COHABITATION predates marriage, and doubtless society, too. Nor has the division between the two always been so clear-cut as it is today (When the living together has to stop, October 12).

Cohabitants threaten no one. What undermines the institution of marriage is not cohabitation, but infidelity and divorce.

Time consecrates a relationship more surely than ceremony. We rightly revere what endures: tradition, the age-old monument, the veteran warrior, the exemplary life of service and self-sacrifice; and we willingly acknowledge good title to land based on no more than long occupation.

How curious then, and how unjust, that a spouse should be granted instantaneously rights denied a cohabitant even after a lifetime of devotion.

This injustice falls most heavily, not on the separated, but on the bereaved partner; and when that partner is a woman, she might find herself suddenly and frighteningly deprived of support, home, chattels and livelihood. She is then dependent on the charity of the judiciary, a profession notorious for prejudice, arrogance and an understanding of contemporary life gleaned from robing-room gossip.

Cohabitants are the least militant, the least well-organised, and consequently the most vulnerable section of society. For them, there is no safety in numbers.

Those who fear a radical change in the law may rest easy. There are no lay members to balance and inform the panel of the Law Commission. What we shall be offered eventually will not be a remedy for injustice, but a lawyer's law generously sown with enough ambiguities to provide rich pickings for the bewigged.

William Dixon Smith, Welland Rise, Acomb, York.