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II. JUS MARITI. The common-law conception of marriage and its effects upon the status and rights of husband and wife can hardly be better ex pressed than by saying that husband and wife are one person, and that the husband is that person. The last clause indeed is usu ally added as a witticism, or as a reproach, as if it contained a disgraceful refusal of rights to the wife; but in early times it was differently regarded. The whole phrase is almost identical with that by which the gravest continental writers describe the re lation in early Germanic law : — "In the conception of marriage as an in timate union of life and person- (unum corpus unamque vitam, as Tacitus expresses it, Germ. c. 19), it appears as a consociation or juridical unity, of which the husband is the legal representative." fRenaud, Deutsches Privatrecht, § 157.) If it were correct to say that the law gave to the husband the property of the wife upon marriage (as has been said very often at least from the time of Shelley, J., Y. B. 26 Hen. VIII. pi. i. fo. 7. See also, 2 Ventris, 341; 34 Me. 573; 22 N. H. 124, 125; 2 Conn. 145, 556; 7 ib. 426), it would of course imply that there was a time when that property was not so given, but was vested in the wife, at least before marriage. But it would be diffi cult to find such a time in history. The far ther back we go in the common law, the less rights do we find either wife or maid enjoy ing. In the primitive law they could not be said to have any rights at all; for they had no " standing in court," but were under the perpetual mundium of parents and friends. The married woman simply ex changed the control of a parent or guardian for that of a husband. At that time even men had but few of that great variety of property rights now recognized. Not merely the objects of ownership, but the rights thereof were al most unknown. All was summed up in the possession, or gewere, and of that woman

was incapable. The development of prop erty rights did not exclude wives; it sim ply passed them by unnoticed, because they were, while covert, of no account in the eyes of the law. I do not mean that their abstract rights were excluded from the process of develop ment. All the forms of property which grew up one after another — inheritances, remainders, uses, trusts — might be vested in femes covert as well as in men; but hav ing no power to act, change, transfer, or even resign those rights, their personality went for nothing. The possession and enjoy ment of property, lands, or chattels was in the baron. This is the key to the entire commonlaw doctrine of married women's property. There was no transfer of the things owned, of the objects of property, by the marriage. The change was entirely in the personality of the owner. The wife at once disappeared from the eye of the law under her cover ture; the baron stood in her place, and rep resented her entirely and conclusively so long as the coverture lasted. Nor was this an exceptional case or jus singulare. The entire doctrine of estates shows that rights which we now regard as measured by their objects, the land owned, were then purely personal qualities. The freeholder differed from the serf; not the freehold from the copyhold land. Consist ently with this we find that actual possession is at once the source and the measure of the husband's rights, (if that word can prop erly be used here,) of his power over the wife's property. Whatever was or came into the wife's possession was ipso facto in the husband's, and he, not she, was regarded as the legal possessor. " They were but one person, and he was that person." Just so far as she, if single, could affect the property by dealing with its possession, or transferring that possession to another, he during the coverture could do the same in the same way. But we must be careful not to apply this rule to modern conceptions