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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 32

Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister

Marriage with a Deceased Wife's Sister

And the present Government, as also we think the late one, advised Her Majesty to give the Royal assent to these enactments. Such marriages are now therefore as legal in our Australian and other colonies as they have always been in almost all other Protestant countries but this; and it is but too easy to see the difficulties that may or must arise when a transaction involving so many interests, present and prospective, moral and material, is legal in some and illegal in other parts of the Queen's dominions.

The amount of those difficulties and even dangers must now be held as more apparent than ever, at least by the present Government and all its supporters, after the recent declaration of Mr. Disraeli to the effect that the colonists do not really form separate communities, but are members of the British community, indulging in short absences, only to come back here to spend their fortunes, become high sheriffs of counties, and otherwise take up high places in British society.

In these circumstances, it has obviously become doubly impossible that the law in this country should continue to hold as morally dishonourable and legally ineffective what both law and society in what the Premier describes as a virtually inseparable section of the same community hold to be honourable in all men.

The present Bill, however, deals only with the matter of property in this country belonging or that may come to belong to the children of such marriages performed in the colonies. There is something more than a doubt that the law here might be so interpreted as to refuse recognition of the colonial law and the marriages under it, and to treat colonial children as not legitimate in England, and so not entitled to succeed to any but colonial property.

It is difficult to imagine on what plea a remedy for a wrong so monstrous and ridiculous can be refused.

The only imaginable argument is the very old and rotten one that this is "the thin end of the wedge." No doubt it is; but the wedge is in already without our help, or our being able to prevent it. The colonists have driven it in to the thick end, and we have not a shadow of moral right to prevent them taking their own way in the matter, nor to deny them here, at least as to property, what by the assent of the Crown they possess at home.

It is true also that when these colonial marriages are made effective here as to property, it would be absurd and indeed impossible to prevent them being made effective as to everything else. Any support that the existing law of this country receives from social ideas and customs is fast dying away, and even the most ignorant or priest-ridden persons will scarcely now refuse social recognition to men and women married according to the laws of their own country, which country is a part of the British Empire, and which law has been sanctioned by the British Government. The wedge already in will thus undoubtedly be driven home—but that only proves that the system into which it is being driven was not worthy of preservation."—Scotsman, 3rd April, 1876.