“Love withers under constraint; its very essence is liberty; it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear; it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve. How long, then, ought the sexual connexion to last? What law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration? 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.”[190] He then proceeds to attack the conventional morality so intimately associated with coercive marriage, and concludes with the words: “Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law. A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage. I conceive that from the abolition of marriage, the fit and natural arrangement of sexual connexion would result. =I by no means assert that the intercourse would be promiscuous=; on the contrary, it appears, from the relation of parent to child, that this union is generally of long duration, and marked above all others with generosity and self-devotion.”[191] Here, also, we find the expression of the firm conviction that in the freedom of love is to be found an assured guarantee for its durability! Later, also, the English Pre-Raphaelites, especially John Ruskin, advocated free love, and maintained that the sacredness of these natural bonds lay in their very essence. It is love which first makes marriage legal, not marriage which legalizes love (_cf._ Charlotte Broicher, “John Ruskin and his Work,” vol. i., pp. 104-106; Leipzig, 1902). In Germany, at the commencement of the nineteenth century, a lively discussion of the problems of love and marriage ensued upon the publication of Friedrich Schlegel’s “Lucinde” and Goethe’s “Wahlverwandtschaften”--“Elective Affinities” (1809).