How had Godwin tried to meet it, when it was still in the hands of weaker men, and therefore not at all conclusive? He could not ignore it. In his Political Justice (1793) he had given the outlines of a “simple form of society, without government,” on the principle of Tom Paine, which was also a received Jacobin motto, “Society is produced by our wants, government by our wickedness.”[[11]] He says, with the ruling philosophy, that man is born a blank, and his outward circumstances make him good or evil. Thanks to human institutions, especially lawyers, sovereigns, and statesmen, the outward circumstances, he says, are as bad as they can be. Everywhere there is inequality. There is great poverty alongside of great riches, and great tyranny with great slavery. In the same way the best of his novels, Caleb Williams (1794), tells us how “things as they are” enable the rich sinner to persecute the poor righteous man. But he is no pessimist. The Political Justice does not end with a statement of evils. It goes on to show that in the end truth will conquer; men will listen to reason, they will abandon their present laws, and they will form a society without law or government or any kind of force; no such things will be needed when every man listens to reason, and contents himself with plain living and high thinking. There will be no king in Israel; every man will do that which is right in his own eyes. In our present society, says Godwin, it is distribution and not production that is at fault. There is more than enough of wealth for all, but it is not shared amongst all. One man has too much, another little or nothing. In the new society reason will change all that. Reason tells us that, if we make an equal division, not only of the good things of this life, but of the labour of making them, then we shall secure a production quite sufficient for the needs of plain livers, at the cost of perhaps half-an-hour’s labour in a day from each of them.[[12]] Each of them will, therefore, have leisure, which is the true riches, and he will use the time for his own moral and intellectual improvement. In this way, by the omnipotence of truth and the power of persuasion, not by any violence or power of the sword, perfection and happiness will in time be established on the earth.
Godwin made no essential change in these views in the later editions of the Political Justice (1796 and 1798), or in the Enquirer (1797). “Among the faithless, faithful only he,” when the excesses of the Terror made even Sir James Mackintosh (not to say Bishop Watson, Southey, and Wordsworth) a lukewarm reformer. Nothing in Godwin’s life is more admirable than the perfect confidence with which he holds fast to his old faith in democratic principles and the perfectibility of man. If it is obstinacy, it is very like devotion; and perhaps the only author who shows an equal constancy is Condorcet, the Girondist, marked out for death, and writing in his hiding-place, almost under the eyes of the Convention, his eager book on the Progress of the Species. Nothing but intense sincerity and sheer depth of conviction could have enabled these men to continue the defence of a dishonoured cause. They had not the martyr’s greatest trial, the doubt whether he is right. The great impression made by their works was a sign that, as they felt strongly, they wrote powerfully. Malthus, who refuted both of them, apologized for giving serious criticism to Condorcet’s palpable extravagances by saying that Condorcet has many followers who will hold him unanswerable unless he is specially answered.[[13]] Of Godwin, Mr. Sumner, writing in 1816, says that though his book (the Political Justice) was becoming out of date, it was still “the ablest and best known statement” of the doctrines of equality that had ever appeared in England.[[14]] It has been justly called the “first text-book of the philosophical radicals.” The actual effect of it cannot be measured by the number of copies sold on its first appearance. Godwin had placed it far beyond the reach of ordinary democrats by fixing the price at three guineas. In 1793 many who would have been his keenest readers could not have paid three shillings for it. But the event proved him wise in his generation. The Privy Council decided they might safely tolerate so dear a book; and a small audience even of the rich was better to Godwin than prosecution, which might mean exile and no audience at all.[[15]] Few writers of our own day have so good an excuse for making themselves inaccessible to the poor. Godwin, however, like Ruskin, reached the poor in spite of his arrangements for avoiding them. He filtered down among the masses; and his writings became a political as well as a literary power in England, long before he had a poetic son-in-law to give him reflected glory. If a species is to be judged by its best individual, then Godwin represents better than Paine the class of political writers to which they both belong; and many fell down with Godwin when he fell down before Malthus.
The Enquirer was less popular than the Political Justice. Part of the charm of the latter undoubtedly lay in the elaborate completeness and systematic order of the whole discussion. The foundations were laid in the psychology of Locke; and then the building was raised, stone by stone, until the whole was finished. But in the Enquirer Godwin’s dislike of law had extended even to the form of composition. He had been wrong, he said, in trying to write a systematic treatise on society, and he would now confine himself to detached essays, wholly experimental, and not necessarily in harmony with one another. “He (the author) has carried this principle so far that he has not been severely anxious relative to inconsistency that may be discovered between the speculations of one essay and the speculations of another.”[[16]] The contrast between these two styles is the contrast between a whole oratorio and a miscellaneous concert, or between a complete poem and a volume of extracts.
