Roundell Palmer

“ Every married man whose wife has sisters has an interest in that condition of society which is produced by the state of law which makes his wife's sister his "sister-in-law." Our popular expression exactly hits the principle. The law makes the wife's sister his sister, and if you alter the law the wife's sister for domestic purpose will be his sister no longer. Do you want prohibitory laws against marriage without any degrees of relationship, or do you not? ”

“ To pass such an Act, repealing the law retrospectively in favour of all law-breakers, is really to tell the people "you are under no obligation to obey the laws." But the matter does not stop there. Every clause of the Bill is more and more monstrous as we go forward. ”

“ If the principle be a right one, of course it extends to all the immediate members of one's own family. We know that the brutal passions of some of the lowest order of mankind are capable of overleaping even the natural barriers which exist between parent and child, between brother and sister. ”

“ But everybody else who, having repented of breaking the law, and having treated the marriage as void, has separated front the person who never was his wife, shall be married compulsorily by the Bill to that person. Is that the sort of legislation of which your Lordships will approve? You not only give to the law-breakers themselves everything they ask, but you say that persons who have regretted their disobedience of the law shall be forced back into their original illegal relations. ”

“ If we were to bring together all the aberrations of our law in matters relating to the connection of the sexes we should no doubt have a very alarming and very lamentable catalogue of evils. But does any one suppose that by adapting our law to such a state of things we should not produce a greater amount of mischief? For these reasons, my Lords, I earnestly entreat you not to agree to the second reading of this Bill. ”

“ The truth is, that the husband and the wife are so united that you cannot make their intercourse with their own brothers and sisters really sisterly and brotherly—you cannot make it unrestrained—unless you apply the same rule to both of them. ”

“ I think I have said enough to show that if your Lordships should at any time be persuaded, contrary to my own conviction, that the main principle of the Bill is right, you must set to work to give effect to your wish in a totally different manner. You must not by retrospective legislation try to render legal that which was not lawful and cannot properly be made so. You must consider how far your principle ought to go, and I am sure you can never stop short of the abolition of all marriages of affinity. ”

“ The moment you go a little further in the circle of relationship the power of the prohibitory law becomes stronger, because, the more remote the connection, the more important it is to fence it. Take the case of uncle and niece. We know that in some countries dispensations are granted for such marriages; and there the principle of such unions being admitted men are not restrained by natural repugnance from forming them. ”

“ That is the principle on which the law has proceeded, and I say it is a most wise and salutary law that you should carry the fence as far in favour of the relatives of the wife as of the relatives of the husband, so that the two may be thoroughly identified, and the intercourse which is perfectly unrestrained as to the one should be equally unrestrained as to the other. ”

“ It is necessary and important so to fence round the sanctity of the domestic hearth upon the subject of marriage as to make safe and secure, as far as law can do so, the unrestrained and peculiarly affectionate intercourse which ought to exist for the happiness of families between the closest and nearest relations. ”

“ Being in daily and constant association with the labouring and poorer classes; as one living among them, and being in their homes in the most poverty-stricken neighbourhoods; intimately knowing hundreds of the families of the superior working men, and also of those in the deepest poverty ”

“ In 1859 I received, through an eminent prelate, a number of letters, which I have in my hand, from clergymen who had laboured many years in some of the largest centres of population. These clergymen assert that in their experience the poor did not generally practise or approve these marriages. ”