The Committee on the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill on Wednesday
was talked out by the opponents of the Bill, and thus, we fear, the chance of passing it this year has vanished, A curious episode of the discussion was a very sharp collision between Mr. Chamberlain and. the Home Secretary, in which, as it seems to us, Mr. Matthews was theoretically right, though he took a line which we regret, and which is certainly not the line usually taken by the Roman Catholic Church to which he belongs. It is true that a dispensation is required by Rome for any marriage between a man and his deceased wife's sister ; but the dispensation is always granted, and there is no general feeling at all amongst the Roman Catholic priesthood at large that such mar- riages are contrary to natural feeling or ecclesiastical principle. On the other hand, Mr. Chamberlain seems to us to go much too far in asserting that, because the pro- posed Bill would repeal the old law against these marriages, it condemns the old law as radically unjust. It only declares it to have been, on the whole, impolitic, not unjust, and does not at all excuse those who, while it was law, deliberately broke it. Mr. Chamberlain might just as well say that when we repeal a high import duty on the ground that it is im- politic, we admit it to have been radically unjust, and that we
ought therefore, so far as possible, to relieve smugglers who broke the law from the consequences of their defiance of the law.
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