i88 3 .] 
Rational Marriage Law . 
583 
a minor degree, several of the royal and many of the noble 
families of Europe have married within a circle so narrow 
that degradation, bodily and mental, has been the result. 
While on the one side injudicious and harmful relaxations 
of Nature’s marriage-law have thus crept in, there have oc- 
curred on the other hand increased restrictions equally 
injudicious. Ecclesiastics and lawyers, not recognising the 
objeCt to be kept in view, have added to the plain notion of 
consanguinity that of affinity, and even in the Middle Ages 
that of so-called “ spiritual relationship.” 
The Catholic church, whilst wisely prohibiting the inter- 
marriage of cousins, unwisely and needlessly forbade the 
union of persons connected merely by affinity,— e.g., that of 
a man with the sister of his deceased wife. She even went 
a step further, and declared that a man and a woman who 
had both been sponsors at the baptism of the same child 
could not lawfully marry. What might be the motive for so 
strange a regulation, or what supposed evil it was intended 
to prevent, we are unable even to guess. But it appears 
that at one time a man might have no small difficulty in 
meeting with a woman whom he might legally marry unless 
he could either obtain a dispensation or seek for a wife in 
some remote part of the country. Hence much hardship 
arose, and doubts frequently arose as to the legitimacy of 
the descendants of certain marriages. 
Still the Catholic church, if wrong, was at least con- 
sistent. She forbade marriage between relatives entirely, 
and if we grant that persons connected by affinity or 
“ gossipry ” are relatives, she is in the right ; but this is the 
very point which we deny. 
We Englishmen in this particular have held fast to our 
national character of inconsistency. We have prudently 
abolished- spiritual relationship as an impediment to mar- 
riage, but we have retained affinity even whilst making 
serious inroads upon the fundamental principle of blood- 
relationship. 
Hence when the “Marriage-Law Defence Union” — a 
body formed to oppose the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage 
Bill — say, in an advertisement, “ The whole principle on 
which the Marriage-Law of this land is based is involved in 
the acceptance or rejection of the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s 
Bill,” they venture on a very wild statement. The Marriage- 
Law of this land is based on no principle. It is a medley 
of enactments arbitrarily thrown together, and having no 
vital connection. It tolerates what it should forbid, and it 
forbids what it should tolerate. If we analyse the table of 
