entry thereof in manner herein prescribed during the period of two months thereafter, shall be liable in a penalty of fifty pounds, and in default of payment thereof to suffer imprisonment for one month." We cannot help thinking that the Registration Bill, from which we have just quoted, has been framed without any view to the purpose which its machinery is to serve under the Marriage Bill, of not merely registering a marriage otherwise constituted, but also of actually constituting the marriage that is to be registered. There is a gap apparently left between the two Bills, and at least there is something that appears very blank and meagre in the provision made for extra-ecclesiastical marriages to be contracted in the registrar's presence. We presume that this officer is not to judge what ceremony or declaration shall constitute a marriage; if he were to do so new difficulties would arise: but we take it for granted that if asked by the contracting parties to register them as married persons, the registrar must immediately obey, when the entry will of itself marry them, whether they were married or not before. There is certainly something startling in a system of registration which does not precisely settle the antecedent matter on which it is to act; and it is still more singular to consider mere registration as constituting in itself the very thing that is to be registered. But it seems to be so written in the Bill before us. Various other observations will occur as to the imperfect structure of the two Acts thus taken in connexion; but we pass over these minor matters to point out the characteristic principles of this measure, and the consequences which we think it involves. It will be seen, first, that it declares marriage to be constituted by mere registration to all effects and purposes, so that two parties thus entered in the register, are conclusively and irrevocably united by that simple fact. Second, that it professes no preference, and shows no favour for ecclesiastical marriages over those constituted by simple contract or mere registration, the old-fashioned mode of solemnising, them by a clergyman being merely saved from abolition, but shorn of all its privileges, and left, as it were, to die out in due time. Third, that in registration marriages, no proclamation of banns is required, and no notice of any kind is given to the public, nor any interval for deliberation forced upon the parties. Fourth, that no locality is assigned within which the parties may thus marry by registration, it being competent apparently to carry out the arrangement in any district however distant from their ordinary abode, by requiring, in a somewhat Irish fashion, "the registrar of the subdistrict within which such marriage HAS BEEN contracted to attend _at the contraction_."