His dominion extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves; indeed the relations of sonship and serfdom appear to differ in little beyond the higher capacity which the child in blood possesses of becoming one day the head of a family himself.
This passage highlights the absolute power of the patriarch in a household.
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He could have found the truth as a statesman just as he found it when a judge; but he never did find it.
Now it is not conceivable that a race of beings with valuable instincts supporting their existence and supplying their wants would need these simple tools.
If those persons be people of different temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an almost infallible security that nothing, or almost nothing, will be done with excessive rapidity.
That a House of Commons may work well it must perform, as we saw, five functions well: it must elect a Ministry well, legislate well, teach the nation well, express the nation's will well, bring matters to the nation's attention well.
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