determine to desert it; and how often the most tempting proposals
of embarking for new settlements have been rejected by people who
appeared to be almost starving.



CHAPTER 11

Mr Godwin's conjecture concerning the future extinction of the
passion between the sexes--Little apparent grounds for such a
conjecture--Passion of love not inconsistent either with reason
or virtue.


We have supported Mr Godwin's system of society once completely
established. But it is supposing an impossibility. The same
causes in nature which would destroy it so rapidly, were it once
established, would prevent the possibility of its establishment.
And upon what grounds we can presume a change in these natural
causes, I am utterly at a loss to conjecture. No move towards the
extinction of the passion between the sexes has taken place in
the five or six thousand years that the world has existed. Men in
the decline of life have in all ages declaimed against a passion
which they have ceased to feel, but with as little reason as
success. Those who from coldness of constitutional temperament
have never felt what love is, will surely be allowed to be very
incompetent judges with regard to the power of this passion to
contribute to the sum of pleasurable sensations in life. Those
who have spent their youth in criminal excesses and have prepared
for themselves, as the comforts of their age, corporeal debility