ence between the Common Law and the jurisprudence of the Court of Chancery in the rules which they respectively apply to wives.
If we were to lose sight of the true origin of Guardianship in both its forms and were to employ the common language on these topics, we should find ourselves remarking that, while the Tutelage of Women is an instance in which systems of archaic law push to an extravagant length the fiction of suspended rights, the rules which they lay down for the Guardianship of Male Orphans are an example of a fault in precisely the opposite direction. All such systems terminate the Tutelage of males at an extraordinary early period. Under the ancient Roman law which may be taken as their type, the son who was delivered from Patria Potestas by the death of his Father or Grandfather remained under guardianship till an epoch which for general purposes may be described as arriving with his fifteenth year, but the arrival of that epoch placed him at once in the full enjoyment of personal and proprietary independence. The period of minority appears therefore to have been as unreasonably short as the duration of the disabilities of women was preposterously long. But, in point of fact, there was no element either of excess or of shortcoming in the circumstances which gave their original form to the two kinds of guardianship. Neither the one nor the other of them was based on the slightest consideration of public or
