But though in this particular it is possible that the bill might have been improved, it must be allowed to have been a measure very creditable to its framers.  Few reforms have been conceived in a more judicious and more moderate spirit; few have been so carefully limited to the removal of real and proved abuses, and the prevention of their recurrence, while avoiding any concessions to the insidious demands of revolutionists, or the ill-regulated fancies of metaphysical theorists.  It was a reform strictly in accordance with some of the most important principles of the constitution, as they have been gradually developed by the practical experience 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