emedied alone by paternal law. "This seems to be the
most natural transition." (Marx.) As to the opinion of the comparative
jurists, how this transition took place among the civilized nations of
the old world--although only in hypotheses--compare M. Kovalevsky,
Tableau des origines et de l'evolution de la famille et de la
propriete, Stockholm, 1890.

The downfall of maternal law was the historic defeat of the female sex.
The men seized the reins also in the house, the women were stripped of
their dignity, enslaved, tools of men's lust and mere machines for the
generation of children. This degrading position of women, especially
conspicuous among the Greeks of heroic and still more of classic times,
was gradually glossed over and disguised or even clad in a milder form.
But it is by no means obliterated.

The first effect of the established supremacy of men became now visible
in the reappearance of the intermediate form of the patriarchal family.
Its most significant feature is not polygamy, of which more anon, but
"the organization of a certain number of free and unfree persons into
one family under the paternal authority of the head of the family. In
the Semitic form this head of the family lives in polygamy, the unfree
members have wife and children, and the purpose of the whole
organization is the tending of herds in a limited territory." The
essential points are the assimilation of the unfree element and the
paternal authority. Hence the ideal type of this form of the family is
the Roman family. The word familia did not originally signify the
composite ideal of sentimentality and domestic strife in the present day
philistine mind. Among the Romans it did not even apply in the beginning
to the leading couple and its children, but to the slaves alone. Famulus
means domestic slave, and familia is the aggregate number of slaves
belonging to one man. At the time of Gajus, the familia, id est
patrimonium (i. e., paternal legacy), was still bequeathed by testament.
The expression was invented by the Romans in order to designate a new
social organism, the head of which had a wife, children and a number of
slaves under his paternal authority and according to Roman law the
right of life and death over all of them. "The word is, therefore, not
older than the ironclad family system of the Latin tribes, which arose
after the introduction of agriculture and of lawful slavery, and after
the separation of the Aryan Itali from the