The chief speaker against the Bill was the Bishop of
Peter- borough, who, if we may trust the report, did not speak with anything like his usual ability. He insisted that the only effect of legalising these marriages would be that poor men could no longer obtain the help of their sisters-in-law as house- keepers for at least a year after the death of their wives, or, indeed, at all, till it was considered decent for them to marry that sister-in-law ; and he urged that the only ground of prin- ciple on which the Bill could be put, would be the formal legalising of all marriages of mere affinity. He suggested, though he did not seem to expect, that the sisters of a deceased wife, after being "evicted as sisters-in-law,"—as they would be by this Bill,—might be " put in as caretakers," bat, if they were, he anticipated that only very strong-minded women would welcome the change of position. It was not a time, he thought, to meddle with marriage laws, unless you could put them on a new basis of principle ; whereas this Bill had confessedly no basis of principle, being intended to remedy only one particular grievance, and to leave a number of other alleged grievances, standing on the same basis of general principle, unremedied. Of course, the reply to the Bishop of Peterborough is that the natural principle is liberty of choice, and that to justify the prohibition of liberty of choice, especially as regards a class of actions in which there are strong motives for exer- cising it in a particular direction, there should be very strong grounds of principle or expediency, which cannot be shown to exist, and are not, in fact, shown to exist, in this case. The Bill was rejected by the narrow majority of four (132 against 128).
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