From Kings who seek in Gothic nightTo hide the blaze of moral light.Fill high the animating glassAnd let the electric ruby pass.
It was a cheerful indignation, a festive rage.
That dinner must have marked the height of the revolutionary tide in England. The reaction was already rampant and vindictive, and before the year 1794 was out it had crushed the progressive movement and postponed for thirty-eight years the triumph of Parliamentary Reform. It requires a strenuous exercise of the imagination to conceive the panic which swept over England as the news of the French Terror circulated. It fastened impartially on every class of the community, and destroyed the emotional balance no less of Pitt and his colleagues than of the working men who formed the Church and King mobs. Proclamations were issued toquell insurrections which never had been planned, and the militia called out when not a hand had been raised against the King throughout Great Britain. So great was the fear, so deep the moral indignation that "even respectable and honest men," (the phrase is Holcroft's) "turned spies and informers on their friends from a sense of public duty." A mob burned Dr. Priestley's house near Birmingham for no better reason than because he was supposed to have attended a Reform dinner, which in fact, he did not attend. Hardy's bookshop in Piccadilly was rushed by a mob, and his wife, about to be confined, was injured in her efforts to escape, and died a few hours afterwards. A hunt went on all over the kingdom for booksellers and printers to prosecute, and when Thomas Paine was prosecuted in his absence for publishingThe Rights of Man, the jury was so determined to find him guilty that they would not trouble to hear the case for the Crown.
Twenty years before, the French philosopher Helvétius, after an experience of Jesuit persecution and Court disfavour in France, made a quaint proposal for re-organising the whole discussion of moral and political questions. The first step, he thought, wasto compile a dictionary in which all the terms required in such debates would receive an authoritative definition. But this dictionary, he urged, must be composed in the English language, and published first in England, for only there was discussion free, and the press unfettered. In the reaction over which Pitt and Dundas presided, that envied liberty was totally eclipsed. TheHabeas CorpusAct was suspended; the Privy Council sat as a sort of Star Chamber to question political suspects, and there was even talk of importing Hessian and Hanoverian mercenaries to check an insurrection which nowhere showed its head. The frailest of all human endowments is the sense of humour. The sense of proportion had been eclipsed in the panic, and most of the cases which may be studied to-day in the State trials impress the modern reader as tasteless and cruel farces. Men were tried and sentenced never for deeds, but always for words. For a sermon closely resembling Dr. Price's, a dissenting minister named Winterbotham was tried at Exeter, and sentenced to four years' imprisonment and a fine of £200. The attorney, John Frost, returning from France, admitted in a chance conversation in a coffee-house that he thought society could manage very well without kings; he wasimprisoned, set in the pillory and struck off the rolls. One favourite expedient was to produce a spy who would swear that he had heard some suspect Radical declare in a coach or a coffee-house, that he would "as soon have the King's head off as he would tear a bit of paper" (evidence against a group of Manchester prisoners), or that he "would cut off the King's head as easily as he would shave himself" (case against Thomas Hardy). The climax of really entertaining absurdity was reached when two debtors imprisoned in the Fleet were tried and sentenced for nailing a seditious libel to its doors. The libel was a notice that "This house is to let," that "infamous bastilles are no longer necessary in Europe," and that "peaceable possession" would be secured "on or before the first day of January, 1793, being the commencement of the first year of liberty in Great Britain."
The farce of this panic became a tragedy when the reformers of Scotland ventured to summon a Convention at Edinburgh to voice the demand for shorter Parliaments and universal male suffrage. It met in October, 1793, and was attended by delegates from the London Corresponding Society as well as from Scottish branches. Nothing was intended beyond the holding of what we shouldcall to-day a conference or congress. But the word "Convention" with its reminiscence of the French revolutionary assembly seems to have caused the Government some particular alarm. The Convention, after some days of orderly debate, was invaded by the magistrates and broken up. Margarot and Sinclair (the English delegates), Skirving, Palmer and Thomas Muir, were tried before that notorious hanging judge, whom Stevenson portrayed as Weir of Hermiston, and sentenced to fourteen years' deportation at Botany Bay.
Of these five, all of them young men of brilliant promise and high courage, only one, Margarot, lived to return to England. Muir, daring, romantic and headstrong, contributed to the history of the movement a page of adventure which might invite the attention of a novelist. He escaped from Botany Bay on a whaler, was wrecked on the coast of South America, contrived to wander to the West Indies, there shipped on a Spanish vessel for Europe, fell in with an English frigate, was wounded in the fight that followed, and had the good fortune to find among the officers who took him prisoner an old friend, who recognised him, and assisted him to conceal his identity. He was landed inSpain, invited to Paris and pensioned by the Convention, but died shortly after his arrival. Less romantic but even finer is Sinclair's story. He obtained bail while his comrades were tried and sentenced. He might have broken his bail, and his friends urged him to do so, but with the certainty that Botany Bay lay before him he none the less returned to Edinburgh, as Horne Tooke puts it "in discharge of his faith as a private man towards his bail, and in discharge of his duty towards an oppressed and insulted public; he has returned not to take a fair trial, but, as he is well persuaded, to a settled conviction and sentence." Joseph Gerrald, another member of the same group gave the same fine example of courage, surrendered to his bail, and was sent for fifteen years to Botany Bay.
The ferment was more than an intellectual stirring. It brought with it a moral elevation and a great courage that did not shrink from venturing life and fortune for a disinterested end. The modern reader is apt to indulge a smile when he reads in the ardent declamation of this time professions of a love of Virtue and praises of Universal Benevolence. We are impatient of abstractions and shy of capital letters. But it was no abstraction which carried a man with honourto the fevers and privations of Botany Bay, when he might have sought safety and fame in Paris. The English reformers were resolved to brave the worst that Pitt could do to them, and challenged the fate of their Scottish comrades. They prepared in their turn to hold a "Convention" for Parliamentary Reform, and showed a doubtful prudence in keeping its details secret while the intention was boldly avowed. The counter-stroke came promptly. Twelve of the leading members of the Corresponding Society, including Hardy, Horne Tooke and Holcroft were arrested and sent, for the most part to the Tower, on a charge of high treason. The records of their preliminary examination before the Privy Council go to show that Pitt and Dundas had allowed themselves to be persuaded by their spies that every species of treason and folly was in preparation, from an armed insurrection down to a plan to murder the King by blowing a poisoned arrow from an air-gun. The Government had said that there was a treasonable conspiracy; it had to produce the traitors.
There was some delay in arresting Holcroft. His conduct is worth recording because it is so typical of the naïve courage, the doctrinaire hardihood of the group. These men whomthe reaction accused of subverting morality, were in fact dervishes of principle, who rushed on the bayonets in the name of manhood and truth and sincerity. Godwin when he came in his systematic treatise to describe how a free people would conduct a defensive war, declared that it would scorn to resort to a stratagem or an ambuscade. In the same spirit Holcroft hearing that a warrant was out against him for high treason, walked boldly into the Chief Justice's court, and announced that he came to be put upon his trial "that if I am a guilty man, the whole extent of my guilt may become notorious, and if innocent that the rectitude of my principles and conduct may be no less public." When a messenger did, in fact, go to Holcroft's house about the same hour to arrest him, his daughters, obedient to the same ideal of sincerity, actually invited him to take their father's papers.
