Mr. Broadhurst, on Tuesday, carried a• resolution in favour of
a measure of relief to repeal the law against marriage with a deceased wife's sister, by a majority of II1 (238 against 127). He maintained strongly that the present, law does press most hardly on the working classes in preventing second marriages which would Secure the children of. the previous marriage a kind step-mother, and showed that he had found it far easier to• obtain a much more numerously signed _petition in favour of such marriages in the borough he represents (Stoke-upon- Trent) than Dr. MacLagan (the Bishop of Lichfield) had been able to obtain by painfully canvassing his whole diocese against such marriages. But the most remarkable speech made in favour of the resolution was that of. Mr. E. Clarke (M.P.. for Plymouth),' a strong Conservative, who professed in eloquent terms 'his deep attachment to the Church of England,—an attachment far transcending, he said, any political tie. Yet he held it so inischievosis to refuse the repeal of the law for- bidding these marriages; that he believed it might lead tcs. attempts of the State to interfere with the Established Church, if such an ecclesiastical marriage law as the present. were permitted to retain its legal validity. Certainly it does seem very hard. that an ecclesiastical law which does not bind Dis- senters' consciences at all, and which seems to most of them purely capricious, should be binding on them only because it does bind the consciences of certain members of the Church of England, and because it was accepted as the law of the land at a time when Dissenters were unknown.
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