Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/468

452 became highly developed among the Japanese, similarly goes great filial subjection. Mitford, qualifying previous statements, admits that needy people "sell their children to be waitresses, singers, or prostitutes;" and Sir Rutherford Alcock says that "parents, too, have undoubtedly in some cases, if not in all, the power to sell their children." It may be added that the subordination of young to old, irrespective of sex, is greater than the subordination of females to males; for abject as is the slavery of wife to husband, yet, after his death, the widow's power "over the son restores the balance and redresses the wrong, by placing woman, as the mother, far above man, as the son, whatever his age or rank." And the like holds among the Chinese.

How among the primitive Semites the father exercised capital jurisdiction, and how along with this there went a lower status of girls than of boys, needs no proof. But, as further indicating the parental and filial relation, I may name the fact that children were considered so much the property of the father, that they were seized for his debts (2 Kings iv. 1; Job xxiv. 9); also the fact that selling of daughters was authorized (Exodus xxi. 7); also the fact that injunctions respecting the treatment of children referred exclusively to paternal benefit: as instance the reasons given in Ecclesiasticus, chapter xxx., for chastisement of sons; and the further fact that in Deuteronomy, xxi. 18, stoning to death is the appointed punishment of a rebellious son. Though some qualification of paternal absolutism arose during the later settled stages of the Hebrews, yet along with persistence of the militant type of government there continued extreme filial subordination.

Already in the chapter on the Family, when treating of the Romans as illustrating both the social and domestic organization possessed by the conquering Aryans during their spread into Europe, something has been implied respecting the status of children among them. In the words of Mommsen, relatively to the father, "all in the household were destitute of legal rights—the wife and child no less than the bullock or the slave." He might expose his children: the religious prohibition which forbade it "so far as concerned all the sons—deformed births excepted—and at least the first daughter," was without civil sanction. He "had the right and duty of exercising over them judicial powers, and of punishing them as he deemed fit, in life and limb." He might also sell his child. It remains to say that the same implied development of industrialness which we saw went along with improvement in the position of women during the growth of the Roman Empire, went along with improvement in the position of children. I may add that in Greece there were allied manifestations of paternal absolutism: a man could bequeath his daughter, as he could also his wife.

If, again, we compare the early states of existing European