One may doubt whether English liberties have ever run a graver danger in modern times than at the trial of the twelve reformers. The Government sought to overwhelm them with a mass of evidence which they lacked the means to sift and confute. But no definite act was charged against them, and the whole case turned on a monstrous attempt to give awide constructive interpretation to the law of high treason. High treason in English law has the perfectly definite meaning of an attempt on the King's life, or the levying of war against him. Chief Justice Eyre, in his charge to the Grand Jury, sought to stretch it until it assumed a Russian latitude, and would include any effort by agitation to alter the form of government or the constitution of Parliament. The issue, before a jury which probably had not escaped the general panic, seemed very doubtful, and it was the general opinion that the decisive blow for liberty was struck by William Godwin. Long years afterwards Horne Tooke, in a dramatic scene, called Godwin to him in public, and kissed the hand which had saved his life.
Godwin contributed to theMorning Chroniclea long letter, or more properly, a pamphlet, in which he analysed the Chief Justice's charge and brought to the light what really was latent in it, a claim to treat as high treason any effort, however peaceful and orderly, to bring about a fundamental change in our institutions. The letter shows none of Godwin's speculative daring, and his gift of cold and dignified eloquence is severely repressed. He wrote to attain his immediate end, and from that standpoint his pleading was a masterpiece.A certain deadly courtesy, a tone of quiet reasonableness made it possible for the most prejudiced reader to follow it with assent. The argument was irresistible, and the single touch of emotion at the end was worthy of a great orator. A few lines depicted these men who, moved by public spirit, had acted in good faith within the law, as it had been universally understood in England, overwhelmed by a sudden extension of its most terrible articles, applied to them without precedent or warning. Should the awful sentence be read over these men, that they should be hanged (but not until they were dead), and then, still living, suffer the loss of their members and see their bowels torn out? The ghastly barbarity of the whole procedure could not have been more effectively exposed. Looking back upon this trial there is no reason to think that the reformers exaggerated its importance. Had the Government won its case, it must have succeeded in destroying the very possibility of opposition or agitation in England. It was believed that no less than three hundred signed warrants lay ready for issue on the day that Hardy and his friends were convicted. But the stroke was too daring, the threat too impudent. When the trial began, the prosecution lightened itsown task by dropping the charge against Holcroft and three of his comrades. But for nine days the charge was pressed against Thomas Hardy, and when he was acquitted a further six days was spent in the effort to convict Horne Tooke, and four in a last vain attempt to succeed against Thelwall.
The popular victory checked the excesses of the reaction. As Holcroft wrote: "The whole power of Government was directed against Thomas Hardy: in his fate seemed involved the fate of the nation, and the verdict of Not Guilty appeared to burst its bonds, and to have released it from inconceivable miseries and ages of impending slavery." The reaction, indeed, was restrained; but so also was the movement of reform. The subsequent history of its leaders is one of unheroic failure, and of an unpopularity which was harder to endure than danger. Windham referred to the twelve in debate as "acquitted felons," and Holcroft was constrained first to produce his plays under a borrowed name, and then to seek a refuge in voluntary exile on the continent. The passions roused by the Terror arrested the progress of the revolutionary movement in England. The alarms and glories of the struggle with Napoleon buried it in oblivion.
It is this complex experience which lies behind Godwin's political writings. The French Revolution produced its simple effects in Burke and Tom Paine—revolt and disgust in the one, enthusiasm and hope in the other. In Godwin the reaction is more complicated. He retained to the last his ardent faith in progress, and the perfectibility of mankind. No events could shake that, but it was the work of experience to reinforce all the native individualism of his confident and self-reliant temper, to harden into an extreme dogma that general belief inlaissez fairewhich was the common property of most of the English progressives of his day, and to beget in him not merely a doubt in the efficacy of violent revolutions, but a dislike of all concerted political effort and the whole collective work of political associations. He had felt the lash of repression, saved one friend from the hangman, and seen others depart for Botany Bay: he remained to the end, the uncompromising foe of every species of governmental coercion. He had listened to Horne Tooke perorating "hanging matters" at the Corresponding Society; he had seen the "electric ruby" circulating at its dinners; he had witnessed the collapse of Thomas Hardy's painstaking and methodical organisation. The fruit ofall these experiences was the first statement in European literature of philosophic anarchism—a statement which hardly yields to Tolstoy's in its trenchant and unflinching logic.
"Logic" is more often a habit of consecutive and reasoned writing than the source of a thinker's opinion. The logical writer is the man who can succeed in displaying plausible reasons for what he believes by instinct, or knows by experience. There is history and temperament behind the coldest logic. The history which set Godwin against all State action, whether undertaken in defence of order or privilege, or on behalf of reform, is to be read in the excesses of Pitt and the futilities of the Corresponding Society. The question of temperament involves a subtler psychological judgment. If you feel in yourself something less than the heroic temper which will make a militant agitation or a violent revolution against the monstrous ascendency of privilege and ordered force, you are lucky if you can convince yourself that agitation is commonly mischievous, and association but a means of combating one evil by creating another. Godwin was certainly no coward. But he was fortunate in evolving a theory which excused him from attempting the more dangerous exploits ofcivic courage. His ideal was the Stoic virtue, the isolated strength, which can stand firm in passive protest against oppression and wrong. He stood firm, and Pitt was content to leave him standing.
We have seen the first bold statement of the hope which the French Revolution kindled in Dr. Price's Old Jewry sermon. We have watched the brave incautious effort to realise it in the plans of the Corresponding Society. In these crowded years that began with the fall of the Bastille and closed with the Terror, it was to enter on yet another phase, and in this last incarnation the hope was very near despair. To men in the early prime of life, aware of their powers and their gift of influence, the Revolution came as a call to action. To a group of still younger men, poets and thinkers, forming their first eager views of life in the leisure of the Universities, it was above all a stimulus to fancy. Godwin was their prophet, but they built upon his speculations the superstructure of a dream that was all their own. For some years, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth were caught and held in the close web of logic which Godwin gave to the world in 1793 in the first edition ofPolitical Justice. Wordsworth readand studied and continually discussed it. Southey confessed that he "read and studied and all but worshipped Godwin." Coleridge wrote a sonnet which he afterwards suppressed in which he blesses his "holy guidance" and hymns Godwin "with an ardent lay."
For that thy voice in passion's stormy dayWhen wild I roamed the bleak heath of distressBade the bright form of Justice meet my way,And told me that her name was Happiness.
