Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle

by Henry Noel Brailsford

Duties and rights are correlative. As it cannot be the duty of men or societies to do anything to the detriment of human happiness, so it appears with equal evidence that they cannot have the right to do so. There cannot be a more absurd proposition than that which affirms the right of doing wrong. The voice of the people is not the voice of God, nor does universal consent or a majority vote convert wrong into right. It is absurd to say that any set of people has a right to set up any form of government it chooses, or any sect to establish any superstition however detestable. All this would have delighted Burke, but Godwin stands firmly in his path by asserting what he calls the one negative right of man. It is in a word, the right to exercise virtue, the right to a region of choice, a sphere of discretion, which his neighbours must not infringe save by censure and remonstrance. When I am constrained, I cease to be a person, and become a thing. "I ought to exercise my talents for the benefit of others, but the exercise must be the fruit of my own conviction; no man must attempt to press me into the service."

Government is an evil, and the business of human advancement is to dispense with it as rapidly as may be. In the period of transition Godwin had but a secondary interest, and his sketch of it is slight. He dismisses in turn despotism, aristocracy, the "mixed monarchy" of the Whigs, and the president with kingly powers of some American thinkers. His pages on these subjects are vigorous, well-reasoned, and pointed in their satire. It required much courage to write them, but they do not contain his original contribution to political theory. What is most characteristic in his line of argument is his insistence on the moral corruption that monarchy and aristocracy involve. The whole standard of moral values is subverted. To achieve ostentation becomes the first object of desire. Disinterested virtue is first suspected and then viewed with incredulity. Luxury meanwhile distorts our whole attitude to our fellows, and in every effort to excel and shine we wrong the labouring millions. Aristocracy involves general degradation, and can survive only amid general ignorance. "To make men serfs and villeins it is indispensably necessary to make them brutes.... A servant who has been taught to write and read, ceases to be any longer a passive machine."

From the abolition of monarchy and aristocracy Godwin, and indeed the whole revolutionary school, expected the cessation of war. War and conquest elevate the few at the expense of the rest, and cannot benefit the whole community. Democracies have no business with war save to repel an invasion of their territory. He thought of patriotism and love of country much as did Dr. Price. They are (as Hervé has argued in our own day) specious illusions invented to render the multitude the blind instruments of crooked designs. We must not be lured into pursuing the general wealth, prosperity or glory of the society to which we belong. Society is an abstraction, an "ideal existence," and is not on its own account entitled to the smallest regard. Let us not be led away into rendering services to society for which no individual man is the better. Godwin is scornful of wars to maintain the balance of power, or to protect our fellow-countrymen abroad. Some proportion must be observed between the evil of which we complain and the evil which the proposed remedy inevitably includes. War may be defensible in support of the liberty of an oppressed people, but let us wait (here he is clearly censuring the practice of the French Republic) until the oppressed people rises. Do not interfere to force it to be free, and do not forget the resources of pacific persuasion. As to foreign possessions there is little to be said. Do without them. Let colonies attend to their own defence; no State would wish to have colonies if free trade were universal. Liberty is equally good for every race of men, and democracy, since it is founded on reason, a universal form of government. There follow some naïve prescriptions for conducting democratic wars. Sincerity forbids ambuscades and secresy. Never invade, nor assume the offensive. A citizen militia must replace standing armies. Training and discipline are of little value; the ardour of a free people will supply their place.

Godwin's leading idea when he comes to sketch a shadowy constitution is an extreme dislike of overgrown national States. Political speculation in his day idealised the city republic of antiquity. Helvétius, hoping to get rid as far as possible of government, had advocated a system of federated commonwealths, each so small that public opinion and the fear of shame would act powerfully within it. He would have divided France into thirty republics, each returning four deputies to a federal council. The Girondins cherished the same idea, and lost their heads for it. Tolstoy, going back to the village community as the only possible scene of a natural and virtuous life, exhibits the same tendency.

For Godwin the true unit of society is the parish. Neighbours best understand each others' concerns, and in a limited area there is no room for ambition to unfold itself. Great talents will have their sphere outside this little circle in the work of moulding opinion. Within the parish public opinion is supreme, and acts through juries, which may at first be obliged to exert some degree of violence in dealing with offenders:—"But this necessity does not arise out of the nature of man, but out of the institutions by which he has already been corrupted. Man is not originally vicious. He would not ... refuse to be convinced by the expostulations that are addressed to him, had he not been accustomed to regard them as hypocritical, and to conceive that while his neighbour, his parent and his political governor pretended to be actuated by a pure regard to his interest or pleasure, they were in reality, at the expense of his, promoting their own.... Render the plain dictates of justice level to every capacity ... and the whole species will become reasonable and virtuous. It will then be sufficient for juries to recommend a certain mode of adjusting controversies, without assuming the prerogative of dictating that adjustment. It will then be sufficient for them to invite offenders to forsake their errors.... Where the empire of reason was so universally acknowledged, the offender would either readily yield to the expostulations of authority, or if he resisted, though suffering no personal molestation, he would feel so weary under the unequivocal disapprobation and the observant eye of public judgment as willingly to remove to a society more congenial to his errors." The picture is not so Utopian as it sounds. It is a very fair sketch of the social structure of a Macedonian village community under Turkish rule, with the massacres left out.

