Successive writers on Shelleyan questions have regarded the Free Contract movement, in which the poet took so characteristic a part, as one of the consequences of the great revolution which, towards the close of the last century, disposed a considerable proportion of our own people, as well as of the peoples more deeply and violently influenced by novel ideas, to refer all social evils to existing institutions, and, in their impatience of prevailing wrongs and wretchedness, to cry aloud for the quick and total suppression of the social arrangements to which they attributed so much mischief and misery. But the French Revolution did no more, in this respect, than quicken a discontent and stimulate a movement that had affected English life for generations and centuries. To discover the origin of the Free Contract party in this country the student of social phenomena must go back to the sixteenth century. In pre-Reformation times, living under the control of a Church that, knowing nothing of the larger divorce (_a vinculo matrimonii_ == from bond of matrimony), and granting only in cases of extreme conjugal infidelity the minor divorce (_a mensâ et thoro_ == from board and bed), subsequently designated ‘judicial separation,’ which afforded no liberty of marrying other spouses to the separated parties, our forefathers in this island enjoyed practically a freedom of divorce, that under ordinary circumstances enabled unhappily mated spouses to make lawful marriage with other persons.