The Sun.
London, England, 1860-10-02 00:00:00

LATE

Across Piedmont, across Lombardy—Parma—
Modena—Tuscany—the "ErniHan Provinces—be-
yond the Neapolitan frontiers—southwards to the
Abruzzi—across Calabria—beyond the Straits of
Alessina—throughout Sicily, at turin, at Milan, at
Florence, at Naples, at Palermo, there flutters at this
moment from all the conspicuous watchtowers of
the Italian nation that tricoloured token and type
for Italy of her Unity and her Independence. The
work is already, we have said, more than half
achieved—shall it not now be fully and perfectly
accomplished ? Whether the Crown shall or shall
not be put to the task of its accomplishment rests,
we believe in our hearts, with the Italians them-
selves—but especially with the Chiefs of the Ita-
lians—above all, with the accord of the three fore-
most men of the nation—with the Soldier of Italy,
the Statesman, and the Sovereign—with GARI-
BALDI, CAYOUR, and VICTOR EMANNUEL. Those
who shall breed strife in the councils of these three
are the deadliest foes of Italian Unity and Italian
Independence. As for the three chiefs of men
themselves—they should aim now principally at
the most generous mutual concessions. The paths
they have until now trodden have hitherto run
parallel to each other—and have thereby made one
broad and noble highway for the Italian race to
traverse in its rapid and uninterrupted advance
towards the final goal of the national Independence.
The disastrous interruption of their triumphal
march together along those heretofore parallel
paths can commence only from the point of their
divergence!

Lord DEBBY, with all his splendid talents, is him-
self deeply prejudiced on Church matters, and that
he wished to please the High Church Bishops.
To the reason, or rather pretext, assigned there
are two objections. The case adverted to would
not, as we conceive, touch the colonial question.
The issue to be decided on appeal to the Lords, is
whether persons, leaving England to marry in a
State where the marriages prohibited here are law-
ful, can sustain their legality in England. But the
point between the colonists and the Government is
whether their laws on the subject must be
identical with those of the mother-country.
They desire to be a State in which
such marriages are lawful ; which surely has not,
fairly, anything to do with the legal question
whether resorting to other countries to evade the
prohibitions of an English Act of Parliament enables
the parties really to get free from its penalties. To
us it appears the very shallowest of pretences, and
we wonder Lord STANLEY was not ashamed to be
the channel of its transmission to the colonists; and
to allege this irrelevant issue as a reason for advis-
ing the QUEEN to do what she is never advised to at
home—to exercise her veto on a bill which has
passed the two houses.
But this includes, indeed, the second objection—
that England certainly intended, in giving her
colonies constitutions, to make them entirely inde-
pendent in regard to their own internal manage-
ment. Now, we cannot conceive how diversity of
views, and legislation on the degrees of affinity and
consanguinity, within which marriage is permitted,
can be other than an affair of any community
which forms, like a colony, a social whole.
There is no State Church in South Australia ; and
the vast majority of Colonists, are, we believe, Dis-
senters. They have a Bishop, who of course
acted the same part as Bishops, with some honour-
able exceptions, do here ; at least as well
as his position enabled him. He could not vote,
but he could, and did, petition for enforcing the
Canon of his Church on those who utterly repudiate
it as sheer superstition. But he was the only
petitioner ! Not one even of his clergy joined
him. But all would not avail. The colonists
this year, and after the election of a new
Parliament, have passed again the Bill of
1858, and it is now, we presume, in the hands of
her MAJESTY'S Ministers; since we have the ac-
count of its finally passing both Houses on the 21st
of July. We hope the present Government, the
more liberal character of which was several
times adverted to in the colonial debate, will not
imitate its predecessors. Its leaders have avowed
themselves favourable to the abolition of the re-
striction in this country ; the Premier has done so
in very strong language, even speaking of these mar-
riages as desirable. But over and above the special
grounds, it would be strange, indeed, if we could
not trust a Liberal Ministry to put the most
liberal construction on the rights of the colo-
nists. The QUEEN might quite as reasonably
have interposed to prohibit vote by ballot and
universal suffrage, or what there is tantamount to
it, as to prohibit the colonists marrying according
to their own conceptions of what is proper and
advantageous. As to the validity of such mar-
riages in this country, it were surely but due to
colonial legislative independence to regard them,
in this respect, in the light of those countries where
such marriages are legal. We never deny the validity
of marriages which are contracted there between
natives or naturalised persons. Let the same rule
apply to South Australia, or to any ether colony
which passes similar acts, so long as our law remains
unaltered. Between persons who become bonafide
citizens of the colony, the marriage should be held
in our courts as a marriage would between two
persons in the same relation, citizens of Altona.
This question, then, raises a very important point
as to the independence of the legislation of our
numerous, intelligent, and hereafter to become
powerful colonies, and it is much to be desired that
the inhabitants of South Australia will, temperately,-
yet decisively, assert their reasonable and constitu-
tional privileges.

