
seriously diminished, the whole civilised world was brought
within their sphere. No innovation of any kind was attempted till
the first year of the Empire, when the acquisitions of soldiers
on service were withdrawn from the operation of the Patria
Potestas, doubtless as part of the reward of the armies which had
overthrown the free commonwealth. Three centuries afterwards the
same immunity was extended to the earnings of persons who were in
the civil employment of the state. Both changes were obviously
limited in their application, and they were so contrived in
technical form as to interfere as little as possible with the
principle of Patria Potestas. A certain qualified and dependent
ownership had always been recognised by the Roman law in the
perquisites and savings which slaves and sons under power were
not compelled to include in the household accounts, and the
special name of this permissive property, Peculium, was applied
to the acquisitions newly relieved from Patria Potestas, which
were called in the case of soldiers Castrense Peculium, and
quasi-castrense Peculium in the case of civil servants. Other
modifications of the parental privileges followed, which showed a
less studious outward respect for the ancient principle. Shortly
after the introduction of the Quasicastrense Peculium,
Constantine the Great took away the father's absolute control
over property which his children had inherited from their mother,
and reduced it to a usufruct, Or life-interest. A few more
changes of slight importance followed in the Western Empire, but
the furthest point reached was in the East, under Justinian, who
enacted that unless the acquisitions of the child were derived
from the parent's own property, the parent's rights over them
should not extend beyond enjoying their produce for the period of
his life. Even this, the utmost relaxation of the Roman Patria
Potestas, left it far ampler and severer than any analogous
institution of the modern world. The earliest modern writers on
jurisprudence remark that it was only the fiercer and ruder of
the conquerors of the empire, and notably the nations of
Sclavonic origin, which exhibited a Patria Potestas at all
resembling that which was described in the Pandects and the Code.
All the Germanic immigrants seem to have recognised a corporate
union of the family under the mund, or authority of a patriarchal
chief; but his powers are obviously only the relic of a decayed
Patria Potestas, and fell far short of those enjoyed by the Roman
father. The Franks are particularly mentioned as not having the
Roman Institution, and accordingly the old French lawyers, even
when most busily engaged in filling the interstices of barbarous
custom with rules of Roman law, were obliged to protect
themselves against the intrusion of the Potestas by the express
maxim, Puyssance de pere en France n'a lieu. The tenacity of the
Rowans in maintaining this relic of their most ancient condition
is in itself remarkable, but it is less remarkable than the
diffusion of the Potestas over the whole of a civilisation from
which it had once disappeared. While the Castrense Peculium
constituted as yet the sole exception to the father's power over
property, and while his power over his children's persons was
still extensive, the Roman citizenship, and with it the Patria
Potestas,were spreading into every corner of the empire. Every
African or Spaniard, every Gaul, Briton, or Jew, who received
this honour by gift, purchase, or inheritance, placed himself
under the Roman Law of Persons, and, though our authorities
intimate that children born before the acquisition of citizenship
could not be brought under Power against their will, children
born after it and all ulterior descendants were on the ordinary
footing of a Roman filius familias. It does not fall within the
province of this treatise to examine the mechanism of the later
Roman society but I may be permitted to remark that there is
little, foundation for the opinion which represents the
constitution of Antoninus Caracalla conferring Roman citizenship
on the whole of his subjects as a measure of small importance.
However we may interpret it, it must have enormously enlarged the
sphere of the Patria Potestas, and it seems to me that the
tightening of family relations which it effected is an agency
which ought to be kept in view more than it has been, in
accounting for the great moral revolution which was transforming
the world. 
