But if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and disunions; if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, then the connection of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its evils are greater than its benefits.  There is nothing immoral in this separation.  Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spirit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice.  Love is free:  to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed:  such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from all inquiry.  The language of the votarist is this:  The woman I now love may be infinitely inferior to many others; the creed I now profess may be a mass of errors and absurdities; but I exclude myself from all future information as to the amiability of the one and the truth of the other, resolving blindly, and in spite of conviction, to adhere to them.  Is this the language of delicacy and reason?  Is the love of such a frigid heart of more worth than its belief?

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 one whom they find it impossible to love, spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts to appear otherwise than they are, for the sake of the feelings of their partner or the welfare of their mutual offspring:  those of less generosity and refinement openly avow their disappointment, and linger out the remnant of that union, which only death can dissolve, in a state of incurable bickering and hostility.  The early education of their children takes its colour from the squabbles of the parents; they are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence, and falsehood.  Had they been suffered to part at the moment when indifference rendered their union irksome, they would have been spared many years of misery:  they would have connected themselves more suitably, and would have found that happiness in the society of more congenial partners which is for ever denied them by the despotism of marriage.  They would have been separately useful and happy members of society, who, whilst united, were miserable and rendered misanthropical by misery.  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.