"POLITICAL JUSTICE"
The controversy which produced _Political Justice_ was 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 the
rich, 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 Helvetius, 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.
Godwin starts boldly with the thesis that "the characters of men
originate in their external circumstances." He brushes aside innate
ideas or instincts or even ante-natal impressions. Accidents in the womb
may have a certain effect, and every man has a certain disposition at
birth. But the multiplicity of later experiences wears out these early
impressions. Godwin, in all this, reproduces the current fallacy of his
generation. Impressions and experiences were for them something
external, flung upon the surface of the mind. They were just beginning
to realise that the mind works when it perceives. Change a nobleman's
child at birth with a ploughman's, and each will grow up quite naturally
in his new circumstances. Exercise makes the muscles; education,
argument, and the exchange of opinion the mind. "It is impression that
makes the man, and compared with the empire of impression, the mere
differences of animal structure are inexpressibly unimportant and
powerless." Change continues through life; everything mental and
physical is in flux; why suppose that only in the propensities of the
new-born infant is there something permanent and inflexible? Helvetius
had been Godwin's chief precursor in this opinion. He had gone so far as
to declare that men are at birth equal, some raw human stuff which
"education," in the broad sense of the word, proceeds to modify in the
long schooling from the cradle to the grave. Men differ in genius, he
would assert, by education and experience, not by natural organisation.
The original acuteness of the senses has little to do with the
development of talent. The new psychology had swept "faculties" away.
Interest is the main factor in the development of perception and
attention. The scarcity of attention is the true cause of the scarcity
of genius, and the chief means of promoting it are emulation and the
love of glory.
Godwin is too cautious to accept this ultra-revolutionary statement of
the potential equality of men without some reserves. But the idea
inspires him as it inspired all the vital thought of his day. It set
humane physicians at the height of the Terror to work on discovering a
method by which even defective and idiot children might be raised by
"education" to the normal stature of the human mind. It fired Godwin
himself with a zeal for education. "Folly," said Helvetius, "is
factitious." "Nature," said Godwin, "never made a dunce." The failures
of education are due primarily to the teacher's error in substituting
compulsion for persuasion and despotism for encouragement. The
excellences and defects of the human character are not due to occult
causes beyond the reach of ingenuity to modify or correct, nor are false
views the offspring of an irresistible destiny. Our conventional schools
are the slaughterhouses of mind; but of all the external influences
which build up character and opinion, the chief are political. It is
Godwin's favourite theme, and he carries it even further than Holbach
and Helvetius had done. From this influence there is no escape, for it
infects the teacher no less than the taught. Equality will make men
frank, ingenuous and intrepid, but a great disparity of ranks renders
men cold, irresolute, timid and cautious. However lofty the morality of
the teacher, the mind of the child is continually corrupted by seeing,
in the society around him, wealth honoured, poverty contemned, intrepid
virtue proscribed and servility encouraged. From the influence of social
and political institutions there is no escape: "They poison our minds
before we can resist or so much as suspect their malignity. Like the
barbarous directors of Eastern seraglios they deprive us of our
virility, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle. So
false is the opinion that has too generally prevailed that politics is
an affair with which ordinary men have little concern."
Here Godwin is introducing into English thinking an idea originally
French. English writers from Locke to Paine had spoken of government as
something purely negative, so little important that only when a man saw
his property threatened or his shores invaded, was he forced to
recollect that he had a country. Godwin saw its influence everywhere,
insinuating itself into our personal dispositions and insensibly
communicating its spirit to our private transactions. The idea in his
hands made for hope. Reform, or better still, abolish governments, and
to what heights of virtue might not men aspire? We need not say with
Rousseau that men are naturally virtuous. The child, as Helvetius
delighted to point out, will do that for a coral or a doll which he will
do at a mature age for a title or a sceptre. Men are rather the
infinitely malleable, variable stuff on which education and persuasion
can play.
The first essential dogma of perfectibility, the first presupposition of
progress is, then, that men's characters depend on external
circumstances. The second dogma, the second condition of hope is that
the voluntary actions of men originate in their opinions. It is an
orthodox Socratic position, but Godwin was not a student of Plato. He
laid down this dogma as the necessary basis of any reform by persuasion.
