ather 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 a