home to be sacrificed to this caprice, for really it is no more, of a few, who are determined to marry some one person put out of their reach by law? Why are all men to lose their sisters-in-law because some disclaim that relationship? Why are all sisters-in-law now living with widowed brothers-in-law to be ordered either to quit or marry them? Above all, why is every man in the country who is free from the monomania of desiring a forbidden union to feel that his home is broken up by the snapping of the first link of moral restraint, to fear lest (as the next step) his own brother should desire his daughter in marriage, or look even to the reversion of his wife? Why is distrust to be sown where perfect love, frank familiarity, sweet and pure affection were before unrestrained? Why, lastly, is England to be selected for this blighting curse upon her homes? Ireland will have none of these relaxations; Scotland rejects them with abhorrence[1].
I have taken mere heathen ground in this letter. But by all the joys of that tie of real brotherhood which binds us to the sister of our wife; by all the aspirations of a high and holy morality, be the man's religious faith what it may; by all the horrors of an ever deepening, hopeless sinking
- ↑ The Bill last passed by the Commons would render it possible for an Irish or Scotch gentleman to have two wives at once; one, his wife's sister, at Holyhead or Carlisle, the other, an Irish or Scottish wife, for his English wife would in Ireland or Scotland be a concubine only.