To us who read Godwin with many a later Utopia in our memories, his most valuable chapters are those which give his penetrating criticisms of existing society. To these young men the excitement was in his picture of a free community from which laws and coercion had been eliminated, and in which property was in a continual flux actuated by the stream of universal benevolence. They resolved to found a community based on Godwinian principles, and to free themselves from the cramping and dwarfing influences of a society ruined by laws and superstitions, they lit on the simple expedient of removing themselves beyond its reach. They lacked the manhood and the simplicity which had turned more prosaic natures into agitators and reformers. It is a tale which every student of literaturehas delighted to read, how Coleridge and Southey, bent on founding their Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehana, came to Bristol to charter a ship, and while they waited, dimly aware that they lacked funds for the adventure, anchored themselves in English homes by marrying the Fricker sisters.
As one of the comrades, Robert Lovell, quaintly puts it in a letter to Holcroft, "Principle, not plan, is our object." Lovell had visited Holcroft in gaol, and one can well understand how that near view of the fate which awaited the reformer under Pitt, confirmed them in their idea of crossing the Atlantic. "From the writings of William Godwin and yourself," Lovell went on, "our minds have been illuminated; we wish our actions to be guided by the same superior abilities." Holcroft, older and more combative than his poet-disciples, advised the founding of a model colony in this country. But the lure of a distant scene was too attractive. Cottle, the friend and publisher of the Pantisocrats, has left his account of their aims. Theirs was to be "a social colony in which there was to be a community of property and where all that was selfish was to be proscribed." It would realise "a state of society free from the evils and turmoilsthat then agitated the world, and present an example of the eminence to which men might arrive under the unrestrained influence of sound principles." It would "regenerate the whole complexion of society, and that not by establishing formal laws, but by excluding all the little deteriorating passions, injustice, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking, and thereby setting an example of human perfectibility."
What is left of the dream to-day? Some verses in Coleridge's earlier poems, the address to Chatterton for instance
O Chatterton! that thou wert yet alive,Sure thou wouldst spread the canvas to the gale;And love with us the tinkling team to driveO'er peaceful Freedom's undivided dale.
and those lines, half comical, half pathetic, in which the "sweet harper" is assured as some requital for a hard life and a cruel death, that the Pantisocrats will raise a "solemn cenotaph" to his memory "Where Susquehana pours his untamed stream." Long afterwards, Coleridge described Pantisocracy inThe Friendas "a plan as harmless as it was extravagant," which had served a purpose by saving him from more dangerous courses. "It was serviceable in securingmyself and perhaps some others from the paths of sedition. We were kept free from the stains and impurities which might have remained upon us had we been travelling with the crowd of less imaginative malcontents through the dark lanes and foul by-roads of ordinary fanaticism."
Pantisocracy was indeed a happy episode for English literature. One may doubt whether the "Ancient Mariner" would have been written, had Coleridge travelled with Gerrald and Sinclair along the "dark lane" that led to Botany Bay. Nature can work strange miracles with the instinct of self-preservation, and even for poets she has a care. The prudence which teaches one man to be a Whig, will make of another a Utopian.
"Where Liberty is, there is my country." The sentiment has a Latin ring; one can imagine an early Stoic as its author. It was spoken by Benjamin Franklin, and no saying better expresses the spirit of eighteenth century humanity. "Where is not Liberty, there is mine." The answer is Thomas Paine's. It is the watchword of the knight errant, the marching music that sent Lafayette to America, and Byron to Greece, the motto of every man who prizes striving above enjoyment, honours comradeship above patriotism, and follows an idea that no frontier can arrest. Paine was indeed of no century, and no formula of classification can confine him. His writing is of the age of enlightenment; his actions belong to romance. His clear, manly style, his sturdy commonsense, the rapier play of his epigrams, the formal, logical architecture of his thoughts, his complacent limitations, his horror of mysteryand Gothic half-lights, his harsh contempt for all the sacred muddle of priestly traditions and aristocratic politics, his assurance, his intellectual courage, his humanity—all that, in its best and its worst, belongs to the century of Voltaire and the Revolution. In his spirit of adventure, in his passion for movement and combat, there Paine is romantic. Paine thought in prose and acted epics. He drew horizons on paper and pursued the infinite in deeds.
Tom Paine was born, the son of a Quaker stay-maker, in 1737, at Thetford, in the county of Norfolk. His parents were poor, but he owed much, he tells us, to a good moral education and picked up "a tolerable stock of useful learning," though he knew no language but his own. A "Friend" he was to the end in his independence, his rationalism, and his humanity, though he laughed when he thought of what a sad-coloured world the Quakers would have made of the creation, if they had been consulted. The boy craved adventure, and was prevented at seventeen from enlisting in the crew of the privateerTerrible, Captain Death, only to sail somewhat later in theKing of Prussia, Captain Mendez. One cruise under a licensed pirate was enough for him, and he soon settled in London,making stays for a living and spending his leisure in the study of astronomy. He qualified as an exciseman, acquiring in this employment a grasp of finance and an interest in budgets of which he afterwards made good use in his writings. Cashiered for negligence, he turned schoolmaster, and even aspired to ordination in the Church of England. Reinstated as a "gauger," he was eventually dismissed for writing a pamphlet in defence of the excisemen's agitation for higher wages. He was twice married, but his first wife died within a year of marriage, and the second, with whom he had started a "tobacco-mill," agreed on its failure, apparently for no definite fault on either side, to a mutual separation. At thirty-seven, penniless, lonely, and stamped with failure, yet conscious of powers which had found no scope in the Old World, he emigrated in 1774 to America with a letter from Benjamin Franklin as his passport to fortune.
Opportunity came promptly, and Paine was presently settled in Philadelphia as the editor of thePennsylvania Magazine. From the pages of this periodical, his admirable biographer, Mr. Moncure D. Conway, has unearthed a series of articles which show that Paine had somehow brought with himfrom England a mental equipment which ranked him already among the moral pioneers of his generation. He advocates international arbitration; he attacks duelling; he suggests more rational ideas of marriage and divorce; he pleads for mercy to animals; he demands justice for women. Above all, he assails negro slavery, and with such mastery and fervour, that five weeks after the appearance of his article, the first American Anti-Slavery Society was founded at Philadelphia. The abolition of slavery was a cause for which he never ceased to struggle, and when in later life he became the target of religious persecutors, it was in their dual capacity of Christians and slave-owners that men stoned him. The American colonies were now at the parting of the ways in the struggle with the Mother Country. The revolt had begun with a limited object, and few if any of its leaders realised whither they were tending. Paine it was, who after the slaughter at Lexington, abandoned all thoughts of reconciliation and was the first to preach independence and republicanism.