    Before this branch of our subject is dismissed, it should be
observed that the Paterfamilias was answerable for the delicts
(or torts) of his Sons under Power. He was similarly liable for
the torts of his slaves; but in both cases he originally
possessed the singular privilege of tendering the delinquent's
person in full satisfaction of the damage. The responsibility
thus incurred on behalf of sons, coupled with the mutual
incapacity of parent and Child under Power to sue one another,
has seemed to some jurists to be best explained by the assumption
of a "unity of person" between the Paterfamilias and the
Filius-familias. In the chapter on Successions I shall attempt to
show in what sense, and to what extent, this "unity" can be
accepted as a reality. I can only say at present that these
responsibilities of the Paterfamilias, and other legal phenomena
which will be discussed hereafter, appear to me to point at
certain duties of the primitive Patriarchal chieftain which
balanced his rights. I conceive that, if he disposed absolutely
of the persons and fortune of his clansmen, this representative
ownership was coextensive with a liability to provide for all
members of the brotherhood out of the common fund. The difficulty
is to throw ourselves out of our habitual associations
sufficiently for conceiving the nature of his obligation. It was
not a legal duty, for law had not yet penetrated into the
precinct of the Family. To call it moral is perhaps to anticipate
the ideas belonging to a later stage of mental development; but
the expression "moral obligation" is significant enough for our
purpose, if we understand by it a duty semi-consciously followed
and enforced rather by instinct and habit than by definite
sanctions. 
    The Patria Potestas, in its normal shape, has not been, and,
as it seems to me, could not have been, a generally durable
institution. The proof of its former universality is therefore
incomplete so long as we consider it by itself; but the
demonstration may be carried much further by examining other
departments of ancient law which depend on it ultimately, but not
by a thread of connexion visible in all its parts or to all eyes.
Let us turn for example to Kinship, or in other words, to the
scale on which the proximity of relatives to each other is
calculated in archaic jurisprudence. Here again it will be
convenient to employ the Roman terms, Agnatic and Cognatic
relationship. Cognatic relationship is simply the inception of
kinship familiar to modern ideas; it is the relationship arising
through common descent from the same pair of married persons,
whether the descent be traced through males or females. Agnatic
relationship is something very different : it excludes a number
of persons whom we in our day should certainly consider of kin to
ourselves, and it includes many more whom we should never reckon
among our kindred. It is in truth the connexion existing between
the member of the Family, conceived as it was in the most ancient
times. The limits of this connexion are far from conterminous
with those of modern relationship. 
    Cognates then are all those persons who can.trace their.
blood to a single ancestor and ancestress; or, if we take the
strict technical meaning of the word in Roman law, they are all
who trace their blood to the legitimate marriage of a common
pair. "Cognation" is therefore a relative term, and the degree of
connexion in blood which it indicates depends on the particular
marriage which is selected as the commencement of the
calculation. If we begin with the marriage of father and mother,
Cognation will only express the relationship of brothers and
sisters; if we take that of the grandfather and grandmother, then
uncles, aunts, and their descendants will also be included in the
notion of Cognation, and following the same process a larger
number of Cognates may be continually obtained by choosing the
starting point higher and higher up in the line of ascent. All
this is easily understood by a modern; but who are the Agnates?
In the first place, they are all the Cognates who trade their
connexion exclusively through males. A table of Cognates is, of
course, formed by taking each lineal ancestor in turn and
including all his descendants of both sexes in the tabular view;
if then, in tracing the various branches of such a genealogical
table or tree, we stop whenever we come to the name of a female
and pursue that particular branch or ramification no further, all
who remain after the descendants of women have been excluded are
Agnates, and their connexion together is Agnatic Relationship. I
dwell a little on the process which is practically followed in
separating them from the Cognates, because it explains a
memorable legal maxim, "Mulier est finis familia" -- a woman is
the terminus of the family. A female name closes the branch or
twig of the genealogy in which it occur. None of the descendants
of a female are included in the primitive notion of family
relationship. 
    If the system of archaic law at which we are looking be one
which admits Adoption, we must add to the Agnate thus obtained
all persons, male or female, who have been brought into the
Family by the artificial extension of its boundaries. But the
descendants of such persons will only be Agnates, if they satisfy
the conditions which have just been described. 
