_Marriage-Prohibitions in Past Times._--The marriage-prohibitions of former times may be classified under two heads, ecclesiastical and civil. The leading principle of the canon law of marriage is the limitation to monogamy of the permissible forms of the sexual relationship. More strictly, indeed, we may say, the limitation to ecclesiastical marriage. Marriage is a sacrament, and therefore indissoluble; it conforms to ecclesiastical law only when certain formalities have been observed, and when no ecclesiastical prohibition has been infringed (differences in religious belief, broken vows, &c.). Civil marriage prohibitions date chiefly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They owe their origin to the fear lest parents should allow their offspring to become chargeable to the community, and especially to the poor-law authorities. Such marriage-prohibitions, of course, concerned chiefly the lower classes of the population, and especially mendicants, prostitutes, persons in receipt of poor relief, persons of disorderly life, offenders against the criminal law. A marriage concluded in defiance of such prohibitions involved the deprivation of certain legal rights, and also rendered the offenders liable to punishment. To-day, in the sphere of marriage-law, ecclesiastical law has largely lost significance, and continues to lose what little it still possesses, so that its marriage-prohibitions are coming to possess little more than historical interest. The civil marriage prohibitions were repealed in the nineteenth century, because they were found to have no other effect than to increase the number of illegal unions and the births of illegitimate children, and because they merely increased the burdens upon the poor-law. Even in the nineteenth century, however, certain political parties--the Conservatives, for example--desire that these civil prohibitions should be reintroduced, but in this form, that the marriage of persons actually in receipt of poor relief should be forbidden, or that persons belonging to the lower classes should be allowed to marry only when able to demonstrate the possession of a small capital.