entioned. Public affairs always stirred him, but, as time went on, it
was more and more to verse and less to practical intervention, and after
1817 he abandoned argument altogether for song. But one pamphlet, 'A
Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote' (1817), is characteristic of
the way in which he was always labouring to do something, not merely
to ventilate existing evils, but to promote some practical scheme for
abolishing them. Let a national referendum, he says, be held on the
question of reform, and let it be agreed that the result shall be
binding on Parliament; he himself will contribute 100 pounds a year
(one-tenth of his income) to the expenses of organisation. He is in
favour of annual Parliaments. Though a believer in universal suffrage,
he prefers to advance by degrees; it would not do to abolish aristocracy
and monarchy at one stroke, and to put power into the hands of men
rendered brutal and torpid by ages of slavery; and he proposes that the
payment of a small sum in direct taxes should be the qualification for
the parliamentary franchise. The idea, of course, was not in the sphere
of practical politics at the time, but its sobriety shows how far
Shelley was from being a vulgar theory-ridden crank to whom the years
bring no wisdom.

Meanwhile it had been revealed to him that "intolerance" was the cause
of all evil, and, in the same flash, that it could be destroyed by
clear and simple reasoning. Apply the acid of enlightened argument, and
religious beliefs will melt away, and with them the whole rotten fabric
which they support--crowns and churches, lust and cruelty, war and
crime, the inequality of women to men, and the inequality of one man to
another. With Shelley, to embrace the dazzling vision was to act upon it
at once. The first thing, since religion is at the bottom of all force
and fraud, was to proclaim that there is no reason for believing
in Christianity. This was easy enough, and a number of impatient
argumentative pamphlets were dashed off. One of these, 'The Necessity
of Atheism', caused, as we saw, a revolution in his life. But, while
Christian dogma was the heart of the enemy's position, there were
out-works which might also be usefully attacked:--there were alcohol
and meat, the causes of all disease and devastating passion; there
were despotism and plutocracy, based on commercial greed; and there was
marriage, which irrationally tyrannising over sexual relations, produces
unnatural c