    What then is the reason of this arbitrary inclusion and
exclusion? Why should a conception of Kinship, so elastic as to
include stranger brought into the family by adoption, be
nevertheless so narrow as to shut out the descendants of a female
member? To solve these questions, we must recur to the Patria
Potestas. The foundation of Agnation is not the marriage of
Father and Mother, but the authority of the Father. All persons
are Agnatically connected together who are under the same
Paternal Power, or who have been under it, or who might have been
under it if their lineal ancestor had lived long enough to
exercise his empire. In truth, in the primitive view,
Relationship is exactly limited by Patria Potestas. Where the
Potestas begins, Kinship begins; and therefore adoptive relatives
are among the kindred. Where the Potestas ends, Kinship ends; so
that a son emancipated by his father loses all rights of
Agnation. And here we have the reason why the descendants of
females are outside the limits of archaic kinship. If a woman
died unmarried, she could have no legitimate descendants. If she
married, her children fell under the Patria Potestas, not of her
Father, but of her Husband, and thus were lost to her own family.
It is obvious that the organisation of primitive societies would
have been confounded, if men had called themselves relatives of
their mother's relatives. The inference would have been that a
person might be subject to two distinct Patriae Potestates; but
distinct Patriae Potestates implied distinct jurisdictions, so
that anybody amenable to two of them at the same time would have
lived under two different dispensations. As long as the Family
was an imperium in imperio, a community within the commonwealth,
governed by its own institutions of which the parent was the
source, the limitation of relationship to the Agnates was a
necessary security against a conflict of laws in the domestic
forum. 
    The Parental Powers proper are extinguished by the death of
the Parent, but Agnation is as it were a mould which retains
their imprint after they have ceased to exist. Hence comes the
interest of Agnation for the inquirer into the history of
jurisprudence. The Powers themselves are discernible in
comparatively few monuments of ancient law, but Agnatic
Relationship, which implies their former existence, is
discoverable almost everywhere. There are few indigenous bodies
of law belonging to communities of the Indo-European stock, which
do not exhibit peculiarities in the most ancient part of their
structure which are clearly referable to Agnation. In Hindoo law,
for example, which is saturated with the primitive notions of
family dependency, kinship is entirely Agnatic, and I am informed
that in Hindoo genealogies the names of women are generally
omitted altogether. The same view of relationship pervades so
much of the laws of the races who overran the Roman Empire as
appears to have really formed Part of their primitive usage, and
we may suspect that it would have perpetuated itself even more
than it has in modern European jurisprudence, if it had not been
for the vast influence of the later Roman law on modern thought.
The Praetors early laid hold on Cognation as the natural form of
kinship, and spared no pains in purifying their system from the
older conception. Their ideas have descended to us, but still
traces of Agnation are to be seen in many of the modern rules of
succession after death. The exclusion of females and their
children from governmental functions, commonly attributed to the
usage of the Salian Franks, has certainly an agnatic origin,
being descended from the ancient German rule of succession to
allodial property. In Agnation too is to be sought the
explanation of that extraordinary rule of English Law, only
recently repealed, which prohibited brothers of the half-blood
from succeeding to one another's lands. In the Customs of
Normandy the rule applies to, by the same mother uterine brothers
only, that is, to brothers but not by the same father; and,
limited in this way, it is a strict deduction from the system of
Agnation, under which uterine brothers are no relations at all to
one another. When it was transplanted to England, the English
judges, who had no clue to its principle, interpreted it as a
general prohibition against the succession of the half-blood, and
extended it to consanguineous brothers, that is to sons of the
same father by different wives. In all the literature which
enshrines the pretended philosophy of law, there is nothing more
curious than the pages of elaborate sophistry in which Blackstone
attempts to explain and justify the exclusion of the half-blood. 