There is much virtue in the word "voluntary." In so far as actions are
voluntary, the doctrine is self-evident. A voluntary action is
accompanied by foresight, and the idea of certain consequences is its
motive. A judgment "this is good" or "this is desirable," has preceded
the action, and it originates therefore in an opinion however fugitive.
In moments of passion my attention is so engrossed by a particular view
of the subject that I forget considerations by which I am commonly
guided. Even in battles between reason and sense, he holds, the
contending forces assume a rational form. It is opinion contending with
opinion and judgment with judgment. At this point the modern reader will
become sceptical. These internal struggles assume a rational form only
when self-consciousness reviews them--that is to say when they are over.
In point of fact, Godwin argues, sheer sensuality has a smaller empire
over us than we commonly suppose. Strip the feast of its social
pleasures, and the commerce of the sexes of all its intellectual and
emotional allurements, and who would be overcome?
One need not follow Godwin minutely in his handling of what is after all
a commonplace of academic philosophy. He was concerned to insist that
men's voluntary actions originate in opinion, that he might secure a
fulcrum for the leverage of argument and persuasion. Vice is error, and
error can always be corrected. "Show me in the clearest and most
unambiguous manner that a certain mode of proceeding is most reasonable
in itself, or most conducive to my interest, and I shall infallibly
pursue that mode, so long as the views you suggested to me continue
present to my mind." The practical problem is therefore to make
ourselves and our fellows perfectly conscious of our motives, and always
prepared to render a reason for our actions. The perfection of human
character is to approach as nearly as possible to the absolutely
voluntary state, to act always, in other words, from a clear and
comprehensive survey of the consequences which we desire to produce.
The incautious reader may be invited to pause at this point, for in this
premise lies already the whole of philosophic anarchism. You have
admitted that voluntary action is rational. You have conceded that all
action _ought_ to be voluntary. The silent assumption is that by
education and effort it _can_ be made so. One may doubt whether in the
sense required by Godwin's argument any human action ever is or can be
absolutely "voluntary," rational or self-conscious. To attain it, we
should have to reason naked in a desert with algebraic symbols. To use
words is to think in step, and to beg our question. But Godwin is well
aware that most men rarely reason. He is here framing an ideal, without
realising its remoteness. The mischief of his faith in logic as a force,
was that it led him to ignore the aesthetic and emotional influences, by
which the mass of men can best be led to a virtuous ideal. Shelley, who
was a thorough Platonist, supplements, as we shall see (p. 234), this
characteristic defect in his master's teaching. The main conclusions
follow rapidly. Sound reasoning and truth when adequately communicated
must always be victorious over error. Truth, then, is omnipotent, and
the vices and moral weaknesses of man are not invincible. Man, in short,
is perfectible, or in other words, susceptible of perpetual improvement.
These sentiments have to the modern ear a platitudinous ring. So far
from being platitudes, they are explosives capable of destroying the
whole fabric of government. For if truth is omnipotent, why trust to
laws? If men will obey argument, why use constraint?
But let us move slowly towards this extreme conclusion. If reason
appears to-day to play but a feeble part in society, and exerts only a
limited empire over the actions of men, it is because unlettered
ignorance, social habits and the positive institutions of government
stand in the way. Where the masses of mankind are sunk in brutal
ignorance, one need not wonder that argument and persuasion have but a
small influence with them. Truth indeed is rarely recondite or difficult
to communicate. Godwin might have quoted Helvetius: "It is with genius
as with an astronomer; he sees a new star and forthwith all can see it."
Nor need we fear the objection that by introducing an intellectual
element into virtue, we have removed it beyond the reach of simple men.
A virtuous action, indeed, must be good both in intention and in
tendency. Godwin was like Helvetius and Priestley, a Utilitarian in
ethics, and defined duty as that mode of action on the part of the
individual which constitutes the best possible application of his
capacity to the general benefit, in every situation that presents
itself. One may be mistaken as to what will contribute to the general
benefit, as Sir Everard Digby was, for example, when he thought it his
duty to blow up King James and the Parliament. But the simple man need
be at no loss. An earnest desire will in some degree generate capacity.
