Page:Vindicationoflaw00hath.djvu/70

62 It prevented the calling in question the legitimacy of the offspring of marriages then existing, and applied to all such marriages, though the parents might be living, the same rule that our Courts of Common Law had always applied when one parent had died; but it left the marriage invalid, and the parents punishable for incest. I again appeal to the judgment in Fenton v. Livingstone as showing that at no time has any such marriage been otherwise than invalid and incestuous in England.

Let me here repeat, for it cannot be too often stated, seeing the persevering efforts made by the Anonymous Society for altering our marriage law to mislead the public, that the Law of England has never made any difference between the degrees of incest,—that we are now invited for the first time to pick and choose from the prohibited degrees. If a man before Lord Lyndhurst's Act married his own mother or sister, and had a child by her, yet after the death of either parent nothing (short of an Act of Parliament) could declare the child illegitimate. After Lord Lyndhurst's Act, the children of any such odious union then existing would have been also freed for ever from the possibility of being declared illegitimate, though both their parents were alive. That Act, however, provided, in my judgment most wisely and humanely, that, in future, the legitimate status should not be acquired by the form of marriage being gone through in any case of incestuous marriages. From