Let us suppose all the causes of misery and vice in this island removed.  War and contention cease.  Unwholesome trades and manufactories do not exist.  Crowds no longer collect together in great and pestilent cities for purposes of court intrigue, of commerce, and vicious gratifications.  Simple, healthy, and rational amusements take place of drinking, gaming, and debauchery.  There are no towns sufficiently large to have any prejudicial effects on the human constitution.  The greater part of the happy inhabitants of this terrestrial paradise live in hamlets and farmhouses scattered over the face of the country.  Every house is clean, airy, sufficiently roomy, and in a healthy situation.  All men are equal.  The labours of luxury are at end.  And the necessary labours of agriculture are shared amicably among all.  The number of persons, and the produce of the island, we suppose to be the same as at present.  The spirit of benevolence, guided by impartial justice, will divide this produce among all the members of the society according to their wants.  Though it would be impossible that they should all have animal food every day, yet vegetable food, with meat occasionally, would satisfy the desires of a frugal people and would be sufficient to preserve them in health, strength, and spirits.

Mr Godwin considers marriage as a fraud and a monopoly.  Let us suppose the commerce of the sexes established upon principles of the most perfect freedom.  Mr Godwin does not think himself that this freedom would lead to a promiscuous intercourse, and in this I perfectly agree with him.  The love of variety is a vicious, corrupt, and unnatural taste and could not prevail in any great degree in a simple and virtuous state of society.  Each man would probably select himself a partner, to whom he would adhere as long as that adherence continued to be the choice of both parties.  It would be of little consequence, according to Mr Godwin, how many children a woman had or to whom they belonged.  Provisions and assistance would spontaneously flow from the quarter in which they abounded, to the quarter that was deficient. (See Bk VIII, ch. 8; in the third edition, Vol ii, p. 512) And every man would be ready to furnish instruction to the rising generation according to his capacity.

I cannot conceive a form of society so favourable upon the whole to population.  The irremediableness of marriage, as it is at present constituted, undoubtedly deters many from entering into that state.  An unshackled intercourse on the contrary would be a most powerful incitement to early attachments, and as we are supposing no anxiety about the future support of children to exist, I do not conceive that there would be one woman in a hundred, of twenty-three, without a family.