    It may be shown, I think, that the Family, as held together
by the Patria Potestas, is the nidus out of which the entire Law
of Persons has germinated. Of all the chapters of that Law the
most important is that which is concerned with the status of
Females. It has just been stated that Primitive Jurisprudence,
though it does not allow a Woman to communicate any rights of
Agnation to her descendants, includes herself nevertheless in the
Agnatic bond. Indeed, the relation of a female to the family in
which she was born is much stricter, closer, and more durable
than that which unites her male kinsmen. We have several times
laid down that early law takes notice of Families only; this is
the same thing as saying that it only takes notice of persons
exercising Patria Potestas, and accordingly the only principle on
which it enfranchises a son or grandson at the death of his
Parent, is a consideration of the capacity inherent in such son
or grandson to become himself the head of a new family and the
root of a new set of Parental Power. But a woman, of course, has
no capacity of the kind, and no title accordingly to the
liberation which it confers. There is therefore a peculiar
contrivance of archaic jurisprudence for retaining her in the
bondage of the Family for life. This is the institution known to
the oldest Roman law as the Perpetual Tutelage of Women, under
which a Female, though relieved from her Parent's authority by
his decease, continues subject through life to her nearest male
relations as her Guardians. Perpetual Guardianship is obviously
neither more nor less than an artificial prolongation of the
Patria Potestas, when for other purposes it has been dissolved.
In India, the system survives in absolute completeness, and its
operation is so strict that a Hindoo Mother frequently becomes
the ward of her own sons. Even in Europe, the laws of the
Scandinavian nations respecting women preserved it until quite
recently. The invaders of the Western Empire had it universally
among their indigenous usages, and indeed their ideas on the
subject of Guardianship, in all its forms, were among the most
retrogressive of those which they introduced into the Western
world. But from the mature Roman jurisprudence it had entirely
disappeared. We should know almost nothing about it, if we had
only the compilations of Justinian to consult; but the discovery
of the manuscript of Gaius discloses it to us at a most
interesting epoch, just when it had fallen into complete
discredit and was verging on extinction. The great jurisconsult
himself scouts the popular apology offered for it in the mental
inferiority of the female sex, and a considerable part of his
volume is taken up with descriptions of the numerous expedients,
some of them displaying extraordinary ingenuity, which the Roman
lawyers had devised for enabling Women to defeat the ancient
rules. Led by their theory of Natural Law, the jurisconsults had
evidently at this time assumed the equality of the sexes as a
principle of their code of equity. The restrictions which they
attacked were, it is to be observed, restrictions on the
disposition of property, for which the assent of the woman's
guardians was still formally required. Control of her person was
apparently quite obsolete.
    Ancient Law subordinates the woman to her blood-relations,
while a prime phenomenon of modern jurisprudence has been her
subordination to her husband. The history of the change is
remarkable. It begins far back in the annals of Rome. Anciently,
there were three modes in which marriage might be contracted
according to Roman usage, one involving a religious solemnity,
the other two the observance of certain secular formalities. By
the religious marriage or Confarreation; by the higher form of
civil marriage, which was called Coemption; and by the lower
form, which was termed Usus, the Husband acquired a number of
rights over the person and property of his wife, which were on
the whole in excess of such as are conferred on him in any system
of modern jurisprudence. But in what capacity did he acquire
them? Not as Husband, but as Father. By the Confarreation,
Coemption, and Usus, the woman passed in manum viri, that is, in
law she became the Daughter of her husband. She was included in
his Patria Potestas. She incurred all the liabilities springing
out of it while it subsisted, and surviving it when it had
expired. All her property became absolutely his, and she was
retained in tutelage after his death to the guardian whom he had
appointed by will. These three ancient forms of marriage fell,
however, gradually into disuse, so that, at the most splendid
period of Roman greatness, they had almost entirely given place
to a fashion of wedlock -- old apparently but not hitherto
considered reputable -- which was founded on a modification of
the lower form of civil marriage. Without explaining the
technical mechanism of the institution now generally popular, I
may describe it as amounting in law to little more than a
temporary deposit of the woman by her family. The rights of the
family remained unimpaired, and the lady continued in the
tutelage of guardians whom her parents had appointed and whose
privileges of control overrode, in many material respects, the
inferior authority of her husband. The consequence was that the
situation of the Roman female, whether married or unmarried,
became one of great personal and proprietary independence, for
the tendency of the later law, as I have already hinted, was to
reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of
marriage in fashion conferred on the husband no compensating
superiority. But Christianity tended somewhat from the very first
to narrow this remarkable liberty. Led at first by justifiable
disrelish for the loose practices of the decaying heathen world,
but afterwards hurried on by a passion of asceticism, the
professors of the new faith looked with disfavour on a marital
tie which was in fact the laxest the Western world has seen. The
latest Roman law, so far as it is touched by the constitutions of
the Christian Emperors, hears some marks of a reaction against
the liberal doctrines of the great Antonine jurisconsults. And
the prevalent state of religious sentiment may explain why it is
that modern jurisprudence, forged in the furnace of barbarian
conquest, and formed by the fusion of Roman jurisprudence with
patriarchal usage, has absorbed, among its rudiments, much more
than usual of those rules concerning the position of women which
belong peculiarly to an imperfect civilisation. During the
troubled era which begins modern history, and while the laws of
the Germanic and Sclavonic immigrants remained superposed like a
separate layer above the Roman jurisprudence of their provincial
subjects, the women of the dominant races are seen everywhere
under various forms of archaic guardianship, and the husband who
takes a wife from any family except his own pays a money-price to
her relations for the tutelage which they surrender to him. When
we move onwards, and the code of the middle ages has been formed
by the amalgamation of the two systems, the law relating to women
carries the stamp of its double origin. The principle of the
Roman jurisprudence is so far triumphant that unmarried females
are generally (though there are local exceptions to the rule)
relieved from the bondage of the family; but the archaic
principle of the barbarians has fixed the position of married
women, and the husband has drawn to himself in his marital
character the powers which had once belonged to his wife's male
kindred, the only difference being that he no longer purchases
his privileges. At this point therefore the modern law of Western
and Southern Europe begins to be distinguished by one of its
chief characteristic, the comparative freedom it allows to
unmarried women and widows, the heavy disabilities it imposes on
wives. It was very long before the subordination entailed on the
other sex by marriage was sensibly diminished. The principal and
most powerful solvent of the revived barbarism of Europe was
always the codified jurisprudence of Justinian, wherever it was
studied with that passionate enthusiasm which it seldom failed to
awaken. It covertly but most efficaciously undermined the customs
which it pretended merely to interpret. But the Chapter of law
relating to married women was for the most part read by the
light, not of Roman, but of Canon Law, which in no one particular
departs so widely from the spirit of the secular jurisprudence as
in the view it takes of the relations created by marriage. This
was in part inevitable, since no society which preserves any
tincture of Christian institution is likely to restore to married
women the personal liberty conferred on them by the middle Roman
law, but the proprietary disabilities of married females stand on
quite a different basis from their personal incapacities, and it
is by keeping alive and consolidating the former that the
expositors of the Canon Law have deeply injured civilisation.
There are many vestiges of a struggle between the secular and
ecclesiastical principles, but the Canon Law nearly everywhere
prevailed. In some of the French provinces married women, of a
rank below nobility, obtained all the powers of dealing with
property which Roman jurisprudence had allowed, and this local
law has been largely followed by the Code Napoleon; but the state
of the Scottish law shows that scrupulous deference to the
doctrines of the Roman jurisconsults did not always extend to
mitigating the disabilities of wives. The systems however which
are least indulgent to married women are invariably those which
have followed the Canon Law exclusively, or those which, from the
lateness of their contact with European civilisation, have never
had their archaisms weeded out. The Scandinavian laws, harsh till
lately to all females, are still remarkable for their severity to
wives. And scarcely less stringent in the proprietary
incapacities it imposes is the English Common Law, which borrows
far the greatest number of its fundamental principles from the
jurisprudence of the Canonists. Indeed, the part of the Common
Law which prescribes the legal situation of married women may
serve to give an Englishman clear notions of the great
institution which has been the principal subject of this chapter.
I do not know how the operation and nature of the ancient Patria
Potestas can be brought so vividly before the mind as by
reflecting on the prerogatives attached to the husband by the
pure English Common Law, and by recalling the rigorous
consistency with which the view of a complete legal subjection on
the part of the wife is carried by it, where it is untouched by
equity or statutes, through every department of rights, duties,
and remedies. The distance between the eldest and latest Roman
law on the subject of Children under Power may be considered as
equivalent to the difference between the Common Law and the
jurisprudence of the Court of Chancery in the rules which they
respectively apply to wives. 
