ience of successive generations. It combined with felicitous skill
representative with local government; it secured uniformity in working,
and that peculiarly English principle of publicity, without which the
best-devised system cannot long be preserved from degeneracy.

The Church reforms in England and Ireland, which were carried out about
the same time, cannot be said to have involved any constitutional
principle, though one of them greatly extended the principle of
religious toleration and indulgence to the Dissenters of various sects.
No alteration had been made in the Marriage Act of 1754, which declared
it indispensable to the validity of a marriage that it should be
performed in a church and by a clergyman of the Established Church. And
it was not strange that this should be felt as a grievance by those who
were not in communion with that Church. But some of the Dissenting sects
had an additional cause of discontent in the words of the marriage
service, which gave a religious character to the ceremony, while they
regarded it as a civil contract. In his short administration Sir Robert
Peel had recognized the validity of the arguments against the unmodified
maintenance of the existing law, and had framed a measure calculated, in
his view, to give the Dissenters the relief their title to which could
not be denied. But his bill had been extinguished by his retirement. And
Lord John Russell now availed himself of the machinery of another
measure, which he introduced at the same time, to make the relief
somewhat wider and more effective.

Hitherto there was no record of births and marriages beyond that which
was preserved in the registers of different parishes, which in former
years had in many instances been carelessly and inaccurately kept. But
at the beginning of 1836, the ministers, justly urging that it was
important, in a national point of view, both with regard to the security
of titles to property, and to that knowledge of the state of population
the value of which was recognized by the establishment of the practice
of taking a decennial census, that there should be a general register of
all such occurrences, introduced a bill to establish a registry and
registrar in every Poor-law union, with a farther registry for each
county, and a chief or still more general one in London for the whole
kingdom, subject to the authority of the Poor-law Commissioners. And by
a second bill they farther proposed that the regis