our homes with certain prohibitions of marriages, as I shall presently show. The very terms, mother-in-law, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, indicate the ideas that (in our country at least) have grown up in men's minds under the sanction of laws coeval with our social organization as a state. But the proposed Bill will, in fact, if entertained, abolish all those relationships. Moreover, the law having once (rightly or wrongly) classed the mother-in-law and sister-in-law with the mother and sister, as persons with whom no marriage can be had, this association alone (wholly independently of religious belief) has generated a repugnance to such marriages, as being all equally open to moral objection. In this country, till very lately, and in Scotland to the present hour, this repugnance has been an all but universal feeling. It is, perhaps, though I will not now be sure, still universal as to. the mother-in-law. The long acquiescence, indeed, in the law can only be accounted for by the habitual and universal recognition of its propriety.
Having now established—1st, That, contrary to repeated blundering assertions as to the effect of Lord Lyndhurst's Act, marriage with a deceased wife's sister has, from at least the sixth century, or for 1200 years, been as absolutely illegal and void in England as that with a man's own sister; and having commented on the necessary results produced by the prevalence of such a state of the law for such a period; I have thrown, I think, a heavy