His pamphlet,Common-Sense(1776), achieved a circulation which was an event in the history of printing, and fixed in men's minds as firm resolves what were, beforehe wrote, no more than fluid ideas. It spoke to rebels and made a nation. Poor though Paine was, he poured the whole of the immense profits which he received from the sale of his little book into the colonial war-chest, shouldered a musket, joined Washington's army as a private, and was soon promoted to be aide-de-camp to General Greene. Paine's most valuable weapon, however, was still his pen. Writing at night, after endless marches, by the light of camp fires at a moment of general depression, when even Washington thought that the game was "pretty well up," Paine began to write the series of pamphlets afterwards collected under the title ofThe American Crisis. They did for the American volunteers what Rouget de Lisle's immortal song did for the French levies in the revolutionary wars, what Körner's martial ballads did for the German patriots in the Napoleonic wars. These superb pages of exhortation were read in every camp to the disheartened men; their courage commanded victory. Burke himself wrote nothing finer than the opening sentences of the first "crisis," a trumpet call indeed, but phrased by an artist who knew the science of compelling music from brass:—
"These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriotwill, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated."
"Common-sense" Paine was now the chief of the moral forces behind the fighting Republic, and his power of thinking boldly and stating clearly drove it forward to its destiny under the leadership of men whom Nature had gifted with less trenchant minds. He was in succession Foreign Secretary to Congress and clerk to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and we find him converting despair into triumph by the magic of self-sacrifice. He it was who in 1780 saved the finances of the war in a moment of despair, by starting the patriotic subscription with the gift of his own salary, and in 1781 proved his diplomatic gift in a journey to Paris by obtaining money-aid from the French Court.
Paine might have settled down to enjoy his fame, after the war, on the little property which the State of New York gave him. He loathed inaction and escaped middle age. In 1787 he returned to England, partly to carry his pen where the work of liberation called for it, partly to forward his mechanical inventions. Paine, self-educated though he was, was a capable mathematician, and he followed the progress of the applied sciences with passion. His inventions include a long list of things partly useful, partly whimsical, a planing machine, a crane, a smokeless candle and a gunpowder motor. But his fame as an inventor rests on his construction of the first iron bridge, made after his models and plans at Wearmouth. He was received as a leader and teacher in the ardent circle of reformers grouped round the Revolution Society and the Corresponding Society. Others were the dreamers and theorists of liberty. He had been at the making of a Republic, and his American experience gave the stimulus to English Radicalism which events in France were presently to repeat. His fame was already European, and at the fall of the Bastille, it was to Paine that Lafayette confided its key, when a free France sent that symbol of defeated despotism as a presentto a free America. He seemed the natural link between three revolutions, the one which had succeeded in the New World, the other which was transforming France, and the third which was yet to come in England.
Burke'sReflectionsrang in his ears like a challenge, and he sat promptly down in his inn to write his reply.The Rights of Manis an answer to Burke, but it is much more. The vivid pages of history in which he explains and defends the French Revolution which Burke had attacked and misunderstood, are only an illustration to his main argument. He expounds the right of revolution, and blows away the cobweb argument of legality by which his antagonist had sought to confine posterity within the settlement of 1688. Every age and generation must be free to act for itself. Man has no property in man, and the claim of one generation to govern beyond the grave is of all tyrannies the most insolent. Burke had contended for the right of the dead to govern the living, but that which a whole nation chooses to do, it has a right to do. The men of 1688, who surrendered their own rights and bound themselves to obey King William and his heirs, might indeed choose to be slaves; but that could not lessen the right of their childrento be free. Wrongs cannot have a legal descent. Here was a bold and triumphant answer to a sophistical argument; but it served Paine only as a preface to his exposition of the American constitution, which was "to Liberty what a grammar is to language," and to his plea for the adoption in England of the French charter of the Rights of Man.
Paine felt that he had made one Republic with a pamphlet, why not another? He had the unlimited faith of his generation in the efficacy of argument, and experience had proved his power. As Carlyle, in his whimsical dramatic fashion, said of him, "He can and will free all this world; perhaps even the other." Godwin, as became the philosopher of the movement, set his hopes on the slower working of education: to make men wise was to make them free. Paine was the pamphleteer of the human camp. He saw mankind as an embattled legion and believed, true man of action that he was, that freedom could be won like victory by the impetus of a resolute charge. He quotes the epigram of his fellow-soldier, Lafayette, "For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free it is sufficient that she wills it." Godwin would have sent men to school to liberty; Paine called them to her unfurledstandard. It is easy to understand the success of Paine's book, which appeared in March, 1791. It was theory and practice in one; it was the armed logic which had driven King George's regiments from America, the edged argument which had razed the Bastille. It was bold reasoning, and it was also inspired writing. Holcroft and Godwin helped to bring outThe Rights of Man, threatened with suppression or mutilation by the publishers, and a panting incoherent shout of joy in a note from Holcroft to Godwin is typical of the excitement which it caused:—
"I have got it—if this do not cure my cough it is a damned perverse mule of a cough. The pamphlet—from the row—But mum—we don't sell it—oh, no—ears and eggs—verbatim, except the addition of a short preface, which as you have not seen, I send you my copy.—Not a single castration (Laud be unto God and J. S. Jordan!) can I discover—Hey, for the new Jerusalem! The Millennium! And peace and eternal beatitude be unto the soul of Thomas Paine."
The usual prosecutions of booksellers followed; but everywhere the new societies of reform were circulating the book, and if it helped to send some good men to Botany Bay,copies enough were sold to earn a sum of a thousand pounds for the author, which, with his usual disinterestedness, he promptly gave to the Corresponding Society. A second part appeared in 1792; and at length Pitt adopted Burke's opinion that criminal justice was the proper argument with which to refute Tom Paine. Acting on a hint from William Blake, who, in a vision more prosaic and veridical than was usual with him, had seen the constables searching for his friend, Paine escaped to France, and was convicted in his absence of high treason.
Paine landed at Calais an outlaw, to find himself already elected its deputy to the Convention. As in America, so in France, his was the first voice to urge the uncompromising solution. He advocated the abolition of the monarchy; but his was a courage that always served humanity. The work which he did as a member, with Sieyès, Danton, Condorcet, and five others, of the little committee named to draft the constitution, was ephemeral. His brave pleading for the King's life was a deed that deserves to live. He loved to think of himself as a woodman swinging an axe against rotten institutions and dying beliefs; but he weighted no guillotines. Paine argued against thecommand that we should "love our enemies," but he would not persecute them. This knight-errant would fling his shield over the very spies who tracked his steps. In Paris he saved the life of one of Pitt's agents who had vilified him, and procured the liberation of a bullying English officer who had struck him in public. The Terror made mercy a traitor, and Paine found himself overwhelmed in the vengeance which overtook all that was noblest in the Revolution. He spent ten months in prison, racked with fever, and an anecdote which seems to be authentic, tells how he escaped death by the negligence of a jailor. This overworked official hastily chalked the sign which meant that a prisoner was marked for next batch of the guillotine's victims, on the inside instead of the outside of Paine's cell-door.
