ss,) to build for
the Lombards, who of course had no skill to make anything beyond a skin-
tent or a log-hall.

Then follow laws against incendiaries; a fine for damage by accidental
house-fire, if the offender have carried fire more than nine feet from
the hearth; a law against leaving a fire alight on a journey, as in the
Australian colonies now. Then laws to protect mills; important matters
in those days, being unknown to the Lombards before their entrance into
Italy.

Then laws of inheritance; on which I shall remark, that natural sons, if
free, are to have a portion of their father's inheritance; but less than
the legitimate sons: but that a natural son born of a slave remains a
slave, 'nisi pater liberum thingaverit.' This cruel law was the law of
Rome and of the Church; our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, to their honour,
held the reverse rule. 'Semper a patre, non a matre, generationis ordo
texitur.' Next, it is to be remarked, that no free woman can live in
Lombardy, or, I believe, in any Teutonic state, save under the 'mundium'
of some one. You should understand this word 'mund.' Among most of the
Teutonic races, women, slaves, and youths, at least not of age to carry
arms, were under the mund of some one. Of course, primarily the father,
head of the family, and if he died, an uncle, elder brother, &c. The
married woman was, of course, under the mund of her husband. He was
answerable for the good conduct of all under his mund; he had to pay
their fines if they offended; and he was bound, on the other hand, to
protect them by all lawful means.

This system still lingers in the legal status of women in England, for
good and evil; the husband is more or less answerable for the wife's
debts; the wife, till lately, was unable to gain property apart from her
husband's control; the wife is supposed, in certain cases of law, to act
under the husband's compulsion. All these, and many others, are relics
of the old system of mund for women; and that system has, I verily
believe, succeeded. It has called out, as no other system could have
done, chivalry in the man. It has made him feel it a duty and an honour
to protect the physically weaker sex. It has made the woman feel that
her influence, whether in the state or in the family, is to be not
physical and legal, but moral and spiritual; and that it therefore rests
on a ground really nobler and deeper than that of the man. The modern
experiments for emancipating