The principal arguments by which Shelley brought himself to this conclusion comprise,--(_a_) Arguments based on consideration of the misery and moral injury coming to spouses, who are constrained to live together after ceasing to love one another; (_b_) arguments based on consideration of the happiness withheld by matrimonial law from uncongenial spouses, who, were it not for that law, would part company and find felicity or contentment with other mates; (_c_) arguments drawn from consideration of the moral injury resulting from legal wedlock to spouses, who are rendered careless of one another’s feelings by the sense of security from the proper and natural punishment of habitual perversity and ill-humour; whereas the overbearing husband would restrain his tyrannical disposition, if he knew his wife could leave him should he worry her beyond endurance, and in like manner the scolding wife would put a bridle on her tongue, if she knew her lord could dismiss her at a moment’s notice, and engage another woman in her place; (_d_) arguments arising from a consideration of the misery and evils resulting from marriage to individuals, other than unhappily mated husbands and wives. (9) Of all his arguments against marriage, the one which Shelley valued perhaps most highly was the argument, grounded on his conviction that lawful wedlock and its attendant errors were accountable for prostitution, and that to sweep away the former would be to put an end to the latter. Were matrimony put on a natural footing, and made an estate from which the dissatisfied spouse could retire as easily as from any ordinary commercial contract, young men, no longer afraid to commit themselves to the perils of familiar association with modest and accomplished women, would cease to have intercourse with abandoned women. Liberated from the debasing sentiment of chastity, which retains them in servile bondage to men whom they secretly abhor, women would pass without dishonour to men, whom they could love and who would gladly provide themselves with virtuous mates on reasonable terms. The men put at liberty to take new spouses would often find them in girls, who under the existing restrictions and temptations become lodgers in immoral houses. Under Free-Love ‘the social evil’ would soon disappear, partly through the livelier masculine repugnance to feminine immorality, and partly through the larger demand for virtuous female spouses.