    If we were to lose sight of the true origin of Guardianship
in both its forms and were to employ the common language on these
topics, we should find ourselves remarking that, while the
Tutelage of Women is an instance in which systems of archaic law
push to an extravagant length the fiction of suspended rights,
the rules which they lay down for the Guardianship of Male
Orphans are an example of a fault in precisely the opposite
direction. All such systems terminate the Tutelage of males at an
extraordinary early period. Under the ancient Roman law which may
be taken as their type, the son who was delivered from Patria
Potestas by the death of his Father or Grandfather remained under
guardianship till an epoch which for general purposes may be
described as arriving with his fifteenth year,. but the arrival
of that epoch placed him at once in the full enjoyment of
personal and proprietary independence. The period of minority
appears therefore to have been as unreasonably short as the
duration of the disabilities of women was preposterously long.
But, in point of fact, there was no element either of excess or
of shortcoming in the circumstances which gave their original
form to the two kinds of guardianship. Neither the one nor the
other of them was based on the slightest consideration of public
or private convenience. The guardianship of male orphans was no
more desired originally to shield them till the arrival of years
of discretion than the tutelage of women was intended to protect
the other sex against its own feebleness. The reason why the
death of the father delivered the son from the bondage of the
family was the son's capacity for becoming himself the head of a
new family and the founder of a new Patria Potestas; no such
capacity was possessed by the woman and therefore she was never
enfranchised. Accordingly the Guardianship of Male Orphans was a
contrivance for keeping alive the semblance of subordination to
the family of the Parent, up to the time when the child was
supposed capable of becoming a parent himself. It was a
prolongation of the Patria Potestas up to the period of bare
physical manhood. It ended with puberty, for the rigour of the
theory demanded that it should do so. Inasmuch, however, as it
did not profess to conduct the orphan ward to the age of
intellectual maturity or fitness for affairs, it was quite
unequal to the purposes of general convenience; and this the
Romans seem to have discovered at a very early stage of their
social progress. One of the very oldest monuments of Roman
legislation is the Lex Laetoria or Plaetoria which placed all
free males who were of full years and rights under the temporary
control of a new class of guardians, called Curatores, whose
sanction was required to validate their acts or contracts. The
twenty-sixth year of the young man's age was the limit of this
statutory supervision; and it is exclusively with reference to
the age of twenty-five that the terms "majority" and "minority"
are employed in Roman law. Pupilage or wardship in modern
jurisprudence had adjusted itself with tolerable regularity to
the simple principle of protection to the immaturity of youth
both bodily and mental. It has its natural termination with years
of discretion. But for protection against physical weakness and
for protection against intellectual incapacity, the Romans looked
to two different institutions, distinct both in theory and
design. The ideas attendant on both are combined in the modern
idea of guardianship. 
    The Law of Persons contains but one other chapter which can
be usefully cited for our present purpose. The legal rules by
which systems of nature jurisprudence regulate the connection of
Master and Slave, present no very distinct traces of the original
condition common to ancient societies. But there are reasons for
this exception. There seems to be something in the institution of
Slavery which has at all times either shocked or perplexed
mankind, however little habituated to reflection, and however
slightly advanced in the cultivation of its moral instincts. The
compunction which ancient communities almost unconsciously
experienced appears to have always resulted in the adoption of
some imaginary principle upon which a defence, or at least a
rationale, of slavery could be plausibly founded. Very early in
their history the Greeks explained the institution as grounded on
the intellectual inferiority of certain races and their
consequent natural aptitude for the servile condition. The
Romans, in a spirit equally characteristic, derived it from a
supposed agreement between the victor and the vanquished in which
the first stipulated for the perpetual services of his foe; and
the other gained in consideration the life which he had
legitimately forfeited. Such theories were not only unsound but
plainly unequal to the case for which they affected to account.
Still they exercised powerful influence in many ways. They
satisfied the conscience of the Master. They perpetuated and
probably increased the debasement of the Slave. And they
naturally tended to put out of sight the relation in which
servitude had originally stood to the rest of the domestic
system. The relation, though not clearly exhibited, is casually
indicated in many parts of primitive law; and more particularly
in the typical system -- that of ancient Rome. 