There Godwin opened a profoundly interesting and stimulating line of
thought. The mind is formed not by its innate powers, but by its
governing desires. As love brings eloquence to the suitor, so if I do
but ardently desire to serve my kind, I shall find out a way, and while
I study a plan shall find that my faculties have been exercised and
increased. Moreover, in the struggle after virtue I am not alone.
Burke made the first of the virtues prudence. Godwin would have given
sincerity that place. To him and his circle the chief business of
social converse was by argument and exhortation to strengthen the habit
of virtue. There was something to be said for the practice of auricular
confession; but how much better would it be if every man were to make
the world his confessional and the human species the keeper of his
conscience. The practice of sincerity would give to our conversation a
Roman boldness and fervour. The frank distribution of praise and blame
is the most potent incentive to virtue. Were we but bold and impartial
in our judgments, vice would be universally deserted and virtue
everywhere practised. Our cowardice in censure and correction is the
chief reason of the perpetuation of abuses. If every man would tell all
the truth he knew, it is impossible to predict how short would be the
reign of usurpation and folly. Let our motive be philanthropy, and we
need not fear ruggedness or brutality, disdain or superiority, since we
aim at the interest of him we correct, and not at the triumph of the
corrector. In an aside Godwin demands the abolition of social
conventions which offend sincerity. If I must deny myself to a visitor,
I should scorn the polite lie that I am "not at home."
It is a consequence also of this doctrine, that there should be no
prosecutions for libel, even in private matters. Truth depends on the
free shock of opinions, and the unrestrained discussion of private
character is almost as important as freedom in speculative enquiry. "If
the truth were universally told of men's dispositions and actions,
gibbets and wheels might be dismissed from the face of the earth. The
knave unmasked would be obliged to turn honest in his own defence. Nay,
no man would have time to turn a knave. Truth would follow him in his
first irresolute essays, and public disapprobation arrest him in the
commencement of his career." It is shameful for a good man to retort on
a slander, "I will have recourse to the only means that are congenial to
guilt: I will compel you to be silent." Freedom in this matter, as in
all others, will engender activity and fortitude; positive institution
(Godwin's term for law and constraint) makes the mind torpid and
lethargic. It is hardly necessary to reproduce Godwin's vigorous
arguments for unfettered freedom in political and speculative
discussion, against censorships and prosecutions for religious and
political opinions. Even were we secure from the possibility of mistake,
mischief and not good would accrue from the attempt to impose our
infallible opinions upon our neighbours. Men deserve approbation only in
so far as they are independent in their opinions and free in their
actions.
Equally clear is it that the establishment of religion and all systems
of tests must be abolished. They make for hypocrisy, check advance in
speculation, and teach us to estimate a disinterested sincerity at a
cheap rate. We need not fear disorder as a consequence of complete
liberty of speech. "Arguments alone will not have the power, unassisted
by the sense or the recollection of oppression or treachery to hurry the
people into excesses. Excesses are never the offspring of speculative
reason, are never the offspring of misrepresentation only, but of power
endeavouring to stifle reason, and to traverse the commonsense of
mankind."
A more original deduction from Godwin's demand for the unlimited freedom
of opinion, was that he objected vehemently to any system of national
education. Condorcet had drawn up a marvellously complete project for
universal compulsory education, with full liberty indeed for the
teachers, whose technical competence alone the State would guarantee,
and with a scheme of free scholarships, an educational "ladder" more
generous than anything which has yet been realised in fact. Godwin
objects that State-regulated institutions will stereotype knowledge and
make for an undesirable permanence and uniformity in opinion. They
diffuse what is known and forget what remains to be known. They erect a
system of authority and separate a tenet from the evidence on which it
rests, so that beliefs cease to be perceptions and become prejudices. No
Government is to be trusted with the dangerous power to create and
regulate opinions through its schools. Such a power is, indeed, more
dangerous than that of an Established Church, and would be used to
strengthen tyranny and perpetuate faulty institutions.
