This system of adoption prevailed largely in the feudal times, and still exists, though not to so great an extent. For whereas adoption was formerly almost the only means of procuring independence open to the subordinate members of a family, now no one who is able to shift for himself would care to be adopted and to assume another’s surname unless some great advantage were to be gained thereby. Yet families without male issue must resort to adoption to prevent self-extinction. They adopt therefore from a family on a lower social level or one afflicted with too large a progeny. It is often a little child they undertake to bring up and so have a claim on its gratitude. A man who has daughters but no son, adopts a young man as his eldest daughter’s husband and makes him in due course the head of the family. Sometimes, the adoption and the marriage take place at the same time, when the bridegroom comes to the bride’s house and the usual relations between the two are reversed. The husband naturally assumes the wife’s surname. His position is not an enviable one; for though as the head of the family, he has a legal right to its property, still he is constantly reminded that he is an outsider and has to ingratiate himself with the members and relatives of the family. It is always possible to convene a meeting of these persons; and this council is all-powerful in the disposal of family affairs. In the old times, if a member of the family misbehaved himself disgracefully, the family council met and took measures for his punishment. It would act even against the will of the head; indeed, the head himself was not always exempt from its censure, and there are many instances of his being forced to retire in favour of a son or another member, and in military families, of his being required to wash away with his own life-blood the stain he had brought upon the family name. If one who had become the head by birth was so powerless in the presence of the family council, it will be readily surmised that the head by adoption would often be in a far worse plight than the other; he could be divorced from his wife if she was the daughter of the house, and driven out of the family. He would naturally be more liable than any other member to the censure of the family council.