We cannot give a reason, other than mere chance, why power over a wife should have retained the name of manus, why power over a child should have obt… - Henry James Sumner Maine

The family was based, not upon actual relationship, but upon power, and the husband acquired over his wife the same despotic power which the father had over his children.

The natural condition of mankind (if that word "natural" is used) is not the progressive condition. It is a condition not of changeableness but of unchangeableness. The immobility of society is the rule; its mobility is the exception. The toleration of change and the belief in its advantages are still confined to the smallest portion of the human race, and even with that portion they are extremely modern.

So great is the ascendancy of the Law of Actions in the infancy of Courts of Justice, that substantive law has at first the look of being gradually secreted in the interstices of procedure; and the early lawyer can only see the law through the envelope of its technical forms.