It is difficult to conceive that the improvement in the position of woman witnessed among civilised peoples, can have been much affected by any change that could take place in the relation between husband and wife, so long as the latter is treated as mere property. I am disposed, therefore, to trace that improvement to another source, and to look upon it as springing from the maternal relationship. Stern as may be the treatment experienced by a wife, it is seldom that a mother is not honoured. This is especially the case among the African tribes. The same feeling is not unknown to the Arabs, whose sacred book declares that “a son gains Paradise at the feet of his mother.” Inconsistent as it is with our ideas, there can be little doubt that the curious custom of strangling parents, or burying them alive, when they have become old and helpless, is looked upon as a mark of respect and regard. Wilkes was assured by the missionaries that the Fijians were kind and affectionate to their parents, and that they considered the strangling custom as so great a proof of affection that none but children could be found to perform it. The Chinese have preserved the germs of the primitive idea, according to which woman is a kind of property, and among them still a wife may be sold, although only with her own consent, and as a wife and not as a slave. These restrictions show a great advance, which is evidenced also by the fact that wives possess equal rank with their husbands. Moreover, mothers are allowed a certain degree of influence over their sons, who are, indeed, obliged at particular seasons to pay homage to them, the Emperor himself not being exempt from performing the ceremonies of the _kotow_ before his mother. Where the filial piety is so strong, it is not surprising that ancestral-worship extends to the mother as well as the father, and that the memory of women celebrated for their virtues is perpetuated. Nevertheless, Chinese women are almost absolutely in the power of their fathers, husbands and sons, to whom they owe obedience as the representatives of heaven. In some of their customs the Romans bore considerable resemblance to the Chinese. With the former, as among the latter, the father was absolute within his family, and originally a woman, as part of her husband’s _familia_, could be sold or put to death by him without interference by the State. This was not so if the wife was only _uxor_ and retained her own familia, in which case, however, her children belonged to her husband. The latter form of marriage, or the custom known as “breaking the usus of the year,” gradually came to be the most usual, and it resulted in the emancipation of women from the control to which they had before been subjected.