Property is a means to the preservation of human life.
It is natural therefore that the father's interest in his son should continue to the end of his life, and that father and mother should dwell together to the end. If then a man, taking a woman to wife in the time of her youth, when beauty and fertility wait upon her, could send her away when she was advanced in years, he would do the woman harm, contrary to natural equity. It is manifestly absurd for the woman to be able to send away the man, seeing that woman is naturally subject to the rule of man, and it is not in the power of a subject to run away from control. It being then against the order of nature for the woman to be allowed to desert the man, if the man were allowed to desert the woman, the partnership of man and woman would not be on fair terms, but would be a sort of slavery on the woman's side. But if the man could send away the woman, or the woman the man, and form a connexion with another, certainty as to parentage would be difficult, when a woman had intercourse first with one man and then with another.