do you not? I think so. It is necessary and important so to fence round the sanctity of the domestic hearth upon the subject of marriage as to make safe and secure, as far as law can do so, the unrestrained and peculiarly affectionate intercourse which ought to exist for the happiness of families between the closest and nearest relations. If the principle be a right one, of course it extends to all the immediate members of one's own family. We know that the brutal passions of some of the lowest order of mankind are capable of overleaping even the natural barriers which exist between parent and child, between brother and sister. But as a general rule the repugnance to such unnatural relations is so great that they would be rare even if no prohibitory laws existed. When, however, you pass from these closest relationships, everybody feels that legal prohibitions are necessary and salutary. The moment you go a little further in the circle of relationship the power of the prohibitory law becomes stronger, because, the more remote the connection, the more important it is to fence it. Take the case of uncle and niece. We know that in some countries dispensations are granted for such marriages; and there the principle of such unions being admitted men are not restrained by natural repugnance from forming them. You want a fence in such a case. You want it peculiarly in cases of affinity, for the very reason that in those cases the natural repugnance is less strong. But the question is asked, "Do you want any prohibition in cases of affinity at all?" Surely you do. Is not the wife to associate in your home with her sisters, and her mother, and her daughters, on the same footing as before? Or do you wish that marriage shall make a difference in the position of the wife and her sisters, when she feels that one of them may become the possible wife of her husband? So with regard to the husband's brother. Is he to be only a brother to the wife, or to be looked on as a possible husband to the wife? The truth is, that the husband and the wife are so united that you cannot make their intercourse with their own brothers and sisters really sisterly and brotherly—you cannot make it unrestrained—unless you apply the same rule to both of them. That is the principle on which the law has proceeded, and I say it is a most wise and salutary law that you should carry the fence as far in favour of the relatives of the wife as of the relatives of the husband, so that the two may be thoroughly identified, and the intercourse which is perfectly unrestrained as to the one should be equally unrestrained as to the other. Is it possible, and would it be safe, that a husband should treat a wife's sisters as his own if he were allowed to marry them? And would not children suffer as well as husbands and wives? What is the real meaning of the argument that wives' sisters would prove the best stepmothers the