The legislative rights of the colonies are about to
be tested by a question we have not unfrequently
discussed in our columns, the Amendment of the
Marriage Law. There is now, so far as we are
aware, but one point on which the community
feels much solicitude in regard to the present state
of the law, in which the House of Lords, or
rather we may say the House of Bishops, resists
its declared wishes. Repeatedly, and by increasing
numbers, the constitutional representatives of the
nation have affirmed the desirableness of legalising
marriage with a deceased wife's sister; but the Lords,
at the instance of its most High Church bishops,
have, though by decreasing numbers, rejected the
bill. The true position of the question, now,
in England is the Bishops of EXETER and
OXFORD, with some aid from Tory partizanship
and from antiquated bigotry, versus the genuine
Protestantism, the liberality, the intelligence,
we may add the morality and religion of the
country. For the fact is undisputed, that per-
sons of the best character for religion and morality
frequently contract these marriages, and the mass
of the community encourage and approve.
_ _

In making these remarks we are not speaking at
random. The Marriage Bill has been before
the House of Lords four times ; and the following
table will show that not only the lay opposition,
but that of the Bishops' also, has each expressed
itself by diminishing majorities :-
1851. 1856. 1858. 1859.
The vote against the bill was, 50 43 46 49
The vote for the Bill, l6 19 22 39
Bishops against the bill
Bishops for the bill
Number of Lay Peers against, 3O 31 39 41

