s prevailed originally in most nations, and a
reminiscence of it still exists in the village system among the Slavonic
tribes of Russia and Poland; and nearly all jurists maintain that the
testamentary right by which a man disposes of his goods after his
natural death, as well as that by which a child inherits from the
parent, is a municipal, not a natural right.

The most striking feature in the Saint-Simonian scheme was the rank and
position it assigned to woman. It asserted the absolute equality of the
sexes, and maintained that either sex is incomplete without the other.
Man is an incomplete individual without woman. Hence a religion, a
doctrine, a social institution founded by one sex alone is incomplete,
and can never be adequate to the wants of the race or a definite order.
This idea was also entertained by Frances Wright, and appears to be
entertained by all our Women's Rights folk of either sex. The old
civilization was masculine, not male and female as God made man. Hence
its condemnation. The Saint-Simonians, therefore, proposed to place by
the side of their sovereign Father at the summit of their hierarchy a
sovereign Mother. The man to be sovereign Father they found; but a woman
to be sovereign Mother, _Mere Supreme_, they found not. This caused
great embarrassment, and a split between Bazard and Enfantin. Bazard was
about marrying his daughter, and he proposed to place her marriage under
the protection of the existing French laws. Enfantin opposed his doing
so, and called it a sinful compliance with the prejudices of the world.
The Saint-Simonian society, he maintained, was a State, a kingdom within
itself, and should be governed by its own laws and its own chiefs
without any recognition of those without. Bazard persisted, and had the
marriage of his daughter solemnized in a legal manner, and for aught I
know, according to the rites of the Church. A great scandal followed.
Bazard charged Enfantin with denying Christian marriage, and with
holding loose notions on the subject. Enfantin replied that he neither
denied nor affirmed Christian marriage; that in enacting the existing
law on the subject man alone had been consulted, and he could not
recognize it as law till woman had given her consent to it. As yet the
society was only provisionally organized, inasmuch as they had not yet
found the _Mere Supreme_. The law on marriage must emanate conjointly
from the Supreme Father and the Supreme Mother, and it woul