    Much industry and some learning have been bestowed in the
United States of America on the question whether the Slave was in
the early stages of society a recognised member of the Family
There is a sense in which an affirmative answer must certainly be
given. It is clear, from the testimony both of ancient law and of
many primeval histories, that the Slave might under certain
conditions be made the Heir, or Universal Successor, of the
Master, and this significant faculty, as I shall. explain in the
Chapter on Succession, implies that the government and
representation of the Family might, in a particular state of
circumstances, devolve on the bondman. It seems, however, to be
assumed in the American arguments on the subject that, if we
allow Slavery to have been a primitive Family institution, the
acknowledgment is pregnant with an admission of the moral
defensibility of Negro-servitude at the present moment. What then
is meant by saying that the Slave was originally included in the
Family? Not that his situation may not have been the fruit of the
coarsest motives which can actuate man. The simple wish to use
the bodily powers of another person as a means of ministering to
one's own ease or pleasure is doubtless the foundation of
Slavery, and as old as human nature. When we speak of the Slave
as anciently included in the Family, we intend to assert nothing
as to the motives of those who brought him into it or kept him
there; we merely imply that the tie which bound him to his master
was regarded as one of the same general character with that which
united every other member of the group to its chieftain. This
consequence is, in fact, carried in the general assertion already
made that the primitive ideas of mankind were unequal to
comprehending any basis of the connection inter se of
individuals, apart from the relations of family. The Family
consisted primarily of those who belonged to it by consanguinity.
and next of those who had been engrafted on it by adoption; but
there was still a third class of persons who were only joined to
it by common subjection to its head, and these were the Slaves.
The born and the adopted subjects of the chief were raised above
the Slave by the certainty that in the ordinary course of events
they would be relieved from bondage and entitled to exercise
powers of their own; but that the inferiority of the Slave was
not such as to place him outside the pale of the Family, or such
as to degrade him to the footing of inanimate property, is
clearly proved, I think, by the many traces which remain of his
ancient capacity for inheritance in the last resort. It would, of
course, be unsafe in the highest degree to hazard conjectures how
far the lot of the Slave was mitigated, in the beginnings of
society, by having a definite place reserved to him in the empire
of the Father. It is, perhaps, more probable that the son was
practically assimilated to the Slave, than that the Slave shared
any of the tenderness which in later times was shown to the son.
But it may be asserted with some confidence of advanced and
matured codes that, wherever servitude is sanctioned, the Slave
has uniformly greater advantages under systems which preserve
some memento of his earlier condition than under those which have
adopted some other theory of his civil degradation. The point of
view from which jurisprudence regards the Slave is always of
great importance to him. The Roman law was arrested in its
growing tendency to look upon him more and more as an article of
property by the theory of the Law of Nature; and hence it is
that, wherever servitude is sanctioned by institutions which have
been deeply affected by Roman jurisprudence, the servile
condition is never intolerably wretched. There is a great deal of
evidence that in those American States which have taken the
highly Romanised code of Louisiana as the basis of their
jurisprudence, the lot and prospects of the negro-population are
better in many material respects than under institutions founded
on the English Common Law, which, as recently interpreted, has no
true place for the Slave, and can only therefore regard him as a
chattel. 
