maintenance.  To give a man a family during his apprenticeship, whilst his very labor belongs to another,—­to give him a family, when you do not give him a fortune to maintain it,—­to give him a family before he can contract any one of those engagements without which no business can be carried on, would be to burden the state with families without any security for their maintenance.  When parents themselves marry their children, they become in some sort security to prevent the ill consequences.  You have this security in parental consent; the state takes its security in the knowledge of human nature.  Parents ordinarily consider little the passion of their children and their present gratification.  Don’t fear the power of a father:  it is kind to passion to give it time to cool.  But their censures sometimes make me smile,—­sometimes, for I am very infirm, make me angry:  saepe bilem, saepe jocum movent.

It gives me pain to differ on this occasion from many, if not most, of those whom I honor and esteem.  To suffer the grave animadversion and censorial rebuke of the honorable gentleman who made the motion, of him whose good-nature and good sense the House look upon with a particular partiality, whose approbation would have been one of the highest objects of my ambition,—­this hurts me.  It is said the Marriage Act is aristocratic.  I am accused, I am told abroad, of being a man of aristocratic principles.  If by aristocracy they mean the peers, I have no vulgar admiration, nor any vulgar antipathy towards them; I hold their order in cold and decent respect.  I hold them to be of an absolute necessity in the Constitution; but I think they are only good when kept within their proper bounds.  I trust, whenever there has been a dispute between these Houses, the part I have taken has not been equivocal.  If by the aristocracy (which, indeed, comes nearer to the point) they mean an adherence to the rich and powerful against the poor and weak, this would, indeed, be a very extraordinary part.  I have incurred the odium of gentlemen in this House for not paying sufficient regard to men of ample property.  When, indeed, the smallest rights of the poorest people in the kingdom are in question, I would set my face against any act of pride and power countenanced by the highest that are in it; and if it should come to the last extremity, and to a contest of blood,—­God forbid!  God forbid!—­my part is taken:  I would take my fate with the poor and low and feeble.  But if these people came to turn their liberty into a cloak for maliciousness, and to seek a privilege of exemption, not from power, but from the rules of morality and virtuous discipline, then I would join my hand to make them feel the force which a few united in a good cause have over a multitude of the profligate and ferocious.