Shelley handled the subject in a very different way. It was natural for the thorough and unwavering disbeliever, who had formerly denied and still questioned the existence of the Deity, and no less natural for the fervid political theorist, who regarded all human governments and their subordinate institutions as the mere contrivances of tyranny for the subjugation and debasement of the peoples, to come to the conclusion that the impediments to matrimony had no other foundation, and were in no degree more entitled to the respect of reasonable men, than the impediments to escape from wedlock. Absolutely ignorant of the social conditions from which the hindrances to marriage had arisen, and no less ignorant of the physical and social reasons for regarding most of them as conducive to domestic purity, and some of them as needful for preserving the human species from mental and bodily disease and deterioration, Shelley was only carrying certain of his principles to certain of their extreme logical conclusions, when he closed his consideration of the impediments to marriage, by regarding them as so many capricious and pernicious interferences with natural forces, which, if they were left to take their own course, without let or hindrance from presumptuous, and arrogant, and meddlesome mortals, would in due course bring the whole human race under the dominion of universal love;--a dominion under which all mankind for countless ages would have enjoyed unqualified felicity, had it not been for the disastrous activity of tyrants and priests. It was not in Shelley to distinguish between the various impediments, and discover grounds for deciding that some of them should be retained, whilst others might be abolished. To Shelley, a man’s right to marry his deceased wife’s sister was not more obvious than a man’s right to marry his own sister. Regarded by the new light, arising from the larger consideration of the matrimonial law, to which he had been incited by the Genevese scandal, the artificial hindrances to egress from matrimony were not more demoralizing than the artificial hindrances to ingress into matrimony. For human happiness marriage must be relieved of the impediments on its one side, no less than of the hindrances on its other side. Love must be restored to Freedom:--to freedom so perfect that a young man would be free to marry his own sister, without the intervention of priest or the control of lawyer; and after wearying of her be free to marry her younger sister under circumstances in no way affecting his freedom in the future. This discovery was the completion of Shelley’s social philosophy in respect to the intercourse of the sexes;--the philosophy that is, in the opinion of some of his admirers, a part of his title to be regarded as a man, who, under auspicious circumstances, ‘might have been the Saviour of the World!’