The need felt by the fathers of securing themselves against the frequent mutinies of the slaves led to the mutual alliance of fathers, the patrician order and the heroic state. Of this state the slaves constituted the first plebs. They had no citizen's rights, since they were not citizens; no solemnities of marriage, since the auspices were a monopoly of the fathers; nor the right of making wills, since that right had and always kept the political character of a command. They were therefore excluded from the _comitia curiata_ held by the patricians under arms, which survived later for dealing with sacred questions; profane matters being everywhere in the earliest times, at Rome as in Greece and Egypt, considered as sacred. The king of the patricians, whom we have called the magistrate of the order, was thus especially their leader and general in their resistance to the slaves or plebeians. But the heroes did not provide for the stability of their order by means of forcible resistance alone. Just as, when they abdicated their position of sovereignty in their respective families for one of subordination to the higher sovereignty of the order, they formed a kind of noble or armed feudal system, so to keep their slaves more or less reconciled to obedience they granted them, without admitting them to citizenship, a kind of rustic feudalism. The origin of property is thus explained in a way entirely different on the one hand from the charmingly poetical theory according to which men adorned with all the virtues of the golden age when justice dwelt on earth, foreseeing the disorder that might result from communism, themselves with kindly arbitration marked out the limits of fields, endeavouring not to assign to one nothing but fertile, to another nothing but barren ground; to one a waterless portion, to another one abounding in perennial streams: and different on the other hand from the "philosophical" origin by a voluntary submission to the wise, or that invented by "politician kings" who derived property from violence. The granting of this rustic feudalism, which might be called the first agrarian law, distinguished three kinds of land-tenure: bonitary for the people, quiritary or noble, supported by arms, for the fathers, and eminent, belonging to the whole order. And since the strength of the order rested upon its wealth, it did all in its power to prevent the enrichment of the plebs; and in war--here we see the social motive of the "Roman clemency"--deprived the conquered of their arms only, leaving them in bonitary possession of their lands and imposing upon them a suitable tribute. For the same reason the patricians were very reluctant to go to war, for then the plebeian multitude gained experience of warfare and became dangerous.