The thoughts were the same, though they had lost their attractive expression. The essay on Avarice and Profusion[[17]] tells us, among other things, that “a state of cultivated equality is that state which, in speculation and theory, appears most consonant to the nature of man, and most conducive to the extensive diffusion of felicity.” This was the essay which led Malthus and his father into their fruitful argument. The essay on Riches and Poverty, and the one on Beggars,[[18]] contain other applications of the same idea, with many moralizing digressions. Godwin has not lost his sweet Utopian vision; he has not yielded to the objections that baffled Dr. Robert Wallace; he thinks he has removed all objections.
He meets them[[19]] by saying first of all: “There is a principle in the nature of human society by means of which everything seems to tend to its level,” when not interfered with; and the population of a country when left to itself does not seem to increase beyond the food. But in the second place, supposing things not to find their level in this way, the earth is wide and the evil day is far off. It may take myriads of centuries to till the untilled acres and to replenish the empty earth with people, and much may happen before then. In fact, he views the subject as many of us view the question of our coal supply. Before it is exhausted we may be beyond the need of it.[[20]] The earth itself may have collapsed with all its inhabitants. Don’t let us refuse a present blessing from fear of a remote future danger. Besides, it is not very hard to imagine a safeguard. Franklin says that “mind will one day become omnipotent over matter;”[[21]] why not over the matter of our own bodies? Does not the bodily health depend largely on the mind?
“A merry heart goes all the day;
Your sad tires in a mile, O!”
The time may come when we shall be so full of liveliness that we shall not sleep, and so full of life that we shall not die. The need for marriage will be superseded by earthly immortality, and the desire for it by the development of intellect. On the renewed earth of the future there will be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, but we shall be as the angels. “The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have, in a certain degree, to recommence her career every thirty years. Other improvements may be expected to keep pace with those of health and longevity. There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice as it is called, and no government. Besides this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all.”[[22]]
This sweet strain had been enchanting the public for four or five years, when Malthus ventured to interrupt it with his modest anonymous Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society. The writer claims to be as hearty a philanthropist as Mr. Godwin, but he cannot allow the wish to be father to the thought, and believe in future perfection against evidence. To prove a theory true, he says, it is not enough to show that you cannot prove its contradiction, or that you can prove its usefulness. It would be very useful to have eyes in both sides of our head; but that does not prove that we are going to have them. If you told me that man was becoming a winged creature like the ostrich, I should not doubt that he would find wings very useful, but I could hardly believe your prophecy without some kind of proof beyond the mere praises of flying. I should ask you to show palpable signs in his body and habits that such a change was going on, that his neck has been lengthening, his lips hardening, and his hair becoming feathery. In the same way, when you tell me that man is becoming a purely intellectual being, content with plain living and high thinking, I see there might be advantage in the change, but I ask for signs that it is in progress. I see none; but, on the contrary, I see strong reasons for believing in its impossibility. Grant me two postulates, and I disprove your millennium. The first is, that food is necessary; the second, that the instinct for marriage is permanent. No one denies the first, and Godwin’s denial of the second is purely dogmatic. He has given us no proofs. Men have no doubt made progress in other respects; they have passed from barbarism to civilization. But in respect of the second postulate they are the same now as they were 4000 years ago. Individual exceptions are individual exceptions still. I am bound, therefore, to believe in the truth of my postulates, and I infer from them the impossibility of your millennium.
You speak of a society, he continues, where the members are all equally comfortable and at leisure. Suppose it established, it could not last; it would go to pieces through the principle of population alone. The seven years of plenty would be at once devoured by seven years of want. The proof of this is short and decisive:—Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio; subsistence only in an arithmetical. “A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.”[[23]] “The race of plants and animals shrinks under this great restrictive law, and the race of man cannot by any efforts of reason escape from it. Among plants and animals its effects are waste of seed, sickness, and premature death, among men misery and vice,” the former necessary, the latter probable. Now, in the old countries of Europe, population never is unchecked. It is checked by want of room and food. Vice and misery, and the fear of them, are always “equalizing” the numbers of the people with the food of the people. In the New World, “the cynosure of neighbouring eyes,” there are fewer hindrances to early marriage; there is more room and there is more food; hard work is the only condition of a happy life. But, even there, population is not entirely unchecked; the hard work will at least interfere with the rearing of children; and the people, however comfortable, are not at the very highest pitch of comfort, or at the highest pitch of purity and simplicity of life; whereas, by assumption, Godwin’s imaginary society is all these. If, therefore, the people of old Europe double their numbers once a century, and the people of new America (at least in the United States) once in twenty-five years, we may be sure that in the millennial society of Godwin,