Another important branch of the child-protection movement that had its beginning in New York City, was placing laws on the statute book, and then enforcing them, against the sale of injurious liquors to children. Laws tending to protect the morality of children followed these, and in fact almost from the first year of its birth, every year has seen the Protection Society enlarging its field of action until today it hardly seems possible that it was only a few hundred years ago that the very life of a child itself was considered of no importance. The general law laid down by Spencer, in virtue of which everything passes “from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from the indefinite to the definite, from the simple to the complex,” is evident in the history of the progress of the child as a factor in society. When in neolithic times there was no moral instinct in man, the child’s only hope of life was the parental or rather the maternal instinct, of beings not yet risen to the plain of reasoning animals. In a higher stage of civilization one finds, where the matriarchal régime exists, children have a value, the value of chattels and live stock, though the maternal uncle has more rights over them than their own father.[460] The _patria potestas_ of the Romans was not so strange or unusual as it seemed to Gibbon, for the power of life and death (_jus vitæ ac necis_) is found among the Apaches, the Botocodos, the Bedouins, and the Samoyedes and is a stage in the development and evolution of the family idea. In the religious and philosophical stage the child takes on an importance of its own; it is humanely treated because it is now recognized as a human being, or it is protected because it is said to have, young and apparently unimportant as it seems to be, a _soul_ of its own. From there on to the time when the child, as the father of the man, is a charge upon the State,—or on all men,—until it is able to take care of and protect itself, the murder of a child is theoretically as great a crime as the murder of an adult. In fact, the conditions of the past hold long after each recognized step of progress, the most primitive habits obtruding in the very midst of the most advanced knowledge and the most complete enlightenment. It is for this that the story of the past is valuable. That we may know and understand and value rightly what is past, past for all time so far as intelligent and self-governing humanity is able to will—that is one of the surest steps to knowledge and truth. APPENDIX A NAPOLEONIC DECREE OF 1811. IMPERIAL DECREE CONCERNING FOUNDLINGS, ABANDONED CHILDREN, AND POOR ORPHANS OF JANUARY 19, 1811. 1ST TITLE. ARTICLE I. The children whose education is entrusted to public charity are: 1st. Foundlings. 2d. Abandoned children. 3d. Poor orphans. 2D TITLE. 2. Foundlings are those born of unknown parents, who have been found exposed in any place, or those taken to the hospitals intended to receive them.