the Grecian. With the growth of riches and of power in the State, more
social but still no legal freedom was accorded. The elder Cato
complained of the allowing of more liberty, and urged that every father
of a family should keep his wife in the proper state of servility; but
in spite of this remonstrance, a movement for the better had begun.
Under the Empire, woman acquired the right of inheritance, but she
herself remained a minor, and could dispose of nothing without the
consent of her guardian. Sir Henry Maine[3] calls attention to the
institution known to the oldest Roman law as the "Perpetual Tutelage of
Women," under which a female, though relieved from her parent's
authority by his decease, continues subject through life. Various
schemes were devised to enable her to defeat ancient rules; and by their
theory of "Natural Law," the jurisconsults had evidently assumed the
equality of the sexes as a principle of their code of equity.

Few more significant words or words more teeming with importance on the
actual economic condition of women have ever been written than those of
the great jurist whose name counts as almost final authority. "Ancient
law," he writes, "subordinates the woman to her blood relations, while a
prime phenomenon of modern jurisprudence has been her subordination to
her husband." Under the modified laws as to marriage, he goes on to
state, there came a time "when the situation of the Roman female,
unmarried or married, became one of great personal and proprietary
independence; for the tendency of the later law, as already hinted, was
to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of
marriage in fashion conferred on the husband no compensating
superiority."

These were the final conditions for the Roman, whose power, sapped by
long excesses, was even then trembling to its fall. Already the