t 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 life-long 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 w