Coemption ended in time by becoming purely symbolic; the wife was delivered to the husband, who, as a formality, gave her a few pieces of money; but the ceremony is none the less eloquent, and it proves clearly that in principle the woman had been, at Rome as elsewhere, assimilated by the parents to a thing, to a venal property. When at Athens and at Rome an effort was made to give the married woman a less subordinate position, nothing more was done than opposing money to money by inventing the dowry marriage; and hence resulted other inconveniences, on which Latin writers have largely dilated, and which we can easily study to-day from life. But for the present I must not speak of them. It suffices to have proved that all over the earth, in all times and among all races, marriage by purchase has been widely practised. Now, the custom of marriage by purchase has a very clear and very important signification from a moral and social point of view. It implies a profound contempt for woman, and her complete assimilation to chattels, to cattle, and to things in general. On this point the Roman law leaves no room for ambiguity, since it makes no essential difference between the marital law and the law of property. In regard to the woman, as in regard to goods, possession or use, continued for a year, gave a right of ownership. When applied to things, this possession is called _usucapion_; applied to the woman, it is called _usus_.[338] The difference between the terms is slight; between the facts there is none. In reality the wife and the child, especially the female child, have been the first property possessed by man, which has even implanted in the savage mind the taste for possession, and the pretension to use and abuse the things left entirely to his mercy. At Rome this became by the _jus quiritium_, for the woman the _manus_ of the husband, and for property the _jus utendi et abutendi_ of the proprietor. But this abuse, and this use, nearly always equally an abuse also, have contributed not a little to deprave man and to render him, from the origin of societies until our own day, refractory to ideas of equity and justice, especially in what relates to the condition of woman. FOOTNOTES: [267] Williams, _Fiji and the Fijians_, vol. i. p. 156. [268] Pritchard, _Polynesian Reminiscences_, etc., p. 371. [269] De Rochas, _Nouv. Calédonie_, p. 231. [270] Burchell, _Hist. Univ. des Voy._, t. xxvi. p. 330. [271] Bowdich, _Hist. Univ. des Voy._, t. xxviii. p. 430. [272] Moerenhout, _Voy. aux îles_, etc., t. ii. p. 67. [273] _Homme Américain_, t. I^{er.} p. 40. [274] Marco Polo (Edition Populaire), p. 61. [275] Schortt, _Trans. Ethn. Soc._ (New Series), vol. vii. p. 194. [276] Sonnerat, _Hist. Univ. des Voy._, t. xxxi. p. 350.--_Lettres Edifiantes_, t. x. p. 23. [277] Plutarch, _Numa and Lycurgus compared_. [278] E. de Lavelaye, _De la Propriété_, p. 35. [279] Lafitau, t. I^{er.} pp. 557-560.