ncerning seclusion from other peoples, the severe
regulations against foreign marriages, the poor laws, the agrarian laws,
the jubileum,--all of them provisions calculated to prevent the
accumulation of great wealth by the individual. The Jewish people were
to be kept in permanent disability ever to become the builders of a real
State. Hence it happens that the tribal organization, which rested upon
the gentile order, remained in force with them till its complete
dissolution, and continues to affect them even now.

It seems that the Latin tribes, which took a hand in the founding of
Rome, had long passed beyond the stage of the mother-right. Hence Rome
was built from the start as a State. The women that they needed they
captured, as the legend tells us, from the tribe of the Sabines, and
they called themselves after their Sabine wives,--Quirites. Even in
later years, the Roman citizens were addressed in the Forum as Quirites.
"Populus Romanus" stood for the free population of Rome in general; but
"Populus Romanus quiritium" expressed the ancestry and quality of the
Roman citizen. The Roman gens was of father-right stamp. The children
inherited as consanguineous heirs; if there were no children, the
relatives of the male line inherited; were none of these in existence,
then the property reverted to the gens. By marriage, woman lost her
right to inherit her father's property and that of his brothers. She had
stepped out of her gens: neither she nor her children could inherit from
her father or his brothers: otherwise the inheritance would be lost to
the paternal gens. The division in gentes, phratries and tribes
constituted in Rome for centuries the foundation of the military
organization, and also of the exercise of the rights of citizenship. But
with the decay of the paternal gentes and the decline of their
significance, conditions shaped themselves more favorably for woman. She
could not only inherit, but had the right to administer her own fortune.
She was, accordingly, far more favorably situated than her Greek sister.
The freer position that, despite all legal impediments, she gradually
knew how to conquer, caused the elder Cato, born 234 before our
reckoning, to complain: "If, after the example of his ancestors, every
head of a family kept his wife in proper subjection, we would not have
so much public bother with the whole sex."[18]

So long as the father lived, he held in Rome the guardianship over his
daughter,