t, in point of fact, we shall only half
understand it, if we forget that the state of things I have been
describing is likely to have existed at the very moment when Roman
society was in the first stage of its transition from its primitive
organisation in detached families. The empire of the father had indeed
received one of the earliest blows directed at it through the
recognition of Emancipation as a legitimate usage, but the law, still
considering the Patria Potestas to be the root of family connection,
persevered in looking on the emancipated children as strangers to the
rights of Kinship and aliens from the blood. We cannot, however, for a
moment suppose that the limitations of the family imposed by legal
pedantry had their counterpart in the natural affection of parents.
Family attachments must still have retained that nearly inconceivable
sanctity and intensity which belonged to them under the Patriarchal
system; and, so little are they likely to have been extinguished by
the act of emancipation, that the probabilities are altogether the
other way. It may be unhesitatingly taken for granted that
enfranchisement from the father's power was a demonstration, rather
than a severance, of affection--a mark of grace and favour accorded to
the best-beloved and most esteemed of the children. If sons thus
honoured above the rest were absolutely deprived of their heritage by
an Intestacy, the reluctance to incur it requires no farther
explanation. We might have assumed _a priori_ that the passion for
Testacy was generated by some moral injustice entailed by the rules of
Intestate succession; and here we find them at variance with the very
instinct by which early society was cemented together. It is possible
to put all that has been urged in a very succinct form. Every dominant
sentiment of the primitive Romans was entwined with the relations of
the family. But what was the Family? The Law defined it one
way--natural affection another. In the conflict between the two, the
feeling we would analyse grew up, taking the form of an enthusiasm for
the institution by which the dictates of affection were permitted to
determine the fortunes of its objects.

I regard, therefore, the Roman horror of Intestacy as a monument of a
very early conflict between ancient law and slowly changing ancient
sentiment on the subject of the Family. Some passages in the Roman
Statute-Law, and one statute in particular which limited the capacity
for i