If the father could
subdue his own feelings, he might escape, though not the censure, at
least the chastisement of the laws; and the Roman Empire was stained
with the blood of infants, till such murders were included by
Valentinian and his colleagues in the letter and spirit of the Cornelian
law. The lessons of jurisprudence and Christianity had been insufficient
to eradicate this inhuman practice, till their gentle influence was
fortified by the terrors of capital punishment.

Experience has proved that savage are the tyrants of the female sex, and
that the condition of women is usually softened by the refinements of
social life. In the hope of a robust progeny, Lycurgus had delayed the
season of marriage: it was fixed by Numa at the tender age of twelve
years, that the Roman husband might educate to his will a pure and
obedient virgin. According to the custom of antiquity, he bought his
bride of her parents, and she fulfilled the _coemption_ by purchasing,
with three pieces of copper, a just introduction to his house and
household deities. A sacrifice of fruits was offered by the pontiffs in
the presence of ten witnesses; the contracting parties were seated on
the same sheepskin; they tasted a salt-cake of _far_ or rice; and this
confarreation, which denoted the ancient food of Italy, served as an
emblem of their mystic union of mind and body.

But this union on the side of the woman was rigorous and unequal; and
she renounced the name and worship of her father's house to embrace a
new servitude, decorated only by the title of adoption: a fiction of the
law, neither rational nor elegant, bestowed on the mother of a family
(her proper appellation) the strange characters of sister to her own
children, and of daughter to her husband or master, who was invested
with the plenitude of paternal power. By his judgment or caprice her
behavior was approved or censured or chastised; he exercised the
jurisdiction of life and death, and it was allowed that in the cases of
adultery or drunkenness the sentence might be properly inflicted. She
acquired and inherited for the sole profit of her lord; and so clearly
was woman defined, not as a _person_, but as a _thing_, that if the
original title were deficient, she might be claimed, like other
movables, by the _use_ and possession of an entire year. The inclination
of the Roman husband discharged or withheld the conjugal debt, so
scrupulously exacted by the Athenian and Jewish laws;