without legal protection against a secretary whose pen can dethrone them; and until they are loyal, we have no security; we pay the penalty in thousands of soldiers' lives every year sacrificed to the climate. We are wasting with an ulcer which incapacitates us in Europe, and must doom us at length to be driven ignominiously out of India, unless it be cured; that is, unless we win the free and honourable allegiance of both princes and people. The first step to this is, to give them a judicial court that can decide between the princes and our executive. We know none so proper as the House of Lords. And out of this would arise a much greater activity of that House as to all Indian questions, and much greater weight of authority. This also is extremely needed: for it is manifest that the Commons feel themselves but half competent even for Irish questions, and resolutely refuse to judge those of India. On the other hand, every Indian Board or Council, whatever it may be called, is either dependent on the Ministry, or is utterly deficient in weight to resist their decisions. Until India can have its own Parliament, it needs to find in England such protection as only our Upper House can give it.

But now (it may be asked) of what are we talking? Do we forget that the vast majority of the English peers have no taste for public duty, and that out of more than four hundred it is a fair house if thirty attend? Do we forget that the absent peers habitually degrade the Upper House from being a deliberative body into (what we above called) a voting-machine, by sending their proxies as votes when they have not heard the debates ? Such facts are highly discouraging. They are triumphant arguments to those who hope to see the Upper House reduced to impotency or swept away. But we will add,-to those who would rather preserve than destroy, to those who know how hard it is to invent de novo a vital organ, except in the midst of a destructive general overturn, these sad facts are an overpowering reason for grappling with the question of Reform of the Lords, before it is too late. This House is still powerful; it may do us much good, or much harm. If allowed to decay, it afflicts us meanwhile with stagnation or half-measures, and undermines attachment to the Constitution. To those who fancy that this House at present is simply effete and harmless, not a real power, we point to the history of the second Reformed Parliament.

During the first Reformed Parliament the Lords were prostrate; were probably panic-struck, and did not move against the Minis

try. In the second Parliament everything changed. The East India Company put its veto on the Ministry as to a vital principle of administration, and the Ministry was afraid to resent it. The Lords saw their time, and vetoed Lord Morpeth's Irish Church Bill. The Ministry submitted to that also. Thereupon the Lords took courage to obstruct systematically, and Lord Lyndhurst in successive sessions summed up the bills which the Ministry had been unable to carry, taunted them with their impotence against the Lords, and bitterly insulted the Irish nation in order to aggravate the difficulties of the Whigs in power. The Whigs have never faltered in their belief that it was right and necessary to reform the Irish Church; yet for thirty years that have since passed they made no new attempt. Dread of the House of Lords has ever since held their hands. the Lords a real power in the empire? and is it not important to have that power act as a joint worker, not as an obstruction and a paralysis?

Are not then

To forbid all voting by proxy is evidently the first necessary thing. It is a high and great function to legislate for such an empire; and to vote without hearing deliberation is little else than contempt of fellow legislators and proud wilfulness. Again; no peer can soberly think that he is allowed such a function for his personal satisfaction, and that it rests with his caprice to fulfil it or neglect it. One who is habitually absent, really abdicates his function, like a king who leaves his country, or a magistrate who is never at his post. It would be a very safe measure, to pronounce that those peers who in any year were absent (say) nine hours out of ten, showed either disinclination or unfitness for the duty. If ill health was the cause, and the ill health was not transitory, it remains a good reason for relieving such peer of his functions.

At the same time, everything points to the wisdom of Lord Palmerston's move for the creation of life peers. Practically, in order to have in the House legal men competent to hear appeals, there is a constant effort after life peers; for it is notorious that those lawyers are preferred who are childless and likely to be childless. But a still more important point is, that the men who are to be our glory or our shame in the Upper House, should not be appointed because they are rich and have spent money in the cause of a party, nor because it will bring some indirect transitory convenience to a minister; but because they are such as will be a strength to their country, and such as the country will love to

honour. This will be attained, so far as any regulations can secure it, if a minister, before recommending any person to her Majesty for a peerage, be bound to ask of the Commons a vote in his favour, declaring that by reason of his public merit he is fit to become a legislator in the Upper House. The high honour would be coveted by all the foremost minds. The sons of peers would wish to be thus promoted in their father's lifetime. If those peers who have abdicated their duties were forbidden to vote by proxy, a large number of life peers would be visibly needed to fill the House reasonably; and alike by numbers and by talents they would take the real effective lead. Thus, with honour to the Upper House and without convulsion, it might be so regenerated, that there could be no impropriety, nor any public timidity, in calling it to new activities and nobler tasks, for the benefit of the empire, and with very conservative results for the upper classes and the throne.

