on those whose bad conduct led to it.  Every man, whether married or not, could adopt children under certain restrictions, and they passed entirely under paternal power.  But the marriage relation among the Romans did not accord after all with those principles of justice which we see in other parts of their legislative code.  The Roman husband, like the father, was a tyrant.  The facility of divorce destroyed mutual confidence, and inflamed every trifling dispute; for a word or a message or a letter or the mandate of a freedman was quite sufficient to secure a separation.  It was not until Christianity became the religion of the empire that divorce could not be easily effected without a just cause.  This facility of divorce was a great stigma on the Roman laws, and the degradation of woman was the principal consequence.  But woman never was honored in any Pagan land, although her condition at Rome was better than it was at Athens.  She always was regarded as a possession rather than as a person; her virtue was mistrusted, and her aspirations were scorned; she was hampered and guarded more like a slave than the equal companion of man.  But the progress of legislation, as a whole, was in her favor, and she continued to gain new privileges until the fall of the empire.  The Roman Catholic Church regards marriage as one of the sacraments, and through all the Middle Ages and down to our own day the great authority of the Church has been one of the strongest supports of that institution, as necessary to Christianity as to civilization.  We Americans have improved on the morality of Jesus, of the early and later Church, and of the great nations of modern Europe; and in many of our States persons are allowed to slip out of the marriage tie about as easily as they get into it.

Nothing is more remarkable in the Roman laws than the extent of paternal power.  It was unjust, and bears the image of a barbarous age.  Moreover, it seems to have been coeval with the foundation of the city.  A father could chastise his children by stripes, by imprisonment, by exile, by sending them to the country with chains on their feet.  He was even armed with the power of life and death.  “Neither age nor rank,” says Gibbon, “nor the consular office, could exempt the most illustrious citizen from the bonds of filial subjection.  Without fear, though not without danger of abuse, the Roman legislators had reposed unbounded confidence in the sentiments of paternal love, and the oppression was tempered by the assurance that each generation must succeed in its turn to the awful dignity of parent and master.”  By an express law of the Twelve Tables a father could sell his children as slaves.  But the abuse of paternal power was checked in the republic by the censors, and afterward by emperors.  Alexander Severus limited the right of the father to simple correction, and Constantine declared the father who should kill his son to be guilty of murder.  The rigor of parents in reference to the disposition