nothing more curious than the pages of
elaborate sophistry in which Blackstone attempts to explain and
justify the exclusion of the half-blood.

It may be shown, I think, that the Family, as held together by the
Patria Potestas, is the nidus out of which the entire Law of Persons
has germinated. Of all the chapters of that Law the most important is
that which is concerned with the status of Females. It has just been
stated that Primitive Jurisprudence, though it does not allow a Woman
to communicate any rights of Agnation to her descendants, includes
herself nevertheless in the Agnatic bond. Indeed, the relation of a
female to the family in which she was born is much stricter, closer,
and more durable than that which unites her male kinsmen. We have
several times laid down that early law takes notice of Families only;
this is the same thing as saying that it only takes notice of persons
exercising Patria Potestas, and accordingly the only principle on
which it enfranchises a son or grandson at the death of his Parent, is
a consideration of the capacity inherent in such son or grandson to
become himself the head of a new family and the root of a new set of
Parental Powers. But a woman, of course, has no capacity of the kind,
and no title accordingly to the liberation which it confers. There is
therefore a peculiar contrivance of archaic jurisprudence for
retaining her in the bondage of the Family for life. This is the
institution known to the oldest Roman law as the Perpetual Tutelage of
Women, under which a Female, though relieved from her Parent's
authority by his decease, continues subject through life to her
nearest male relations as her Guardians. Perpetual Guardianship is
obviously neither more nor less than an artificial prolongation of the
Patria Potestas, when for other purposes it has been dissolved. In
India, the system survives in absolute completeness, and its operation
is so strict that a Hindoo Mother frequently becomes the ward of her
own sons. Even in Europe, the laws of the Scandinavian nations
respecting women preserved it until quite recently. The invaders of
the Western Empire had it universally among their indigenous usages,
and indeed their ideas on the subject of Guardianship, in all its
forms, were among the most retrogressive of those which they
introduced into the Western world. But from the mature Roman
jurisprudence it had entirely disappeared. We should know almost
nothing about it, if we h