MANY

MARRIAGE LAWS.

From "Fraser's Magazine," August 1867.

ANY reasons concur, making it not expedient only but highly important, that the topic of marriage should be treated fundamentally before popular audiences and in popular books. The teachers of religion, by dealing with it only dogmatically, briefly, and allusively, throw away the vast influence, which, if wisely informed, they might beneficially exercise and already it is manifest that with a formidable fraction of society they have lost all moral authority. Nor only so: but parents seldom feel themselves strong enough in knowledge to converse freely with their children and give them reasons for established restrictions. Young persons pick up opinions on the whole question rather from their companions and friends whose age is slightly in advance of their own, than from their parents or from any maturer and more fully furnished minds. That libertinism of the most demoralizing character flourishes in London, in Paris, and in New York, cannot be a secret; nor that it is confined to no grade of society. But alas, the chief cities do but impress the imagination more, by the scale of the evil: how much it is really less in smaller assemblages of mankind, is hard to say. One thing only is clear; that the theoretic morality both of the law of the land and of the Christian religion is systematically set at nought by masses of men too numerous to punish and too intelligent to despise; to whom no public argument is addressed; whom no pulpit denunciations affect or reach. And, what makes the evil more untractable, at the back of the offenders lies, as a force in reserve, a theory which they often imagine to justify them; a theory upheld by earnest persons of both sexes, hitherto wholly guiltless of transgression against the received moralities. Concerning opinion in France, Italy, and Germany, we shall not attempt to speak. It concerns us more, that among people who talk English and have Protestant Christianity for the basis of their moral culture, on both sides of the Atlantic, a theory has arisen concerning "free love," which,

however variously applied, in every case would supersede marriage. Meanwhile polygamy has burst out, not among the Mormons only, but among the ruder Americans who are in contact with polygamic Indians; and still more preposterous customs are in some sects practised in the name of religion. Evidently it is on American soil that the battle of old and new morality will most actively be fought; [but in the time of transition the most sacred virtues are not safe here, unless the whole question is opened to discussion and everything overstrained or unjust in existing institutions be removed. For undoubtedly nothing so insures a violent and pernicious overthrow, as the pertinacious maintenance of error, and the consecration of injustice.

It may be a dozen years since a young couple were married in the United States, who forthwith put into all the papers a protest against the tyranny of marriage. (We respect them too much to give the name here; we see it often foremost in philanthropic and virtuous work.) In the advertisement the husband disowned his right to expect "obedience" from his wife; and they jointly declared, that marriage was a thing between themselves and God, with which society and the law had nothing whatever to do. Such is the fundamental idea of "free love;" which with some will be matrimonial faithfulness, and with others wild caprice. It assumes that marriage, like friendship, is an affair essentially private, with which it is impertinent and offensive for the State or social opinion to interfere. The assumption is either a truth or a falsehood: until its falsehood is proved, we cannot take the first step in argument beyond; and when such a view is upheld in simple sincerity, by persons who have persuaded themselves that it would deliver us from the prevalent deplorable unchastity, they certainly have a right to expect a frank acceptance of their challenge. We trust that our readers need not fear in this article anything that can justly offend their taste. The most critical of the topics which we need to treat, are such as ought to be deliberately sifted by every prudent maiden.

While two persons live together as married, but without children, nothing appears of which the State must necessarily take cognizance. But unless such a condition of things were exceptional, human society would soon die out; and law must of course be framed on the assumption that offspring will be the result of unions. The instant that children are born, a duty of protection falls upon the State. Our morality has long ago passed