That was the familiar pessimism which led in practical politics to laissez 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; looking around 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 inventive brain, 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 the poor 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 wrote The Age of Reason on 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 Bible is 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 Reason performed 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.
CHAPTER III
WILLIAM GODWIN AND THE REVOLUTION
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 celebrated Enquiry 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 in 1756, 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 the Account 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.