Condorcet, in hiding and awaiting death, wrote in these months hisSketchof human progress. Paine, meditating on the end that seemed near, composed the first part of hisAge of Reason. Paine was, like Franklin, Jefferson and Washington, a deist; and he differed from them only in the courage which prompted him to declare his belief. He came from gaol a broken man, hardly able to stand, while the Convention, returned to its soundsenses, welcomed him back to his place of honour on its benches. The record of his last years in America, whither he returned in 1802, belongs rather to the history of persecution than to the biography of a soldier of liberty. His work was done; and, though his pen was still active and influential, slave-owners, ex-royalists, and the fanatics of orthodoxy combined to embitter the end of the man who had dared to deny the inspiration of the Bible. His book was burned in England by the hangman. Bishops in their answers mingled grudging concessions with personal abuse. An agent of Pitt's was hired to write a scurrilous biography of the Government's most dreaded foe. In America, the grandsons of the Puritan colonists who had flogged Quaker women as witches, denied him a place on the stage-coach, lest an offended God should strike it with lightning.
Paine died, a lonely old man, in 1809. His personal character stands written in his career; and it is unnecessary to-day even to mention the libels which his biographer has finally refuted. In a generation of brave men he was the boldest. He could rouse the passions of men, and he could brave them. If the Royalist Burke was eloquent for a Queen, Republican Paine risked his lifefor a King. No wrong found him indifferent; and he used his pen not only for the democracy which might reward him, but for animals, slaves and women. Poverty never left him, yet he made fortunes with his pen, and gave them to the cause he served. A naïve vanity was his only fault as a man. It was his fate to escape the gallows in England and the guillotine in France. He deserved them both; in that age there was no higher praise. A better democrat never wore the armour of the knight-errant; a better Christian never assailed Orthodoxy.
Neither by training nor by temperament was Paine a speculative thinker; but his political writing has none the less an immense significance. Godwin was a writer removed by his profoundly individual genius from the average thought of his day. Paine agreed more nearly with the advanced minds of his generation, and he taught the rest to agree with him. No one since him or before him has stated the plain democratic case against monarchy and aristocracy with half his spirit and force. Earlier writers on these themes were timid; the moderns are bored. Paine is writing of what he understands, and feels to be of the first importance. He cares as much about abolishing titles as a modernreformer may feel about nationalising land. His main theory in politics has a lucid simplicity. Men are born as God created them, free and equal; that is the assumption alike of natural and revealed religion. Burke, who "fears God," looks with "awe to kings," with "duty to magistrates," and with "respect to nobility," is but erecting a wilderness of turnpike gates between man and his Maker. Natural rights inhere in man by reason of his existence; civil rights are founded in natural rights and are designed to secure and guarantee them. He gives an individual twist to the doctrine of the social compact. Some governments arise out of the people, others over the people. The latter are based on conquest or priestcraft, and the former on reason. Government will be firmly based on the social compact only when nations deliberately sit down as the Americans have done, and the French are doing, to frame a constitution on the basis of the Rights of Man.
As for the English Government, it clearly arose in conquest; and to speak of a British Constitution is playing with words. Parliament, imperfectly and capriciously elected, is supposed to hold the common purse in trust; but the men who vote the suppliesare also those who receive them. The national purse is the common hack on which each party mounts in turn, in the countryman's fashion of "ride and tie." They order these things better in France. As for our system of conducting wars, it is all done over the heads of the people. War is with us the art of conquering at home. Taxes are not raised to carry on wars, but wars raised to carry on taxes. The shrewd hard-hitting blows range over the whole surface of existing institutions. Godwin from his intellectual eminence saw in all the follies and crimes of mankind nothing worse than the effects of "prejudice" and the consequences of fallacious reasoning. Paine saw more self-interest in the world than prejudice. When he came to preach the abolition of war, first through an alliance of Britain, America and France, and then through "a confederation of nations" and a European Congress, he saw the obstacle in the egoism of courts and courtiers which appear to quarrel but agree to plunder. Another seven years, he wrote in 1792, would see the end of monarchy and aristocracy in Europe. While they continue, with war as their trade, peace has not the security of a day.
Paine's writing gains rather than loses intheoretic interest, because the warmth of his sympathies melts, as he proceeds, the icy logic of his eighteenth century individualism. He starts where all his school started, with a sharp antithesis between society and government.
"Society is produced by our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections; the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. Society in every state is a blessing; but government even in its best state is a necessary evil.... Government, like dress, is the badge of our lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise."
That was the familiar pessimism which led in practical politics tolaissez faire, and in speculation to Godwin's philosophic anarchism. Paine himself seems for a moment to take that road. He enjoys telling us how well the American colonies managed in the early stages of the war without any regular form of government. He assures us that "the more perfect civilisation is, the less occasion has it for government." But he had served an apprenticeship to life; lookingaround him at the streets filled with beggars and the jails crowded with poor men, he suddenly forgets that the whole purpose of government is to secure the individual against the invasion of his rights, and straightway bursts into a new definition:—"Civil government does not consist in executions; but in making such provision for the instruction of youth and the support of age as to exclude as much as possible profligacy from the one and despair from the other. Instead of this the resources of a country are lavished upon kings ... and the poor themselves are compelled to support the fraud that oppresses them."
It is amazing how much good Paine can extract from a necessary evil. He has suddenly conceived of government as the instrument of the social conscience. He means to use it as a means of securing a better organisation of society. Paine was a man of action, and no mere logic could hold him. He proceeds in a breathless chapter to evolve a programme of social reform which, after the slumbers of a century, his Radical successors have just begun to realise. Some hints came to him from Condorcet, but most of these daringly novel ideas sprang from Paine's own inventivebrain, and all of them are presented by the whilom exciseman, with a wealth of financial detail, as if he were a Chancellor of the Exchequer addressing the first Republican Parliament in the year One of Liberty. He would break up the poor laws, "these instruments of civil torture." He has saved the major part of the cost of defence by a naval alliance with the other Sea Powers, and the abolition of capture at sea. Instead of poor relief he would give a subsidy to the children of the very poor, and pensions to the aged. Four pounds a year for every child under fourteen in every necessitous family will ensure the health and instruction of the next generation. It will cost two millions and a half, but it will banish ignorance. He would pay the costs of compulsory education. Pensions are to be granted not of grace but of right, as an aid to the infirm after fifty years, and a subsidy to the aged after sixty. Maternity benefit is anticipated in a donation of twenty shillings to every poor mother at the birth of a child. Casual labour is to be cared for in some sort of workhouse-factories in London. These reforms are to be financed partly by economies and partly by a graduated income-tax, for which Paine presents an elaborate schedule. When thepoor are happy and the jails empty, then at last may a nation boast of its constitution. In this pregnant chapter Paine not only sketched the work of the future; he exploded his own premises.