Godwin, needless to say, takes, as did Condorcet, the side of frankness
in the controversy which was a test of democratic faith in this
generation--whether "political imposture" is allowable, and whether a
statesman should encourage the diffusion of "salutary prejudices" among
the unlearned, the poor and women. This was indeed the main eighteenth
century defence for monarchy and aristocracy. Kings and governors are
not wiser than other men, but it is useful that they should be thought
so. Such imposture, Godwin argued, is as futile as the parallel use by
religion of the pains and penalties of the afterworld. It is the sober
who are demoralised by it, and not the lawless who are deterred. To
terrify men is a strange way of rendering them judicious, fearless and
happy. It is to leave men indolent and unbraced by truth. He objects
even to the trappings and ceremonies which are used to render
magistrates outwardly venerable and awe-inspiring, so that they may
impress the irrational imagination. These means may be used as easily to
support injustice as to render justice acceptable. They divide men into
two classes; those who may reason, and those who must take everything on
trust. This is to degrade them both. The masses are kept in perpetual
vibration between rebellious discontent and infatuated credulity. And
can we suppose that the practice of concealment and hypocrisy will make
no breaches in the character of the governing class?
The general effect of any meddling of authority with opinion is that the
mind is robbed of its genuine employment. Such a system produces beings
wanting in independence, and in that intrepid perseverance and calm
self-approbation which grow from independence. Such beings are the mere
dwarfs and mockeries of men.
Godwin was at issue here as much with Rousseau as with Burke, but his
trust in the people, it should be explained, was based rather on faith
in what they might become, than on admiration for what they were.
That all government is an evil, though doubtless a necessary evil, was
the typical opinion of the individualistic eighteenth century. It would
not long have survived such proposals as Paine's scheme of old age
pensions and Condorcet's project of national education. When men have
perceived that an evil can be turned to good account, they are already
on the road which will lead them to discard their premises. But Godwin
was quite unaffected by this new Liberalism. No positive good was to be
hoped from government, and much positive evil would flow from it at the
best. In his absolute individualism he went further. The whole idea of
government was radically wrong. For him the individual was tightly
enclosed in his own skin, and any constraint was an infringement of his
personality. He would have poured scorn on the half-mystical conception
of a social organism. Nor did it occur to him that a man might
voluntarily subject himself to government, losing none of his own
autonomy in the act, from a persuasion that government is on the whole
a benefit, and that submission, even when his own views are thwarted, is
a free man's duty within certain limits, accepted gladly for the sake of
preserving an institution which commonly works well. He did not see the
institution working well; he did not believe in the benefits; he was
convinced that more than all the advantages of the best of governments
could be obtained from the free operation of opinion in an unorganised
community.
His main point is lucidly simple. It was an application of the Whig and
Protestant doctrine of the right of private judgment. "If in any
instance I am made the mechanical instrument of absolute violence, in
that instance I fall under a pure state of external slavery." Nor is the
case much better, if instead of waiting for the actual application of
coercion, I act in obedience to authority from the hope and fear of the
State's rewards and punishments. For virtue has ceased, and I am acting
from self-interest. It is a triviality to distinguish, as Whig thinkers
do, between matters of conscience (in which the State should not meddle)
and my conduct in the civil concerns of daily life (which the State
should regulate). What sort of moralist can he be, who makes no
conscience of what he does in his daily intercourse with other men? "I
have deeply reflected upon the nature of virtue, and am convinced that a
certain proceeding is incumbent on me. But the hangman supported by an
Act of Parliament assures me that I am mistaken. If I yield my opinion
to his dictum, my action becomes modified, and my character also....
Countries exposed to the perpetual interference of decrees instead of
arguments, exhibit within their boundaries the mere phantoms of men."
The root of the whole matter is that brute force is an offence against
reason, and an unnecessary offence, if in fact men are guided by opinion
and will yield to argument. "The case of punishment is the case of you
and me differing in opinion, and your telling me that you must be right
since you have a more brawny arm."
