The child, as having no property, cannot give satisfaction for wrongs which he has committed. He is regarded as irresponsible, and responsibility for his conduct devolved on the father, who might either give compensation to the injured man, or surrender the delinquent for him to visit with his vengeance, or to use as a means of working out the damage (_noxae deditio_);[78] in the latter case the child becomes for ever the property of another. The father might sell him; if beyond the limits of the country, the son becomes a slave; if within the limits, he is one in private though not in public law (_in causa mancipii_), and exchanges servitude to the father for that to the purchaser. In an age which recognised no free contract of labour, the sale of the son was a means of putting him out to business.[79] The injunction of the Twelve Tables (perhaps the recognition of a custom far earlier than this law) that the thrice-repeated sale of a son involved loss of the _patria potestas_,[80] was an attempt to put an end to an inhuman traffic. The child as a thing might be stolen or detained, and as such be the object of recovery. In this case the father “vindicates” him as he would a chattel or a beast that had strayed from the homestead.[81] The father might scourge or imprison his child,[82] even put him to death. The formula employed in adrogation (the procedure by which a man puts himself into the paternal power of another) shows that the _jus vitae necisque_ was the most distinctive aspect of the _patria potestas_.[83] It was a power never questioned throughout the whole of Republican history, and which received no legal limitations until the time of the Middle Empire.[84] Sometimes it was employed as a means of saving the honour of the family, and there are instances of the son guilty of theft, the daughter of unchastity, being thus put to death;[85] sometimes it was enforced in the interest of the state to punish a public crime.[86]