The odium that still clings to Paine's theological writings comes mainly from those who have not read them. When Mr. Roosevelt the other day called him "a dirty little Atheist," he exposed nothing but his own ignorance. Paine was a deist, and he wroteThe Age of Reasonon the threshold of a French prison, primarily to counteract the atheism which he thought he saw at work among the Jacobins—an odd diagnosis, for Robespierre was at least as ardent in his deism as Paine himself. He believed in a God, Whose bounty he saw in nature; he taught the doctrine of conditional immortality, and his quarrel with revealed religion was chiefly that it set up for worship a God of cruelty and injustice. From the stories of the Jewish massacres ordained by divine command, down to the orthodox doctrine of the scheme of redemption, he saw nothing but a history derogatory to the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty. To believe the Old Testament we must unbelieve our faith in the moral justice of God. It might"hurt the stubbornness of a priest" to destroy this fiction, but it would tranquilise the consciences of millions. From this starting-point he proceeds in the later second and third parts to a detailed criticism designed to show that the books of the Bible were not written by their reputed authors, that the miracles are incredible, that the passages claimed as prophecy have been wrested from their contexts, and that many inconsistencies are to be found in the narrative portions of the Gospels.
Acute and fearless though it is, this detailed argument has only an historical interest to-day. When the violence of his persecutors had goaded Paine into anger, he lost all sense of tact in controversy, and lapsed occasionally into harsh vulgarities. But the anger was just, and the zeal for mental honesty has had its reward. Paine had no sense for the mystery and poetry of traditional religion. But what he attacked was not presented to him as poetry. He was assailing a dogmatic orthodoxy which had itself converted poetry into literal fact. As literal fact it was incredible; and Paine, taking it all at the valuation of its own professors, assailed it with a disbelief as prosaic as their belief, but intellectually more honest. His interpretation of the Bibleis unscientific, if you will, but it is nearer to the truth of history than the conventional belief of his day. If his polemics seem rough and superfluous to us, it is only because his direct frontal attacks forced on the work of Biblical criticism, and long ago compelled the abandonment of most of the positions which he assailed. In spite of its grave faults of taste and temper and manner,The Age of Reasonperformed an indispensable service to honesty and morals. It was the bravest thing he did, for it threatened his name with an immortality of libel. His place in history is secure at last. The neglected pioneer of one revolution, the honoured victim of another, brave to the point of folly, and as humane as he was brave, no man in his generation preached republican virtue in better English, nor lived it with a finer disregard of self.
Tom Paine is still reviled and still admired. The name of Mary Wollstonecraft is honoured by the growing army of free women. Both may be read in cheap editions. William Godwin, a more powerful intellect, and in his day a greater influence than either, is now forgotten, or remembered only because he was the father of Shelley's wife. Yet he blazed in the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Hazlitt has told us, "as a sun in the firmament of reputation." "No one was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.... No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebratedEnquiry Concerning Political Justice. Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; Edmund Burke a flashy sophist."
William Godwin came into the world in1756, at Wisbech, in the Fen country, with the moral atmosphere of a dissenting home for inheritance. His father and grandfather were Independent ministers, who taught the metaphysical dissent of the extreme Calvinistic tradition. The quaint ill-spelled letters of his mother reveal a strong character, a meagre education and rigid beliefs. William was unwholesomely precocious as a boy, pious, studious and greedy for distinction and praise. He was brought up on theAccount of the Pious Deaths of Many Godly Children, and would move his school-fellows to tears by his early sermons on the Last Judgment. At seventeen we find him, destined for the hereditary profession, a student in the Theological College at Hoxton. His mental development was by no means headlong, but he was a laborious reader and an eager disputant, endowed with all the virtues save modesty.
He emerged from College as he had entered it, a Tory in politics and a Sandemanian in religion. The Sandemanians were super-Calvinists, and their tenets may be summarily defined. A Calvinist held that of ten souls nine will be damned. A Sandemanian hoped that of ten Calvinists one may with difficulty be saved. In the Calvinist mould Godwin's mind was formed, and if the doctrine was soondiscarded, the habit of thought characteristic of Calvinism remained with him to the end. It is a French and not a British creed, Latin in its systematic completeness, Latin in the logical courage with which it pursues its assumptions to their last conclusion, Latin in its faith in deductive reasoning and its disdain alike of experience and of sentiment. Had Godwin been bred a Methodist or a Churchman, he could not have writtenPolitical Justice. To him in these early years religion presented itself as a supernatural despotism based on terror and coercion. Its central doctrine was eternal punishment, and when in mature life, Godwin became a free-thinker, his revolt was not so much the readjustment of a speculative thinker who has reconsidered untenable dogmas, as the rebellion of a humane and liberal mind against a system of terrorism. To some agnostics God is an unnecessary hypothesis. To Godwin He was rather a tyrant to be deposed. It was a view which Shelley with less provocation adopted with even greater heat.
Godwin's firm dogmatic creed began to crumble away during his early experiences as a dissenting minister in country towns. He published a forgotten volume of sermons, and his development both in politics andtheology was evidently slow. At twenty-seven, as a young pastor at Beaconsfield, we find him a Whig and a Unitarian, who looked up to Dr. Priestley as his master. He had now begun to study the French philosophers, whom Hoxton had doubtless refuted, but did not read. He was not a successful pastor, and it was as much his relative failure in the pulpit as his slowly broadening beliefs which caused him to take to letters for a livelihood. His long literary career begins in 1783 with some years of prentice work in Grub Street. He wrote a successful pamphlet in defence of the Coalition, which brought him to the notice of the Whig chiefs, worked with enthusiasm at aLife of Chathamwhich has the merit of a rather heavy eloquence, contributed for seven years to theAnnual Registerand wrote three novels which evidently enjoyed an ephemeral success. He lived the usual nomadic life of the young man of letters, and differed from most of his kind chiefly by his industry, his abstinence, and his methodical habits of study, which he never relaxed even when he was writing busily for bread.
We find him rising early, and reading some portion of a Greek or Latin classic before breakfast. He acquired by this practice a literary knowledge of the classics and used itin his later essays with an ease and intimacy which many a scholar would envy. He wrote for three or four hours in the morning, composing slowly and frequently recasting his drafts. The afternoon and evening were devoted to eager converse and hot debate with friends, and to the reading of modern books in English, French and Italian, with not infrequent visits to the theatre. A brief diary carefully kept with a system of signs and abbreviations in a queer mixed jargon of English, French and Latin records his anxious use of his time, and shows to the end of his eighty years few wasted days. If industry was his most conspicuous virtue, he gave proof at the outset of his life of an independence rare among poor men who have their career to make. Sheridan, who acted as the literary agent of the Whigs, wished to engage him as a professional pamphleteer and offered him a regular salary. He refused to tie himself to a party, though his views at this time were those of an orthodox and enthusiastic admirer of Fox.
