ality,
and unreserve."

He then urges:

"A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they
love each other. Any law which should bind them to
cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their
affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most
unworthy of toleration; and there is nothing _immoral_ in
this separation, for love is free. To promise forever to
love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to
believe the same creed."

He states categorically that

"The present system of constraint does no more, in the
majority of instances, than make hypocrites or open enemies.
Persons of delicacy and virtue, unhappily united to those
whom they find it impossible to love, spend the loveliest
season of their lives in unproductive efforts to appear
otherwise than they are, for the sake of the feelings of
their partners or the welfare of their mutual offspring; and
that the early education of their children takes its color
from the squabbles of the parents. They are nursed in a
systematic school of ill-humor, violence, and falsehood, and
the conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the
strongest of all temptations to the perverse. They indulge
without restraint in acrimony and all the little tyrannies
of domestic life, when they know that their victim is
without appeal. If this connection were put on a rational
basis, each would be assured that habitual ill-temper would
terminate in separation, and would check this vicious and
dangerous propensity."

He conceived from the re-arrangement of the marriage relation by
greater facility of divorce than was to be had sixty years ago,[F]

"A fit and natural arrangement would result."

[Footnote F: It should be remembered that in Shelley's day divorce was
obtainable by the most wealthy only, at an enormous cost and by a
lengthy process, precluding the slightest opportunity for the middle
and poorer classes to avail themselves thereof.]

Shelley by no means asserts that the intercourse would be promiscuous,
but on the contrary believed that from the relation of parent to child
a union is generally of longer duration, placed on such a footing, and
marked above all others with generosity and self-devotion.

We are on the eve of great religious changes, which must consequently
disturb all the social