tive 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 years 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acquisitions of soldiers on service were withdrawn from the operation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 Quasi-castrense 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
c