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In Western Europe the modern scientific spirit, being the natural offspring of numerous concomitant historical causes, was born in the natural way, and Society had, consequently, before giving birth to it, to endure the pains of pregnancy and the throes of prolonged labour. In Russia, on the contrary, this spirit appeared suddenly as an adult foreigner, adopted by a despotic paterfamilias.
It has been extended to new relations by analogy, /1/ It exists where the principal does not stand in the relation of paterfamilias to the actual wrong-doer. /2/ A man may be held for another where the relation was of such a transitory nature as to exclude the conception of status, as for the negligence of another person's servant momentarily acting for the defendant, or of a neighbor helping him as a volunteer; /3/ and, so far as known, no principal has ever escaped on the ground of the dignity of his agent's employment. /4/ The courts habitually speak as if the same rules applied to brokers and other agents, as to servants properly so called. /5/ Indeed, it has been laid down in terms, that the liability of employers is not confined to the case of servants, /1/ although the usual cases are, of course, those of menial servants, and the like, who could not pay a large verdict.
Happiness is surely the best teacher of good manners: only the unhappy are churlish in deportment. He was young, remember; and this was his first job. His precocious experience as a paterfamilias had added to his mien just that suggestion of unconscious gravity which is so appealing to ladies.
"Comes home to men's business and bosoms." Paterfamilias, Times. "A long pull, a strong pull, and a pull all together." Nelson at the Nile. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." Jeremy Bentham. Apothegm by the late Lord Mountcoffeehouse. "Love rules the court, the camp, the grove."
Some hint has been conveyed to the reader of a domestic unpleasantness in the Sanford homestead. Sanford paterfamilias was a successful business man of large means and small sensibilities. His first wife, Marion's mother, was a New York beauty, a sweet, sensitive, refined, and delicate girl; in fine, "a sacrifice at the altar of Mammon." She married Mr.
"Quite well," replied Mathieu. "And the children are still growing?" "Yes, still growing." "So you are happy, like a good paterfamilias, in your little nook?" "Perfectly happy." Again she lapsed into silence, but she did not cease to look at him, more provoking, more radiant than ever, with the charm of a young sorceress whose eyes burn and poison men's hearts.
War was the regular annual business; all the male population of military age took part in it; and military age did not end too early. It was an order that tended to leave no room in the world but for the fittest, physically and morally, if not mentally. There was discipline, and again and always discipline: paterfamilias king in his household, with power of life and death over his children.
My candour obliges me to confess that this is the mode in which the hateful monosyllable is more usually employed by the marital part of the one flesh; and has something about it of the odious assumption of the Petruchian paterfamilias the head of the family boding, not perhaps "peace and love, and quiet life," but certainly "awful rule and right supremacy." For example:
What wonder that they came gradually to lose sight of the grand aspirations that had animated their early manhood? To forget, as it were, the objects and aims of their holy mission, and to sink into the mere paterfamilias, like other good masters of families?
Anyhow, I know he oughtn't to have been in it; and 'Paterfamilias' and 'Patriot' wrote letters to the Times about British officers who didn't mind their own business. Why, I saw the papers on board this ship! They were old ones. Papers on ships always are. But I think they came on at Algiers or somewhere." "Probably 'somewhere," I witheringly replied.
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