Morgan in his "Ancient Society," dealing with the question of _Mütter-Recht_, declares that throughout the earliest period of human existence regarding which any knowledge is attainable, descent and all rights of succession were traced through the women of the _gens_ or clans, into which primitive man was organized. Women, as being the bearers and protectors of the young, were regarded as the natural land owners, and therefore did not leave their homes to follow the fathers of their children, lest they should lose their own possessions and rights of inheritance. Instead, the men married into the sept of their wives. The power and independence of women was lost at last through the practice of making female captives in war. These had no land and were the property of, and dependent upon the will of, their male captor. In course of time men naturally grew to prefer these subservient wives. The Arab advises his son: "It is better to have a wife with no claims of kin and no brethren near to take her part." Women therefore began to dread capture as the greatest of evils. After the movements of vast hordes began--the marches of the race columns across the continents--with their wars of spoliation and conquest, there was no security save in physical strength, and the females yielded all claims to the men in return for protection. It was better, they thought, to be a slave at home than a slave among strangers. Still the man, while asserting physical superiority, claimed none morally. Under the pagan rule of Rome, the jurisconsults, by their theory of "Natural Law," evidently assumed the equality of the sexes as a principle of their code of equity. Sir Henry Maine says there came a time "when the situation of the female, married or unmarried, became one of great personal and proprietary independence; for the tendency of the later law ... was to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of marriage conferred on the husband no compensating superiority."