Perhaps when it does, something more stringent will be determined on concerning our regulations as regards the marriage of criminals: those with insanity or inherited disease strongly marked on their family records; and those who have shown the tendency to the latter in their own persons.
SOME LEGISLATIVE REFORMS SUGGESTED BY LECTURE AND ARTICLE
Fifty years ago Newman was cutting and polishing his diamond scheme of legislative decentralization till its facets flashed to the lighted intellects of the world a thousand messages--a thousand clear-cut suggestions for the welfare of his country and the betterment of its legislation, as he firmly believed. He was never tired of urging it on the notice of his fellow men, never tired of pleading for it as a solution of many social difficulties, as a setting of many dislocations of our local systems. Perhaps there was no more earnest apostle of decentralization than was Francis Newman. But at the same time, to be fair to him, it should be said that, first, he threw light upon the old paths, and, secondly, showed where modern obstructions lay which seemed to him to hinder true progress. At all costs the fact must be kept well in view, he believed, that the paths were made for the men, not the men for the paths --a fact which is not always so well remembered as it should be to-day. Fifty years ago he published an article in _Fraser's Magazine_ on "Functions of an Upper House of Parliament." Eight years later he gave a brilliant lecture [Footnote: In the Athenaeum, Manchester.] on "Reorganizations of English Institutions." In this last he touched only briefly upon the former subject because of a notice by the metaphysical railings of his lecture that he was "to keep to the path," and not speak trenchantly on the question of the Upper House, because it would not have found an appreciative audience there!
To begin, however, first upon the article which came out in 1867. He affirmed that the House of Lords does, by its veto, exercise a very powerful, though unseen, influence over the administration of the country. He insisted on the urgent need of its becoming "a real, supreme, judicial court for maintaining the rights of the princes of India, and an authoritative expounder of the treaties which have passed between us and them." It will be seen why this step is called for when we recall the fact that in 1833 the Home Government signed a treaty in which it was definitely agreed that the professions in India should be open to the natives--a promise which has never been kept.