With the era now existing, these old issues and customs are dead and buried out of sight and we would not be mad enough to revive them, if we could. They played no unimportant part, however, in the pathetic drama of the evolution of the race and we ought to erect monuments to their memory, as it were, and occasionally wander back to scatter flowers upon the monumental shaft, without deserting the live issues and duties at present confronting us. When we contemplate the lessons of the past, as presented in these “Legal Antiquities,” we can but realize the plain truth, expressed by William Knox, that “We are the same our fathers have been,” for if we had lived and moved and had our being in the dark days when these customs obtained, we would have considered them in the same light that our fore-fathers viewed them and this should make us charitable toward these frailties and mistakes of the past; we should be comforted with the reflection that such institutions are but mile-stones of the centuries, marking the rapid progress of the race, but when we read of these customs of the men and women of antiquity, we can but realize the truth of the words of Longfellow, that “... the world is very old, And generations pass as they have passed, A troop of shadows, moving with the sun.” FOOTNOTES: [1] Exodus, XXIII., 2. [2] Judge Davidson, of Texas, in Ex parte Martinez, 145 S. W. Rep. 959, 1023. CHAPTER I. MARRIAGE LAWS AND CUSTOMS. The term marriage was defined, in the Institutes of Justinian, as the lawful union of a man and a woman, including an inseparable association of their lives.[1] Written almost fourteen centuries ago, few, if any, of the many definitions of marriage, improve upon that given in the Institutes of this old philosopher-lawyer-Emperor of the Romans.[2] As the basis of the marriage contract is the necessity of society for some rule for the appropriation of the opposite sexes to one another and the protection of that relation, when once established, it is in one form or another, the oldest institution of man and the source of our most antique laws and customs.[3] The Chinese inform us that in the beginning, human beings, like other animals, without morality or community laws, wandered through the plains and forests, using their women in common; that the offspring of such unions knew their mothers, but rarely knew who their fathers were and that this custom continued among men, until the Emperor Fou-hi established the marriage custom.[4] While the ancient “Heathen Chinese” were thus holding their women in common, there is evidence that among the old Teutons and Hindus, the “marriage by capture” and “rape marriages” were still recognized by law, long before the “bride-sale” or “sale marriages,” so generally obtaining in ancient Assyria and Babylon, were established in Germany.[5]