Godwin was to become the apostle of Universal Benevolence. It was a virtue for which in later life he gave many an opportunity to his richer friends, but if he stimulated it in others he never refused to practise it himself.While he was still a struggling and underpaid journeyman author, wandering from one cheap lodging to another, he burdened himself with the care and maintenance of a distant relative, an orphaned second-cousin, named Thomas Cooper. Cooper came to him at the age of twelve and remained with him till he became an actor at seventeen. Godwin had read Rousseau'sEmile, not seldom with dissent, and all through his life was deeply interested in the problems of education. They furnished him with the themes of some of the best essays in hisEnquirerand hisThoughts on Man, and young Cooper was evidently the subject on whom he experimented. He was a difficult, proud, high-spirited lad, and the process of tuition was clearly not as smooth as it was conscientious. Godwin's leading thought was that the utmost reverence is due to boys. He cared little how much he imparted of scholastic knowledge. He aimed at arousing the intellectual curiosity of his charge and fostering independence and self-respect. Sincerity and plain-speaking were to govern the relation of tutor and pupil. Corporal punishment was of course a prohibited barbarity, but it must be admitted that in Godwin's case a violent tongue and an impatient temper more than supplied itsplace. The diary shows how pathetically the tutor exhorted himself to avoid sternness, "which can only embitter the temper," and not to impute dulness, stupidity or intentional error. Some letters show how he failed. Cooper complains that Godwin had called him "a foolish wretch," "a viper" and a "tiger." Godwin replies by complimenting him on his "sensibility," and his "independence," asks for his "confidence" in return, and assures him that he does not expect "gratitude" (a virtue banned in the Godwinian ethics). This essay in education can have been only relatively successful, for Cooper seems to have felt a quite commonplace gratitude to Godwin, and for many a year afterwards sent him vivacious letters, which testify to the real friendship which united them.
Imperious and hot-tempered though he was, Godwin made friends and kept them. Thomas Holcroft came into Godwin's life in 1786. Thanks to Hazlitt's spirited memoir, based as it was on ample autobiographical notes, no personality of this group stands before us so clearly limned, and there is none more attractive. Mrs. Shelley describes him as a "man of stern and irascible character," but he was also lovable and affectionate. There was in his mind and will some powerfulinitial force of resolve and mental independence. He thought for himself, and yet he could assimilate the ideas of other men. He was a reasoner and a doctrinaire; and yet he must have had in himself those untamed volcanic emotions which we associate with the heroes of the romantic novels of the age. He believed in the almost unlimited powers of the human mind, and his own career, which saw his rise from stable-boy and cobbler to dramatist, was itself a monument to the human will. Looking in their mirrors, the progressives of that generation were tempted to think that perfection might have been within their reach had not their youth been stunted by the influence of Calvin and the British Constitution. Rectitude, courage and unflinching truth were Holcroft's ideal. He firmly believed (an idea which lay in germ in Condorcet and was for a time adopted by Godwin) that the will guided by reason might transform not only the human mind but the human body. Like the Christian Scientists of to-day he asserted, as Mrs. Shelley tells us, that "death and disease existed only through the feebleness of man's mind, that pain also had no reality."
He was a man of fifty when he met Godwin at thirty, and he had packed into his halfcentury a more various experience of men and things than the studious and sedentary Godwin could have acquired if he had lived the life of the Wandering Jew. Theirs was a friendship of mutual stimulation and intimate exchange which is commoner between a man and a woman than between two men. They met almost daily, and in spite of some violent lovers' quarrels, their affection lasted till Holcroft's death in 1809. It is not hard to understand their quarrels. Neither of them had natural tact, and Godwin's sensibility was morbid. Unflinching truthfulness, even in literary criticism, must have tried their tempers, and the single word "démêlé," best translated "row," occurs often in Godwin's diary as his note on one of their meetings. It is not easy to decide which influenced the other more. Godwin's was the trained, systematic, academical mind, but Holcroft added to a rich and curious experience of life and a vein of native originality, wide reading and something more than a mere amateur's taste for music and art. It was Holcroft who drove Godwin out of his compromising Unitarianism into a view which for some years he boldly described as Atheism. His religious opinions were afterwards modified (or so he supposed) by S. T. Coleridge; but thatinfluence is not conspicuous in his posthumous essay on religion, and the best label for his attitude is perhaps Huxley's word, "Agnostic."
As the French Revolution approached, the two friends fell under the prevailing excitement. Godwin attended the Revolution Society's dinners, and Holcroft was, as we have seen, a leading member of the Corresponding Society. There is no difficulty in accounting for most of the opinions which the two friends held in common, and which Godwin was soon to embody inPolitical Justice. Some were common to all the group; others lie in germ at least in the writings of the Encyclopædists. Even communism was anticipated by Mably, and was held in some tentative form by many of the leading men of the Revolution. (See Kropotkin:The Great French Revolution.) The puzzle is rather to account for the anarchist tendency which seems to be wholly original in Godwin. It was a revolt not merely against all coercive action by the State, but also against collective action by the citizens. The root of it was probably the extreme individualism which felt that a man surrendered too much of himself, too much of truth and manhood in any political association. The beginnings of this line of thought may bedetected in a vivid contemptuous account of the riotous Westminster election of 1788, in which Holcroft had worked with the Foxites: "Scandal, pitiful, mean, mutual scandal, never was more plentifully dispersed. Electioneering is a trade so despicably degrading, so eternally incompatible with moral and mental dignity that I can scarcely believe a truly great mind capable of the dirty drudgery of such vice. I am at least certain no mind is great while thus employed. It is the periodical reign of the evil nature or demon."
This, to be sure, is no more than a hint of a tendency, but it shows that experience was already fermenting in the brain of one member at least of the pair, and it took these alchemists no great while to distil from it their theoretic spirit. The doings of the Corresponding Society were destined to enlarge and confirm this experience. In the hopes, the indignations, and the perils of the years of revolutionary excitement Godwin had his intimate share. He was one of a small committee which undertook the publication of Paine'sRights of Man, and when the repression began, those who were struck down were his associates and in some cases his intimates. Holcroft, as we have seen, was tried for high treason, and Joseph Gerrald, who was sent toBotany Bay, was a friend for whom he felt both admiration and affection. If the fate of these men was a haunting pain to their friends, their high courage and idealistic faith was a noble stimulus. "Human Perfectibility" had its martyrs, and the words of Gerrald as he stood in the dock awaiting the sentence that was to send him to his death among thieves and forgers, deserve a respectful record: "Moral light is as irresistible by the mind as physical by the eye. All attempts to impede its progress are vain. It will roll rapidly along, and as well may tyrants imagine that by placing their feet upon the earth they can stop its diurnal motion, as that they shall be able by efforts the most virulent and pertinacious to extinguish the light of reason and philosophy, which happily for mankind is everywhere spreading around us." It was in this atmosphere of enthusiasm and devotion thatPolitical Justicewas written.
The main work of Godwin's life was begun in July, 1791. He was fortunate in securing a contract from the publisher Robinson, on generous terms which ultimately brought him in one thousand guineas.Political Justicehas been generally classed among the answers to Burke, but Godwin's aim was in fact something more ambitious. A notein his diary deserves to be quoted: "My original conception proceeded on a feeling of the imperfections and errors of Montesquieu, and a desire of supplying a less faulty work. In the just fervour of my enthusiasm I entertained the vain imagination of "hewing a stone from the rock," which by its inherent energy and weight, should overbear and annihilate all opposition and place the principles of politics on an immoveable basis."
