But the father of the family was in his own person the despot, the senate, the magistrate and the executive of the law; his wife, his children and his slaves represented the people, constantly and eternally in real or theoretical opposition, while he was protected by all the force of the most ferocious laws. A father could behead his son with impunity; but the son who killed his father was condemned to be all but beaten to death, and then to be sewn up in a leathern sack and drowned. The father could take everything from the son; but if the son took the smallest thing from his father he was a common thief and malefactor, and liable to be treated as one, at his father's pleasure. The conception of justice in Rome never rested upon any equality, but always upon the precedence of one order over another, from the highest to the lowest. There were orders even among the slaves, and one who had been allowed to save money out of his allowances could himself buy a slave to wait on him, if he chose. Hence the immediate origin of European caste, of different degrees of nobility, of the relative standing of the liberal professions, of the mediæval guilds of artisans and tradesmen, and of the numerous subdivisions of the agricultural classes, of which traces survive all over Europe. The tendency to caste is essentially and originally Aryan, and will never be wholly eliminated from any branch of the Aryan race. One may fairly compare the internal life of a great nation to a building which rises from its foundations story by story until the lower part can no longer carry the weight of the superstructure, and the first signs of weakness begin to show themselves in the oldest and lowest portion of the whole. Carefully repaired, when the weakness is noticed at all, it can bear a little more, and again a little, but at last the breaking strain is reached, the tall building totters, the highest pinnacles topple over, then the upper story collapses, and the end comes either in the crash of a great falling or, by degrees, in the irreparable ruin of ages. But when all is over, and wind and weather and time have swept away what they can, parts of the original foundation still stand up rough and heavy, on which a younger and smaller people must build their new dwelling, if they build at all. The aptness of the simile is still more apparent when we confront the material constructions of a nation with the degree of the nation's development or decadence at the time when the work was done.