[Sidenote: Mother-kin may survive in the royal family after it has been exchanged for father-kin in all others.] It would be neither unnatural nor surprising if among the ancient Latins mother-kin survived in the royal family after it had been exchanged for father-kin in all others. For royalty, like religion, is essentially conservative; it clings to old forms and old customs which have long vanished from ordinary life. Thus in Uganda persons of royal blood still inherit their totems from their mothers, while other people inherit them from their fathers. So in Denmark and Scandinavia, as we have seen, the kingdom would appear to have been transmitted through women long after the family name and property had become hereditary in the male line among the people. Sometimes the difference in custom between kings and commoners is probably based rather on a distinction of race than on varying degrees of social progress; for a dynasty is often a family of alien origin who have imposed their rule on their subjects by force of arms, as the Normans did on the Saxons, and the Manchus on the Chinese. More rarely, perhaps, it may have happened that from motives of policy or superstition a [Sidenote: Sometimes a conquering race may have left a nominal kingship to members of the old royal house.] conquering tribe has left a nominal kingship to the members of the old royal house. Such a concession would be most likely to be made where the functions of the king were rather religious than civil, and where the prosperity of the country was supposed to depend on the maintenance of the established relations between the people and the gods of the land. In that case the new-comers, knowing not how to appease and conciliate these strange deities, might be glad to let the priestly kings of the conquered race perform the quaint rites and mumble the venerable spells, which had been found to answer their purpose time out of mind.[942] In a commonwealth like the Roman, formed by the union of different stocks, the royal family might thus belong either to the conquerors or to the conquered; in other words, either to the [Sidenote: This perhaps happened at Rome, where many of the kings seem to have been plebeians.] patricians or to the plebeians. But if we leave out of account Romulus and Tatius, who are more or less legendary figures, and the two Tarquins, who came of a noble Etruscan house, all the other Roman kings appear from their names to have been men of plebeian, not patrician, families.[943] Hence it seems probable that they belonged to the indigenous race, who may have retained mother-kin, at least in the royal succession, after they had submitted to invaders who knew father-kin only.