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who have regretted their disobedience of the law shall be forced back into their original illegal relations. Then another difficulty presented itself to the framers of the Bill. What are we to do with respect to rights of property, vested and expectant? You cannot take away from a remainder-man that which by law belongs to him. There may be remainders vested in expectancy in real or personal estates under settlement. If there was a daughter of the first marriage with the deceased sister, she would be entitled in remainder to settled property, whether real or personal, in preference to any sons of the sister whose marriage you are asked to legalise; and all the children of the first marriage, or even uncles, nephews, or cousins, would take a succession exclusively of the issue of the second marriage. It would be otherwise if the issue of the second marriage were legitimate. So the Bill says that all existing equitable and contingent rights shall remaim the same after the passing of the Bill—in other words, that, while for some purposes the children of these marriages will be recognised by the law as such, they will not be so recognised for other purpose. They are to be still illegitimate as regards estates under settlement; but in other cases they are to be legitimate; so that you establish them in inconsistent relations under the same Bill. I think I have said enough to show that if your Lordships should at any time be persuaded, contrary to my own conviction, that the main principle of the Bill is right, you must set to work to give effect to your wish in a totally different manner. You must not by retrospective legislation try to render legal that which was not lawful and cannot properly be made so. You must consider how far your principle ought to go, and I am sure you can never stop short of the abolition of all marriages of affinity. If so, let the existing prohibitions be removed in an intelligible and consistent measure. Do not let us have piecemeal legislation concerning so important a matter, for the main purpose of giving to persons who have broken the law the same relief as if they had obeyed the law. I will now, with your Lordships' permission, say something as to the main principle involved in this question. I have said that all members of society are interested in it—not only those who have married or are wishing to marry their deceased wives' sisters, but those who have not done so, and are not desirous of doing so. Every married man whose wife has sisters has an interest in that condition of society which is produced by the state of law which makes his wife's sister his "sister-in-law." Our popular expression exactly hits the principle. The law makes the wife's sister his sister, and if you alter the law the wife's sister for domestic purpose will be his sister no longer. Do you want prohibitory laws against marriage without any degrees of relationship, or