e inconvenience to those private families wherein they
happen. On the other hand, restraints upon marriage, especially among
the lower class, are evidently detrimental to the public, by hindering
the encrease of people; and to religion and morality, by encouraging
licentiousness and debauchery among the single of both sexes; and
thereby destroying one end of society and government, which is,
_concubitu prohibere vago_. And of this last inconvenience the Roman
laws were so sensible, that at the same time that they forbad marriage
without the consent of parents or guardians, they were less rigorous
upon that very account with regard to other restraints: for, if a
parent did not provide a husband for his daughter, by the time she
arrived at the age of twenty five, and she afterwards made a slip in
her conduct, he was not allowed to disinherit her upon that account;
"_quia non sua culpa, sed parentum, id commisisse cognoscitur_[u]."

[Footnote n: 6 & 7 W. III. c. 6. 7 & 8 W. III. c. 35. 10 Ann. c. 19.]

[Footnote o: _Ff._ 23. 2. 2, & 18.]

[Footnote p: _Ff._ 1. 5. 11.]

[Footnote q: _Cod._ 5. 4. 1, & 20.]

[Footnote r: _Inst._ 1. 10. 1.]

[Footnote s: Domat, of dowries Sec. 2. Montesq. Sp. L. 23. 7.]

[Footnote t: _Vinnius in Inst._ _l._ 1. _t._ 10.]

[Footnote u: _Nov._ 115. Sec. 11.]

4. A FOURTH incapacity is want of reason; without a competent share of
which, as no other, so neither can the matrimonial contract, be valid.
Idiots and lunatics, by the old common law, might have married[w];
wherein it was manifestly defective. The civil law judged much more
sensibly, when it made such deprivations of reason a previous
impediment; though not a cause of divorce, if they happened after
marriage[x]. This defect in our laws is however remedied with regard
to lunatics, and persons under frenzies, by the express words of the
statute 15 Geo. II. c. 30. and idiots, if not within the letter of the
statute, are at least within the reason of it.

[Footnote w: 1 Roll. Abr. 357.]

[Footnote x: _Ff._ 23. _tit._ 1. _l._ 8. & _tit._ 2. _l._ 16.]

LASTLY, the parties must not only be willing, and able, to contract,
but actually must contract themselves in due form of law, to make it a
good civil marriage. Any contract made, _per verba de praesenti_, or
in words of the present tense, and in case of cohabitation _per verba
de futuro_ also, between persons able to contract, was before the late
act deemed a valid marriage to many