No form or ceremony, civil or religious; no notice before, or publication after; no cohabitation, no writing, no witnesses even, are essential to the constitution of this, the most important contract which two persons can enter into.'-- There is a Scotch judge's own statement of the law that he administers! Observe, at the same time, if you please, that we make full legal provision in Scotland for contracts affecting the sale of houses and lands, horses and dogs.
The only contract which we leave without safeguards or precautions of any sort is the contract that unites a man and a woman for life.

As for the authority of parents, and the innocence of children, our law recognizes no claim on it either in the one case or in the other.

A girl of twelve and a boy of fourteen have nothing to do but to cross the Border, and to be married--without the interposition of the slightest delay or restraint, and without the slightest attempt to inform their parents on the part of the Scotch law.

As to the marriages of men and women, even the mere interchange of consent which, as you have just heard, makes them man and wife, is not required to be directly proved: it may be proved by inference.

And, more even than that, whatever the law for its consistency may presume, men and women are, in point of fact, held to be married in Scotland where consent has never been interchanged, and where the parties do not even know that they are legally held to be married persons.