treated their
vanquished enemies in quite a different way from nations of a higher
stage. The men were tortured or adopted as brothers into the tribe of
the victors. The women were married or likewise adopted with their
surviving children. The human labor power at this stage does not yet
produce a considerable amount over and above its cost of subsistence.
But the introduction of cattle raising, metal industry, weaving and
finally agriculture wrought a change. Just as the once easily obtainable
wives now had an exchange value and were bought, so labor power was now
procured, especially since the flocks had definitely become private
property. The family did not increase as rapidly as the cattle. More
people were needed for superintending; for this purpose the captured
enemy was available and, besides, he could be increased by breeding like
the cattle.

Such riches, once they had become the private property of certain
families and augmented rapidly, gave a powerful impulse to society
founded on the pairing family and the maternal gens. The pairing family
had introduced a new element. By the side of the natural mother it had
placed the authentic natural father who probably was better
authenticated than many a "father" of our day. According to the division
of labor in those times, the task of obtaining food and the tools
necessary for this purpose fell to the share of the man; hence he owned
the latter and kept them in case of a separation, as the women did the
household goods. According to the social custom of that time, the man
was also the owner of the new source of existence, the cattle, and later
on of the new labor power, the slaves. But according to the same custom,
his children could not inherit his property, for the following reasons:
By maternal law, i. e., while descent was traced only along the female
line, and by the original custom of inheriting in the gens, the gentile
relatives inherited the property of their deceased gentile relative. The
wealth had to remain in the gens. In view of the insignificance of the
objects, the property may have gone in practice to the closest gentile
relatives, i. e., the consanguine relatives on the mother's side. The
children of the dead man, however, did not belong to his gens, but to
that of their mother. They inherited first together with the other
consanguine relatives of the mother, later on perhaps in preference to
the others. But they could not inherit from their father,