In these times when fact rules, not the fiction of a long past, there can be little excuse for keeping back the clock in the matter of legitimation. If a man has lived with an honest woman and had children by her, he ought to be able to give those children every possible privilege and right by performing with their mother the simple requirements of the law relating to marriage. The Private Act of Parliament now needful to satisfy the English law should be made as obsolete as the Private Act of Parliament required to secure a divorce before the year 1858. Great benefit would accrue to the community by the easy change suggested. It is not possible to fathom or gauge the magnitude of a thing like the illicit union. It exists here and there among all classes. Where there are children, there would be a distinct incitement, were legitimation by subsequent marriage in force, to the legal tie. The artistic temperament, for want of a better name, is responsible for many such unions, and their legalisation would be a temptation to a man who desires to leave his name and blood on the earth without having to start afresh with some other woman on the legal system. The healthy and characteristic appearance of his own living stock are forceful incentives towards freeing it from all disability in law, the more so, when he knows that the mother was, and is, moral in instinct and in fact. In his _Roman Law_, Lord Mackenzie makes some interesting references to the theme. “Apart from the effect of legitimation,” he writes, “the Roman law only considered those children lawful at their birth who were begotten in marriage. It is a peculiarity of the English law that it does not concern itself with the conception, but considers a child legitimate who is born of parents married before the time of birth, though they were unmarried when he was begotten.... The legitimation of children _per subsequens matrimonium_ originated in a constitution of Constantine, which has not reached us, though its tenor is given in a law of the Emperor Zeno, who renewed it. The import of it was, that persons who had been living in a state of concubinage, which was then a condition of society not condemned by Roman customs, might, by entering into marriage, render the children born in that state legitimate, provided the woman was _ingenua_, or free-born, and the man had not already children of a lawful wife. The general object of this law probably was to encourage persons who had been living in concubinage to enter into marriage. Justinian extended the law of Constantine, by declaring that children born in concubinage should be legitimate generally, whether the father had legitimate children by a lawful wife or not; and he removed the distinction as to the woman being _ingenua_ or _libertina_. The children so legitimated were subjected to the paternal power, and entitled to all the rights of lawful children.... By Roman law the privilege of legitimation _per