allow.
I shall therefore endeavor to abridge what has been written by eminent
authorities, taking as a basis the late work of Lord Mackenzie and the
learned and interesting essay of Professor Maine.

The Institutes of Justinian began with the law of persons, recognizing
the distinction of ranks. All persons are capable of enjoying civil
rights, but not all in the same degree. Greater privileges are allowed
to men than to women, to freemen than to slaves, to fathers than
to children.

In the eye of the law all Roman citizens were equal wherever they lived,
whether in the capital or the provinces. Citizenship embraced both
political and civil rights. Political rights had reference to the right
of voting in the comitia; but this was not considered the essence of
citizenship, which was the enjoyment of the _connubium_, and
_commercium_. By the former the citizen could contract a valid marriage
and acquire the rights resulting from it, particularly the paternal
power; by the latter he could acquire and dispose of property.
Citizenship was acquired by birth and by manumission; it was lost when a
Roman became a prisoner of war, or had been exiled for crime, or became
a citizen of another State. An unsullied reputation was required by law
for a citizen to exercise his rights to their full extent.

The Roman jurists acknowledged all persons originally free by natural
law; and while they recognized slavery, they ascribed the power of
masters entirely to the law and custom of nations. Persons taken in war
were considered at the absolute control of their captors, and were
therefore, _de facto_, slaves; the children of a female slave followed
the condition of their mother, and belonged to her master. But masters
could manumit their slaves, who thus became Roman citizens with some
restrictions. After the emancipation of a slave, he was bound to render
certain services to his former master as patron, and if the freedman
died intestate his property reverted to his patron.

Marriage was contracted by the simple consent of the parties, though in
early times equality of condition was required. The _lex Canuleia_,
A.U.C. 309, authorized connubium between patricians and plebeians, and
the _lex Julia_, A.U.C. 757, allowed it between freedmen and freeborn.
By the _conventio in manum_, a wife passed out of her family into that
of her husband, who acquired all her property; without it, the woman
remained in the power of her father, and ret