As a part of this system of policy, he laid great stress upon the parental and family relation. He saw in the tie which binds the father to the child and the child to the father, a natural bond which he foresaw would greatly aid him in keeping the turbulent and boisterous propensities of human nature under some proper control. He accordingly magnified and confirmed the natural force of parental authority by adding the sanctions of law to it. He defined and established the power of the father to govern and control the son, rightly considering that the father is the natural ally of the state in restraining young men from violence, and enforcing habits of industry and order upon them, at an age when they most need control. He clothed parents, therefore, with authority to fulfill this function, considering that what he thus aided them to do, was so much saved for the civil magistrate and the state. In fact, he carried this so far that it is said that the dependence of the child upon the father, under the institutions of Romulus, was more complete, and was protracted to a later period than was the case under the laws of any other nation. The power of the father over his household was supreme. He was a magistrate, so far as his children were concerned, and could thus not only require their services, and inflict light punishments for disobedience upon them, as with us, but he could sentence them to the severest penalties of the law, if guilty of crime. The laws were equally stringent in respect to the marriage tie. Death was the penalty for the violation of the marriage vows. All property belonging to the husband and to the wife was held by them in common, and the wife, if she survived the husband, and if the husband died without a will, became his sole heir. In a word, the laws of Romulus evince a very strong desire on the part of the legislator to sustain the sacredness and to magnify the importance of the family tie; and to avail himself of those instinctive principles of obligation and duty which so readily arise in the human mind out of the various relations of the family state, in the plans which he formed for subduing the impulses and regulating the action of his rude community.