ave followed the Canon
Law exclusively, or those which, from the lateness of their contact
with European civilisation, have never had their archaisms weeded out.
The Scandinavian laws, harsh till lately to all females, are still
remarkable for their severity to wives. And scarcely less stringent in
the proprietary incapacities it imposes is the English Common Law,
which borrows far the greatest number of its fundamental principles
from the jurisprudence of the Canonists. Indeed, the part of the
Common Law which prescribes the legal situation of married women may
serve to give an Englishman clear notions of the great institution
which has been the principal subject of this chapter. I do not know
how the operation and nature of the ancient Patria Potestas can be
brought so vividly before the mind as by reflecting on the
prerogatives attached to the husband by the pure English Common Law,
and by recalling the rigorous consistency with which the view of a
complete legal subjection on the part of the wife is carried by it,
where it is untouched by equity or statutes, through every department
of rights, duties, and remedies. The distance between the eldest and
latest Roman law on the subject of Children under Power may be
considered as equivalent to the difference between the Common Law and
the jurisprudence of the Court of Chancery in the rules which they
respectively apply to wives.

If we were to lose sight of the true origin of Guardianship in both
its forms and were to employ the common language on these topics, we
should find ourselves remarking that, while the Tutelage of Women is
an instance in which systems of archaic law push to an extravagant
length the fiction of suspended rights, the rules which they lay down
for the Guardianship of Male Orphans are an example of a fault in
precisely the opposite direction. All such systems terminate the
Tutelage of males at an extraordinary early period. Under the ancient
Roman law, which may be taken as their type, the son who was delivered
from Patria Potestas by the death of his Father or Grandfather
remained under guardianship till an epoch which for general purposes
may be described as arriving with his fifteenth year; but the arrival
of that epoch placed him at once in the full enjoyment of personal and
proprietary independence. The period of minority appears therefore to
have been as unreasonably short as the duration of the disabilities of
women was preposterously long.