THE DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 687, 5 August 1870, Page 3

THE DECEASED WIFE'S SISTER IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

(From the Pall Mall Gazette.) The debate in the House of Lords on the Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister Bill turned too much on the abstract arguments for or against such, unions, and too little on the characteristic peculiarities which belong to this particular measure. If the law of marriage were now being framed for the first time it might be difficult to construct any satisfactory justification for forbidding the marriage of brothers and sisters in law. The social inconvenience alleged to arise from the impossibility without such a prohibition of unmarried women continuing to keep house for their sister's husband, and to take care of their sister's children, hardly supplies sufficient cause for the intervention of the Legislature. The force of the religious argument is entirely neutralised for political purposes by the fact that it is only recognised by one or two bodies of Christians. The Church of England forbids these marriages, but the origin of her dislike of them is suspiciously connected with the parentage of that " bright occidental star " to whoso beams she is so largely indebted. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland rejects them, but she does so from a narrowness of adherence to the letter of the Levitical law, which ia hardly shared by any other communion. On the other hand, the Roman Catholic Church permits them under certain conditions, and the majority of Protestant denominations as well in England as abroad permit them, or at least wish

to see them permitted, without any conditions at all.

When, however, we ti"*n to the provisions of this particular bill the whole aspect of the question is altered. Parliament is moved to do two things— to make a special law for certain special cases, leaving hosts of presumably identical cases unaffected by the change, and to make this special law retrospective. Both these proposal are so laden with future inconvenience, j and so utterly opposed to all sound principles of legislation, that it is surprising that bo little notice should have been taken of them last night. It is j superfluous to go into the right and wrong of marriages of affinity when I you are asked to make one of them legal while leaviug all the rest illegal. It is superfluous to discuss whether people who want to marry their deceased wives' sisters should be permitted to do so when you are asked to pass an Act of Indemnity for those who have married them without such permission. A law which arbitrarily introduces inequality creates an injustice instead of removing one, and a law which allows of a marriage with a deceased wife's sister while forbidding marriage with a deceased husband's brother, is pre-eminently a law which arbitrarily introduces inequality. A law which implies that a command imposed by lawful authority is of no obligation unless the person upon whom it is imposed happens to Bee the reasonableness of it, is a law which destroys that certainty which is essential to useful legislation, and a law which validates marriages contracted in defiance of an Act of Parliament is a pre-eminent example of this mischievous type. It is strange that Lord Hough ton should not have set up some defence of the piecemeal way of dealing with this subject, of which he has made himself the sponsor, since the historical method he adopted forced him to refer to other marriages of affinity between which and marriage with a deceased wife's sister there is no apparent distinction. " Did their lordships suppose, he asked, " that, had there been issue of the marriage of Henry VIII. and Katharine of Arragon, or, at a later date, of the marriage of Phillip and Mary, any doubt- would have been entertained of the validity of marriages of affinity ?" But what can be said in favour of an Act of Parliament which, professing to repeal a prohibition introduced for an immoral purpose, does so in such a niggardly way as to leave the particular marriage of affinity which this unrighteous prohibition was aimed in the same plight aa before ? Marriage with a brother's wife, and by consequence all other marriages of affinity, were declared invalid to gratify Henry VIII.'s licentious passions ; and to remedy this wrong it is now proposed that marriage with a deceased wife's sister shall be declared valid, and marriage with a deceased brother's wife be still held invalid. Surely this is to make the original wrong more galling. As long as all marriages of affinity are forbidden the law is at least equal, but when a solitary relaxation is introduced, the persons whose condition is not mended are rightly and naturally aggrieved. The Lord Chancellor gave a telling little sketch of the kind of agitation by which this bill has been promoted. Two or three wealthy men wanted to marry their sisters-in-law, and the course they took was to go through the form of marriage first and then form themselves into a " committee for improving the marriage law." In order to get as many people as possible into the same Bcrape as themselves, they circulated pamphlets quoting a decision of Lord Stowell to the effect that a marriage which is good in one country is good everywhere. They knew all the time that a subsequent decision had limited this doctrine by the exclusion of cases in which the contracting parties had gone abroad to be married in order to evade the law of their own country. Consequently, when these men urged other people to follow their example they were well aware that the loophole they pointed out had already been closed. If there must be retrospective legislation in this matter at all, the members of the Society for Improving the Marriage Law ought, at all events, to be excluded from the benefit of it. Their claim to relief is simply that, in order to serve

'their own selfish purpose, they have [deceived a certain number of persons jinto breaking the law when they only 'thought they were evading it. From another point of view the retrospective 'action of this bill is far too restricted. If the children of a man by his de;ceased wife's sister are to be declared legitimate, why should not this relief be made universal? The man who deceives his sister-in.law by a mock ■marriage is far more guilty than the man who openly asks her to become his concubine, and we protest against the former being favoured while no provision is made for the latter.