that in effecting this purpose lay the only hope of the
success of his enterprise, and he devoted himself with great assiduity
and care, and at the same time with great energy and success, to the
work of organizing it. The great leading objects of his life, from the
time that he commenced the government of the new city, were to arrange
and regulate social institutions, to establish laws, to introduce
discipline, to teach and accustom men to submit to authority, and to
bring in the requirements of law, and the authority of the various
recognized relations of social life, to control and restrain the
wayward impulses of the natural heart.

As a part of this system of policy, he laid great stress upon the
parental and family relation. He saw in the tie which binds the father
to the child and the child to the father, a natural bond which he
foresaw would greatly aid him in keeping the turbulent and boisterous
propensities of human nature under some proper control. He accordingly
magnified and confirmed the natural force of parental authority by
adding the sanctions of law to it. He defined and established the
power of the father to govern and control the son, rightly considering
that the father is the natural ally of the state in restraining young
men from violence, and enforcing habits of industry and order upon
them, at an age when they most need control. He clothed parents,
therefore, with authority to fulfill this function, considering that
what he thus aided them to do, was so much saved for the civil
magistrate and the state. In fact, he carried this so far that it is
said that the dependence of the child upon the father, under the
institutions of Romulus, was more complete, and was protracted to a
later period than was the case under the laws of any other nation.
The power of the father over his household was supreme. He was a
magistrate, so far as his children were concerned, and could thus not
only require their services, and inflict light punishments for
disobedience upon them, as with us, but he could sentence them to the
severest penalties of the law, if guilty of crime.

The laws were equally stringent in respect to the marriage tie. Death
was the penalty for the violation of the marriage vows. All property
belonging to the husband and to the wife was held by them in common,
and the wife, if she survived the husband, and if the husband died
without a will, became his sole heir. In a word, the laws of Romulus