When he came to answer his critics, he apologised for extravagances on the plea of haste and excitement; but in fact the work was slowly and deliberately written, and was not completed until January, 1793. Its doctrines, since the book is not now readily accessible, will be summarised fully and in Godwin's own phraseology in the next chapter, but it seems proper to draw attention here to the cool yet unprovocative courage of its writer. It is filled with "hanging matters." Pitt was, perhaps, no more disposed to punish a man for expounding the fundamental principles of philosophic anarchism than was the Russian autocracy in our own day when it tolerated Tolstoy. It was not for writingUtopiathat Sir Thomas More lost his head. But the book is quite unflinching in its application of principle, and its attacks on monarchyare as uncompromising as those for which Paine was outlawed. The preface calmly discusses the possibility of prosecution, issues what is in effect a quiet challenge, and concludes with the consolation that "it is the property of truth to be fearless and to prove victorious over every adversary." The fact was that Godwin watched the dangers of his friends "almost with envy" (letter to Gerrald). But he held that a man who deliberately provokes martyrdom acts immorally, since he confuses the progress of reason by exciting destructive passions, and drives his adversaries into evil courses.
"For myself," he wrote, "I will never adopt any conduct for the express purpose of being put upon my trial, but if I be ever so put, I will consider that day as a day of triumph." Godwin escaped punishment for his activity on behalf of Holcroft and the twelve reformers, because his activity was successful. He escaped prosecution forPolitical Justicebecause it was a learned book, addressed to educated readers, and issued at the astonishing price of three guineas. The propriety of prosecuting him was considered by the Privy Council; and Pitt is said to have dismissed the suggestion with the remark that "a three guinea book could never do much harm amongthose who had not three shillings to spare." That this three-guinea book was bought and read to the extent of no less than four thousand copies is a tribute not merely to its vitality, but to the eagerness of the middle-classes during the revolutionary ferment to drink in the last words of the new philosophy.
A new edition was soon called for, and was issued early in 1796. Much of the book was recast and many chapters entirely rewritten, as the consequence not so much of any material change in Godwin's views, as of the profit he had derived from private controversies. Condorcet (though he is never mentioned) is, if one may make a guess, the chief of the new influences apparent in the second edition. It is more cautious, more visibly the product of a varied experience than the first draft, but it abandons none of his leading ideas. A third edition appeared in 1799, toned down still further by a growing caution. These revisions undoubtedly made the book less interesting, less vivid, less readable. No modern edition has ever appeared, and its direct influence had become negligible even before Godwin's death. It is harder to account for the oblivion into which the book has fallen, than to explain its early popularity. It is not a difficult book to read. "The young andthe fair," Godwin tells us, "did not feel deterred from consulting my pages." His style is always clear and often eloquent. His vocabulary seems to a modern taste overloaded with Latin words, but the architecture of his sentences is skilful in the classical manner. He can vary his elaborate periods with a terse, strong statement which comes with the force of an unexpected blow. He has a knack of happy illustration, and a way of enforcing his points by putting problems in casuistry which have an alluring human interest. The book moved his own generation profoundly, and even to-day his more enthusiastic passages convey an irresistible impression of sincerity and conviction.
The controversy which producedPolitical Justicewas a dialogue between the future and the past. The task of speculation in England had been, through a stagnant century, to define the conditions of political stability, and to admire the elaborate checks and balances of the British Constitution as though change were the only evil that threatened mankind. For Burke, change itself was but an incident in the triumph of continuity and conservation. For Godwin the whole life of mankind is a race through innovation to perfection, and his main concern is to exhort the athlete to fling aside the garments of prejudice, tradition, and constraint, until one asks at the end how much of flesh and blood has been torn away with the garments. If one were to attempt in a phrase to sum up his work, the best title which one could invent for it would be Prolegomena to all Future Progress. What in a word are the conditions of progress?
His attitude to mankind is by turns a pedagogue's disapprobation and a patron's encouragement. The worst enemy of progress was the systematic optimism of Leibnitz and Pope, which Voltaire had overthrown. There is indeed enough of progress in the past to fire our courage and our hopes. In moments of depression, he would admire the beautiful invention of writing and the power of mind displayed in human speech. But the general panorama of history exhorts us to fundamental change. In bold sweeping rhetoric he assures us that history is little else than the record of crime. War has diminished neither its horror nor its frequency, and man is still the most formidable enemy to man. Despotism is still the fate of the greatest part of mankind. Penal laws by the terror of punishment hold a numerous class in abject penury. Robbery and fraud are none the less continual, and the poor are tempted for ever to violence against the more fortunate. One person in seven comes in England on the poor rates. Can the poor conceive of society as a combination to protect every man in his rights and secure him the means of existence? Is it not rather for them a conspiracy to engross its advantages for the favoured few? Luxury insults them; admiration is the exclusive property of therich, and contempt the constant lacquey of poverty. Nowhere is a man valued for what he is. Legislation aggravates the natural inequality of man. A house of landlords sets to work to deprive the poor of the little commonage of nature which remained to them, and its bias stands revealed when we recollect that in England (as Paine had pointed out) while taxes on land produce half a million less than they did a century ago, taxes on articles of general consumption produce thirteen millions more. Robbery is a capital offence because the poor alone are tempted to it. Among the poor alone is all combination forbidden. Godwin was often an incautious rhetorician. He painted the present in colours of such unrelieved gloom, that it is hard to see in it the possibility of a brighter future. Mankind seems hopeless, and he has to prove it perfectible.
Are these evils then the necessary condition of society? Godwin answers that question as the French school, and in particular Helvétius, had done, by a preliminary assault on the assumptions of a reactionary philosophy. He proposes to exhort the human will to embark with a conscious and social resolve on the adventure of perfection. He must first demonstrate that the will is sovereign.Man is the creature of necessity, and the nexus of cause and effect governs the moral world like the physical. We are the product of our conditions. But among conditions some are within the power of the will to change and others are not. Montesquieu had insisted that it is climate which ultimately differentiates the races of mankind. Climate is clearly a despotism which we can never hope to reform away. Another school has taught that men come into the world with innate ideas and a predetermined character. Others again would dispute that man is in his actions a reasonable being, and would represent him as the toy of passion, a creature to whom it is useless to present an argument drawn from his own advantage. The first task of the progressive philosopher is to clear away these preliminary obstacles. Man is the creature of conditions, but primarily of those conditions which he may hope to modify—education, religion, social prejudice and above all government. He is also in the last resort a being whose conduct is governed by his opinions. Admit these premises and the way is clear towards perfection. It is a problem which in some form and in some dialect confronts every generation of reformers. We are the creatures of our own environment,but in some degree we are ourselves a force which can modify that environment. We inherit a past which weighs upon us and obsesses us, but in some degree each generation is born anew. Godwin used the new psychology against the old superstition of innate ideas. A modern thinker in his place would advance Weissmann's biological theory that the acquired modifications of an organism are not inherited, as an answer to the pessimism which bases itself upon heredity.