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In every relation of life in which the collective community might have occasion to avail itself of his wisdom and strength, for all purposes of counsel or of war, the filius familias, or Son under Power, was as free as his father. It was a maxim of Roman jurisprudence that the Patria Potestas did not extend to the Jus Publicum.
Who knows but even our Indian usurpations and villanies may become topics of praise to American schoolboys? As I believe our virtues are extremely like those of our predecessors the Romans, so I am sure our luxury and extravagance are too. The name is Italianised from the Roman Potestas What do you think of a winter Ranelagh erecting in Oxford Road, at the expense of sixty thousand pounds?
What then is the reason of this arbitrary inclusion and exclusion? Why should a conception of Kinship, so elastic as to include strangers brought into the family by adoption, be nevertheless so narrow as to shut out the descendants of a female member? To solve these questions, we must recur to the Patria Potestas.
Under the ancient Roman law, which may be taken as their type, the son who was delivered from Patria Potestas by the death of his Father or Grandfather remained under guardianship till an epoch which for general purposes may be described as arriving with his fifteenth year; but the arrival of that epoch placed him at once in the full enjoyment of personal and proprietary independence.
Perhaps he brought away with him from England in the early seventies a conception of the "patria potestas" which he would now find out of date there as well as here. No doubt the migratory habit is stronger in America than in England, and family life is not apt to flourish in hotels or boarding-houses. The Saratoga trunk is not the best cornerstone for the home: so much we may take for granted.
With some variation of details at different periods, the same system prevailed essentially at Rome, down to the time when Rome became Christian. At one time the husband was held to possess the patria potestas, or paternal power, in its full force. By law "the woman passed in manum viri, that is, she became the daughter of her husband."
Eitel having painted this condition in China in what I thought too favorable colors, I quoted from Doolittle's 'Social Life in China, unquestioned testimony as to what patria potestas was in China before the controversy now raised, and from Mr. Parker, Her Britannic Majesty's Consul at Canton, as to its present state in China.
Their magic fails, and the political and industrial family, which still thinks itself natural, is in truth casual and conventional. There is no real instinct to protect those who can already protect themselves; nor have they any profit in obeying nor, in the end, any duty to do so. A patria potestas much prolonged or extended is therefore an abuse and prolific in abuses.
However we may interpret it, it must have enormously enlarged the sphere of the Patria Potestas, and it seems to me that the tightening of family relations which it effected is an agency which ought to be kept in view more than it has been, in accounting for the great moral revolution which was transforming the world.
The ancient patria potestas of tribal institutions has been thus prolonged beyond the funeral pyre, and the ancient reverence for the dead which originally found expression in an instinctive worship of the ancestors has been translated into a ceremonial cult of the ancestral manes, which constitutes the primary duty and function of every new head of the family.
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