Majority against, without the
Bishops .. .. 15 12 17 6
So that the majority of hereditary Peers agains
the bill in 1859 was only 6.
In regard to the other point, those great Christian
bodies in England who are not fettered by
the canons of the Church, are unanimous in de-
manding the repeal of the present law ; and it will
not be pretended, even by their opponents, that the
great Nonconformist Churches of the country, so
large a part of them the descendants of the ancient
Puritans, and all of them disposed to press the very
letter of scripture to the utmost, are not classes of
men distinguished for morality and religion. The
same fact is apparent in the petitions which
have been presented to Parliament. We
will not now advert to the vastly greater
number in favour of repeal of the restrictive law,
but to the character of the petitions ; we will refer
too, only to the last returns, those for this yea
because they show the present state of feeling
among the class whom no perversity or bigotry
could deem capable of sanctioning anything morally
and socially objectionable.
In the returns of public petitions for the 15th of
August this year, we find a long list indeed—five
hundred and two petitions-113 of them from corpo-
rations and other public bodies in the boroughs and
towns of England, some signed officially, with the
common seal; some including a considerable number
of the inhabitants, very few indeed wanting the
signature of the Mayor, or of the Aldermen, or other
heads of the town. Tho number of the signatures
amounts to 49,499. It is not on the large
number, however, that we lay stress. Their
character is the point. We affirm, and
we defy contradiction—that a law which
pretends to stigmatise as immoral, what such a
number, of such a class of Englishmen, pronounced
by the fact of their petitions to be moral, is itself a
bad and immoral law. If the moral judgments of
the elite of the burgesses of England are not to be
trusted in a matter of legislation, we know not to
what standard we can appeal. Obviously no law
can persuade men of the guilt of an act to whose
innocence, to whose desirableness, indeed, in so
many cases, the most respectable persons in the
kingdom testify by thousands. Were we indeed
amongst the doubters or opponents of the morality
of the marriages in question, we should, as advo-
cates of religious liberty, protest against forcing
our standard of morality on others. Enough to
obey ourselves our own scruples and convictions;
but it is neither in scripture nor in reason that we
should judge another man's liberty, and especially
it is not for us to enforce our scruples on others by
fearful civil penalties—just because we could secure
the votes of a few bishops, in a house too where half
the worshippers of England are unrepresented.
While such is the position of the question in
England, one of our legislatively independent colo-
nies takes it up on its own account. Two years
ago the colony of South Australia passed an Act to
legalise the marriages under discussion. So far as
we can understand, and the colonial debates seem
to sustain this view, the colony of South Australia
is not bound by the Act of 1835, and it must there-
fore be amenable only to the old state of the law by
which such marriages were voidable during the life
of both parties by proceedings in an ecclesiastical
court. There are, however, no ecclesiastical courts,
indeed, no State Church in South Australia, and
while, therefore, the law remains as it is, the
penalties of the Act of 1835 would be.operative
only if the parties returned to England. Be this
as it may, a Colonial Act was passed in 1858,
by which marriage with a deceased wife's
sister was definitively made legal in the
colony. The Governor reserved his assent
till the Act had been laid before her MAJESTY—
that is before the Government of the day. Unhap-
pily for the Australians, the party with whom the
majority of the Bishops vote, Lord DERBY'S, was
then in power. And, as might be expected, a pre-
text was found for not giving the QUEEN'S
sanction to the Act. The pretext was, that a case
was pending in the law courts here, the decision.on
which would settle the question of the legality of
the Act. The real reason as certainly, was, that

THE SUN, LONDON, TUESDAY EVENING, OCTOBER 2, 1880
ri 3

....R--~

The following telegrams have been received at
Mr. Reuter's office

ROME, SEPT. 28, EVENING
(VIA MARSEILLES).

A secret Consistory of Cardinals was held to-day.
The Pope delivered an allocution, concerning which
nothing is yet known.

A long conference between Cardinal Antonelli
and the French Ambassador took place to-day.
The only provinces still under the Papal Govern-
ment are Civita Vecchia, Frosinone, and Velletri.
It is said that the Papal Government has given
up the idea of defending the two latter against the
Sardinians should they pass through them to pro-
ceed to Naples.

The head-quarters of the Sardinian army will be
at Aquilla, the officers of the commissariat having
already arrived there.

MARSEILLES, OCT. 2.

The Journal of Naples, received here, states that
out of 000 Garibaldians who defended Cajazzo 100
only escaped by swimming across the river.
The citadel of Messina reopened fire upon the
city on the 24th ult., in order, it was said, to secure
the supply of provisions.

PARIS, OCT. 1.

M. Thouvenel tendered his resignation to the
Emperor while at Ajaccio, insisting that a more
efficacious protection should be granted to the Pope.
Since the return of the Emperor and the reply
given to the Duke de Cadoro, M. Thouvenel has
withdrawn his resignation.

TURIN, OCT. 1.

King Victor Emmanuel will pass the night at
Forli, and will leave to-morrow for Ravenna, where
his Majesty will embark for Ancona.
The conditions of the capitulation of Ancona are
not yet known at Turin.
The Sardinians found 140. cannon and 700,000 f.
in the fortress.

Letters from Naples to the 27th ult., state that
the new Ministry formed by Garibaldi comprises
Signori Bianco, Guira, and Ferrioni.
The deputation from Sicily has arrived at Turin.

PARIS, MONDAY EVENING

The Petrie announces that further armaments
have been ordered at the Austrian ports in the
Adriatic,

The same paper says :—"lt is said that the King
of Sardinia, after having visited Ancona, will pro-
ceed towards the Neapolitan frontier."