And, secondly, on the moral side we know that the pre-historic age was one of much licence, and the proof is that in that age descent was reckoned through the female only, just as it is among the lowest savages. 'Maternity,' it has been said, 'is a matter of fact, paternity is a matter of opinion;' and this not very refined expression exactly conveys the connection of the lower human societies. In all slave-owning communities--in Rome formerly, and in Virginia yesterday--such was the accepted rule of law; the child kept the condition of the mother, whatever that condition was; nobody inquired as to the father; the law, once for all, assumed that he could not be ascertained. Of course no remains exist which prove this or anything else about the morality of pre-historic man; and morality can only be described by remains amounting to a history. But one of the axioms of pre-historic investigation binds us to accept this as the morality of the pre-historic races if we receive that axiom. It is plain that the wide-spread absence of a characteristic which greatly aids the possessor in the conflicts between race and race probably indicates that the primary race did not possess that quality. If one-armed people existed almost everywhere in every continent; if people were found in every intermediate stage, some with the mere germ of the second arm, some with the second arm half-grown, some with it nearly complete; we should then argue--'the first race cannot have had two arms, because men have always been fighting, and as two arms are a great advantage in fighting, one-armed and half-armed people would immediately have been killed off the earth; they never could have attained any numbers. A diffused deficiency in a warlike power is the best attainable evidence that the pre-historic men did not possess that power.' If this axiom be received it is palpably applicable to the marriage-bond of primitive races. A cohesive 'family' is the best germ for a campaigning nation. In a Roman family the boys, from the time of their birth, were bred to a domestic despotism, which well prepared them for a subjection in after life to a military discipline, a military drill, and a military despotism. They were ready to obey their generals because they were compelled to obey their fathers; they centered the world in manhood because as children they were bred in homes where the tradition of passionate valour was steadied by the habit of implacable order. And nothing of this is possible in loosely-bound family groups (if they can be called families at all) where the father is more or less uncertain, where descent is not traced through him, where, that is, property does not come from him, where such property as he has passes to his SURE relations--to his sister's children. An ill-knit nation which does not recognise paternity as a legal relation, would be conquered like a mob by any other nation which had a vestige or a beginning of the patria potestas.