We are most of us inclined, at this day, to hold that this was an erroneous solution, and that we could have discovered a better one; but it was the solution which was reached, and we shall be wiser if we seek to understand it clearly, instead of wasting our energies in its condemnation, remembering that many of the things of the past, which, from the point of view of the present, we are prone to regard as error, and even as sin, are only anachronisms. In fact, those who founded the colony of Georgia thought _then_ that they had a better solution of the problem. They prohibited slavery at the outset from that colony. In fourteen years they came to regard this act as a great mistake, and the noblest spirits among them acknowledged themselves in error, and joined in the movement for the introduction of negro slave-labor. [Sidenote: Slavery legislation in the Southern colonies.] The conditions above mentioned were undoubtedly the chief causes of the more rapid and pronounced development of negro slavery in the Southern colonies. And that more rapid and pronounced development directs us rather to the legislation of the Southern colonies than to that of the Northern, in following the legalization of the relation. [Sidenote: Partus sequitur ventrem.] Virginia naturally took the lead, and furnished the precedents for the others. The first question, both as to time and importance, which required legislative treatment, was the question of the status of the children of slaves. Where legalized marriage does not exist, the only certainty in respect to parentage is attained by regarding the mother. Rights and status in such a condition of society are, therefore, transmitted through the female line. _Partus sequitur ventrem_ is the rule {44} not only of the civil law, but of every system of law regulating the accidents of descent among people where the mingling of the sexes is not controlled by civilized marriage. Insuperable obstacles present themselves in the attempt to apply any other rule. It was no unusual or arbitrary enactment of the Virginia legislature which, in 1662, prescribed the rule that the status of the slave mother should determine that of her offspring. This rule was followed in all the colonies, and many of them enacted it into statute law. [Sidenote: Definitions of the slave class.]