For the rest Godwin was reluctantly prepared to admit the wisdom of instituting a single chamber National Assembly, to manage the common affairs of the parishes, to arrange their disputes and to provide for national defence. But it should suffice for it to meet for one day annually or thereabouts. Like the juries it would at first issue commands, but would in time find it sufficient to publish invitations backed by arguments. Godwin, who is quite prepared to idealise his district juries, pours forth an unstinted contempt upon Parliaments and their procedure. They make a show of unanimity where none exists. The prospect of a vote destroys the intellectual value of debate; the will of one man really dominates, and the existence of party frustrates persuasion. The whole is based upon "that intolerable insult upon all reason and justice, the deciding upon truth by the casting up of numbers." He omits to tell us whether he would allow his juries to vote. Fortunately legislation is unnecessary: "The inhabitants of a small parish living with some degree of that simplicity which best corresponds with the real nature and wants of a human being, would soon be led to suspect that general laws were unnecessary and would adjudge the causes that came before them not according to certain axioms previously written, but according to the circumstances and demand of each particular cause."

Godwin had a clear mental picture of the gradual decay of authority towards the close of the period of transition; his vision of the earlier stages is less definite. He set his faith on the rapid working of enquiry and persuasion, but he does not explain in detail how, for example, we are to rid ourselves of kings. He once met the Prince Regent, but it is not recorded that he talked to him of virtue and equality, as the early Quakers talked to the man Charles Stuart. He is chiefly concerned to warn his revolutionary friends against abrupt changes. There must be a general desire for change, a conviction of the understanding among the masses, before any change is wise. When a whole nation, or even an unquestionable majority of a nation, is resolved on change, no government, even with a standing army behind it, can stand against it. Every reformer imagines that the country is with him. What folly! Even when the majority seems resolved, what is the quality of their resolution? They do, perhaps, sincerely dislike some specific tax. But do they dislike the vice and meanness that grow out of tyranny, and pant for the liberal and ingenuous virtue that would be fostered in their own minds by better conditions? It is a disaster when the unillumined masses are instigated to violent revolution. Revolutions are always crude, bloody, uncertain and inimical to tolerance, independence, and intellectual inquiry. They are a detestable persecution when a minority promotes them. If they must occur, at least postpone them as long as possible. External freedom is worthless without the magnanimity, firmness and energy that should attend it. But if a man have these things, there is little left for him to desire. He cannot be degraded, nor become useless and unhappy. Let us not be in haste to overthrow the usurped powers of the world. Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. It is unfortunate that men are so eager to strike and have so little constancy to reason. We should desire neither violent change nor the stagnation that inflames and produces revolutions. Our prayer to governments should be, "Do not give us too soon; do not give us too much; but act under the incessant influence of a disposition to give us something."

These are the reflections of a man who wrote amid the Terror. He had seen the Corresponding Society at work, and the experience made him more than sceptical of any form of association in politics, and led him into a curiously biassed argument, rhetorical in form, forensic in substance. Temporary combinations may be necessary in a time of turmoil, or to secure some single limited end, such as the redress of a wrong done to an individual. Where their scope is general and their duration long continued, they foster declamation, cabal, party spirit and tumult. They are frequented by the artful, the intemperate, the acrimonious, and avoided by the sober, the sceptical, the contemplative citizen. They foster a fallacious uniformity of opinion and render the mind quiescent and stationary. Truth disclaims the alliance of marshalled numbers. The conditions most favourable to reasoned enquiry and calm persuasion are to be found in small and friendly circles. The moral beauty of the spectacle offered by these groups of friends united to pursue truth and foster virtue, will render it contagious. So the craggy steep of science will be levelled and knowledge rendered accessible to all.

The conception of the State which Godwin sought to supplant was itself limited and negative. Government was little else in his day than a means for internal defence against criminals and for external defence against aggression. For the rest, it helped landlords to enclose commons, kept down wages by poor relief and in a muddle-headed way interfered with the freedom of trade. But its central activity was the repression of crime, and for Godwin's system the test question was his handling of the problem of crime and punishment. He was no Platonist, but not for the first time we discover him in a familiar Socratic position. "Do you punish a man," asked Socrates, "to make him better or to make him worse?" Godwin starts by rejecting the traditional conception of punishment. The word means the infliction of evil upon a vicious being, not merely because the public advantage demands it, but because there is a certain fitness and propriety in making suffering the accompaniment of vice, quite apart from any benefit that may be in the result. No adherent of the doctrine of necessity in morals can justify that attitude. The assassin could no more avoid the murder he committed than could the dagger. Justice opposes any suffering, which is not attended by benefit. Resentment against vice will not excuse useless torture. We must banish the conception of desert. To punish for what is past and irrecoverable must be ranked among the most baleful conceptions of barbarism. Xerxes was not more unreasonable when he lashed the waves of the sea, than that man would be who inflicted suffering on his fellow from a view to the past and not from a view to the future.

Excluding all idea of punishment in the proper sense of the word, it remains only to consider such coercion as is used against persons convicted of injurious action in the past, for the purpose of preventing future mischief. Godwin now invites us to consider the futility of coercion as a means of reforming, or as he would say, "enlightening the understanding" of a man who has erred. Our aim is to bring him to the acceptance of our conception of duty. Assuming that we possess more of eternal justice than he, do we shrink from setting our wit against his? Instead of acting as his preceptor we become his tyrant. Coercion first annihilates the understanding of its victim, and then of him who adopts it. Dressed in the supine prerogatives of a master, he is excused from cultivating the faculties of a man. Coercion begins by producing pain, by violently alienating the mind from the truth with which we wish it to be impressed. It includes a tacit confession of imbecility.