a supreme lawgiver by simply ignoring the fact that, in point of time, custom precedes legislation and that early law is, to use Maine's own phrase, "a habit" and not a conscious exercise of the volition of a lawgiver or a legislature. The political philosophers, similarly, had sought the origin of political society in a "state of nature"--humane, according to Locke and Rousseau, barbarous, according to Hobbes--in which men freely subscribed to an "original contract" whereby each submitted to the will of all. It was not difficult to show, as Maine has done, that contract--_i.e._ the recognition of a mutual agreement as binding upon the parties who make it--is a conception which comes very late to the human mind. But Maine's work covers much wider ground than this. It may be summed up by saying that he shows that early society, so far as we have any recognisable legal traces of it, begins with the group, not with the individual. This group was, according to Maine's theory, the Family--that is to say the Family as resting upon the patriarchal power of the father to whom all its members, wife, sons, daughters, and slaves, were absolutely subject. This, the central feature of Maine's speculation, is worked out with infinite suggestiveness and great felicity of style in chapter V. ("Primitive Society and Ancient Law") of the present work, and his chief illustrations are sought in the history of Roman law. The topics of the other chapters are selected largely with a view to supplying confirmation of the theory in question and, as we shall see in a moment, Maine's later works do but serve to carry the train of reasoning a step further by the use of the Comparative Method in invoking evidence from other sources, notably from Irish and Hindu Law. Let us, however, confine ourselves for the moment to "Ancient Law." Maine works out the implications of his theory by showing that it, and it alone, can serve to explain such features of early Roman law as Agnation, _i.e._ the tracing of descent exclusively through males, and Adoption, _i.e._ the preservation of the family against the extinction of male heirs. The perpetual tutelage of women is the consequence of this position. Moreover, all the members of the family, except its head, are in a condition best described as _status_: they have no power to acquire property, or to bequeath it, or to enter into contracts in relation to it. The traces of this state of society are clearly visible in the pages of that classical text-book of Roman Law, the _Institutes_ of Justinian,[1] compiled in the sixth century A.D., though equally visible is the disintegration wrought in it by the reforming activity of the praetor's edicts. That reformation followed the course of a gradual emancipation of the members of the family, except those under age, from the despotic authority of the father. This gradual substitution of the Individual for the Family was effected in a variety of ways, but in none more conspicuously than by