    We have now examined all parts of the ancient Law of Persons
which fall within the scope of this treatise, and the result of
the inquiry is, I trust, to give additional definiteness and
precision to our view of the infancy of jurisprudence. The Civil
laws of States first make their appearance as the Themistes of a
patriarchal sovereign, and we can now see that these Themistes
are probably only a developed form of the irresponsible commands
which, in a still earlier condition of the race, the head of each
isolated household may have addressed to his wives, his children,
and his slaves. But, even after the State has been organised, the
laws have still an extremely limited application. Whether they
retain their primitive character as Themistes, or whether they
advance to the condition of Customs or Codified Texts, they are
binding not on individuals,but on Families. Ancient
jurisprudence, if a perhaps deceptive comparison may be employed,
may be likened to International Law, filling nothing, as it were,
excepting the interstices between the great groups which are the
atoms of society. In a community so situated, the legislation of
assemblies and the jurisdiction of Courts reaches only to the
heads of families, and to every other individual the rule of
conduct is the law of his home, of which his Parent is the
legislator. But the sphere of civil law, small at first, tends
steadily to enlarge itself. The agents of legal change, Fictions,
in turn to bear on the Equity, and Legislation, are brought
primeval institutions, and at every point of the progress, a
greater number of personal rights and a larger amount of property
are removed from the domestic forum to the cognisance of the
public tribunals. The ordinances of the government obtain
gradually the same efficacy in private concerns a in matters of
state, and are no longer liable to be overridden by the behests
of a despot enthroned by each hearthstone. We have in the annals
of Roman law a nearly complete history of the crumbling away of
an archaic system, and of the formation of new institutions from
the recombined materials, institutions some of which descended
unimpaired to the modern world, while others, destroyed or
corrupted by contact with barbarism in the dark ages, had again
to be recovered by mankind. When we leave this jurisprudence at
the epoch of its final reconstruction by Justinian, few traces of
archaism can be discovered in any part of it except in the single
article of the extensive powers still reserved to the living
Parent. Everywhere else principles of convenience, or of
symmetry,or of simplification -- new principles at any rate have
usurped the authority of the jejune considerations which
satisfied the conscience of ancient times. Everywhere a new
morality has displaced the canons of conduct and the reasons of
acquiescence which were in unison with the ancient usages,
because in fact they were born of them. 
    The movement of the progressive societies has been uniform in
one respect. Through all its course it has been distinguished by
the gradual dissolution of family dependency and the growth of
individual obligation in its place. The Individual is steadily
substituted for the Family, as the unit of which civil laws take
account. The advance has been accomplished at varying rates of
celerity, and there are societies not absolutely stationary in
which the collapse of the ancient organisation can only be
perceived by careful study of the phenomena they present. But,
whatever its pace, the change has not been subject to reaction or
recoil, and apparent retardations will be found to have been
occasioned through the absorption of archaic ideas and customs
from some entirely foreign source. Nor is it difficult to see
what is the tie between man and man which replaces by degrees
those forms of reciprocity in rights and duties which have their
origin in the Family. It is Contract. Starting, as from one
terminus of history, from a condition of society in which all the
relations of Persons are summed up in the relations of Family, we
seem to have steadily moved towards a phase of social order in
which all these relations arise from the free agreement of
Individuals. In Western Europe the progress achieved in this
direction has been considerable. Thus the status of the Slave has
disappeared -- it has been superseded by the contractual relation
of the servant to his mater. The status of the Female under
Tutelage, if the tutelage be understood of persons other than her
husband, has also ceased to exist; from her coming of age to her
marriage all the relations she may form are relations of
contract. So too the status of the Son under Power has no true
place in law of modern European societies. If any civil
obligation binds together the Parent and the child of full age,
it is one to which only contract gives its legal validity The
apparent exceptions are exceptions of that stamp which illustrate
the rule. The child before years of discretion, the orphan under
guardianship, the adjudged lunatic, have all their capacities and
incapacities regulated by the Law of Persons. But why? The reason
is differently expressed in the conventional language of
different systems, but in substance it is stated to the same
effect by all. The great majority of Jurists are constant to the
principle that the classes of persons just mentioned are subject
to extrinsic control on the single ground that they do not
possess the faculty of forming a judgment on their own interests;
in other words, that they are wanting in the first essential of
an engagement by Contract. 
    The word Status may be usefully employed to construct a
formula expressing the law of progress thus indicated, which,
whatever be its value, seems to me to be sufficiently
ascertained. All the forms of Status taken notice of in the Law
of Persons were derived from, and to some extent are still
coloured by, the powers and privileges anciently residing in the
Family. If then we employ Status, agreeably with the usage of the
best writers, to signify these personal conditions only, and
avoid applying the term to such conditions as are the immediate
or remote result of agreement, we may say that the movement of
the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from
Status to Contract.