ad of the house would
attach, without breach of continuity, to his successor; for, in point
of fact, they would be the rights and obligations of the family, and
the family had the distinctive characteristic of a corporation--that
it never died. Creditors would have the same remedies against the new
chieftain as against the old, for the liability being that of the
still existing family would be absolutely unchanged. All rights
available to the family would be as available after the demise of the
headship as before it--except that the Corporation would be
obliged--if indeed language so precise and technical can be properly
used of these early times--would be obliged to _sue_ under a slightly
modified name.

The history of jurisprudence must be followed in its whole course, if
we are to understand how gradually and tardily society dissolved
itself into the component atoms of which it is now constituted--by
what insensible gradations the relation of man to man substituted
itself for the relation of the individual to his family and of
families to each other. The point now to be attended to is that even
when the revolution had apparently quite accomplished itself, even
when the magistrate had in great measure assumed the place of the
Pater-familias, and the civil tribunal substituted itself for the
domestic forum, nevertheless the whole scheme of rights and duties
administered by the judicial authorities remained shaped by the
influence of the obsolete privileges and coloured in every part by
their reflection. There seems little question that the devolution of
the Universitas Juris, so strenuously insisted upon by the Roman Law
as the first condition of a testamentary or intestate succession, was
a feature of the older form of society which men's minds had been
unable to dissociate from the new, though with that newer phase it had
no true or proper connection. It seems, in truth, that the
prolongation of a man's legal existence in his heir, or in a group of
co-heirs, is neither more nor less than a characteristic of _the
family_ transferred by a fiction to _the individual_. Succession in
corporations is necessarily universal, and the family was a
corporation. Corporations never die. The decease of individual members
makes no difference to the collective existence of the aggregate body,
and does not in any way affect its legal incidents, its faculties or
liabilities. Now in the idea of a Roman universal succession all
these