Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/459

Rh having a common ancestor, and the united clusters of families forming the early Aryan community. As Mommsen describes him, the early Roman ruler, once in office, stood toward citizens in the same relation that the father of the family did to wife, children, and slaves: "The regal power had not, and could not have, any external checks imposed upon it by law: the master of the community had no judge of his acts within the community, any more than the house-father had a judge within his household. Death alone terminated his power." From this first stage, in which the political head was absolute, and absoluteness of the domestic head went to the extent of life and death power over his wife, the advance toward a higher status of women was doubtless, as Sir Henry Maine contends, largely caused by that disintegration of the family which went along with the progressing union of smaller societies into larger ones effected by conquest. But though successful militancy thus furthered female emancipation, it did so only by thereafter reducing the relative amount of militancy; and the emancipation was really associated with an average increase of industrial structures and activities. As before pointed out, militancy is to be measured not so much by success in war as by the extent to which it occupies the male population. Where all men are warriors, and the work is done entirely by women, militancy is the greatest. The introduction of a class of males who, joining in productive labor, lay the basis for an industrial organization, qualifies the militancy. And as the industrial class, at first consisting though it does wholly of slaves, increases in proportion to the militant class, the total activities of the society must be regarded as more industrial and less militant. In another way the same truth is implied, if we consider that when a number of small hostile societies are consolidated by triumph of the stronger, the amount of fighting throughout the area occupied becomes less, although the conflicts now from time to time arising with neighboring larger aggregates may be on a greater scale. This is clearly seen on comparing the ratio of fighting-men to population among the early Romans with the ratio between the armies of the empire and the number of people included in the empire. And there is the further fact that the holding together of these compound and doubly-compound societies eventually formed by conquest, and the efficient coöperation of their parts for military purposes, itself implies an increased development of the industrial organization. Great armies carrying on operations at the periphery of a great territory, imply a numerous working population, a considerable division of labor, and good appliances for transferring supplies: the sustaining and distributing systems must be well developed before large militant structures can be worked. So that this disintegration of the patriarchal family, and consequent emancipation of women, which went along with growth of the Roman Empire, really had for its concomitant a development of the industrial organization.