If I must obey, it is better and less demoralising to yield an external
submission so as to escape penalty or constraint, than to yield to
authority from a general confidence which enslaves the mind. Comply but
criticise. Obey but beware of reverence. If I surrender my conscience to
another man's keeping, I annihilate my individuality as a man, and
become the ready tool of him among my neighbours who shall excel in
imposture and artifice. I put an end moreover to the happy collision of
understandings upon which the hopes of human improvement depend.
Governments depend upon the unlimited confidence of their subjects, and
confidence rests upon ignorance.
Government (has not Burke said so?) is the perpetual enemy of change,
and prompts us to seek the public welfare not in alteration and
improvement, but in a timid reverence for the decisions of our
ancestors, as if it were the nature of the human mind always to
degenerate and never to advance. Godwin thought with John Bright, "We
stand on the shoulders of our forefathers--and see further."
In proportion as weakness and ignorance shall diminish, the basis of
government will also decay. That will be its true euthanasia.
There is indeed nothing to be said for government save that for a time,
and within jealously drawn limits, it may be a fatal and indispensable
necessity. A just government cannot be founded on force: for force has
no affinity with justice. It cannot be based upon the will of God; we
have no revelation that recommends one form of government rather than
another. As little can it be based upon contract. Who were the parties
to the pretended social contract? For whom did they consent, for
themselves or for their descendants, and to how great a variety of
propositions? Have I assented or my ancestors for me, to the laws of
England in fifty volumes folio, and to all that shall hereafter be added
to them? In a few contemptuous pages Godwin buries the social contract.
Men when they digest the articles of a contract are not empowered to
create rights, but only to declare what was previously right. But the
doctrine of the natural rights of man fares no better at his hands.
There is no such thing as a positive right to do as we list. One way of
acting in every emergency is reasonable, and the other is not. One way
will benefit mankind, and the other will not. It is a pestilent doctrine
and a denial of all virtue, to say that we have a right to do what we
will with our own. Everything we possess has a destination prescribed to
it by the immutable voice of reason and justice.
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 Herve 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 naive 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. Helvetius, 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.
With some hesitation Godwin allows the use of force to restrain a man
found in actual violence. We may not have time to reason with him. But
even for self-defence there are other resources. "The powers of the mind
are yet unfathomed." He tells the story of Marius, who overawed the
soldier sent into his cell to execute him, with the words, "Wretch, have
you the temerity to kill Marius?" Were we all accustomed to place an
intrepid confidence in the unaided energy of the intellect, to despise
force in others and to refuse to employ it ourselves, who shall say how
far the species might be improved? But punitive coercion deals only with
a man whose violence is over. The only rational excuse for it is to
restrain a man from further violence which he will presumably commit.
Godwin condemns capital punishment as excessive, since restraint can be
attained without it, and corporal chastisement as an offence against the
dignity of the human mind. Let there be nothing in the state of
transition worse than simple imprisonment. Godwin, however, dissents
vehemently from Howard's invention of solitary confinement, designed to
shield the prisoner from the contamination of his fellow criminals. Man
is a social animal and virtue depends on social relations. As a
preliminary to acquiring it is he to be shut out from the society of his
fellows? How shall he exercise benevolence or justice in his cell? Will
his heart become softened or expand who breathes the atmosphere of a
dungeon? Solitary confinement is the bitterest torment that human
ingenuity can inflict. The least objectionable method of depriving a
criminal of the power to harm society is banishment or transportation.
Expose him to the stimulus of necessity in an unsettled country. New
conditions make new minds. But the whole attempt to apply law breaks
down. You must heap edict on edict, and to make your laws fit your
cases, must either for ever wrest them or make new ones. Law does not
end uncertainty, and it debilitates the mind. So long as men are
habituated to look to foreign guidance and external rules for
direction, so long the vigour of their minds will sleep.
If Fenelon, saint and philosopher, with an incompleted masterpiece in
his pocket, and Fenelon's chambermaid, were both in danger of burning to
death in the archiepiscopal palace at Cambrai, and if I could save only
one of them, which ought I to save? It is a fascinating problem in
casuistry, and Godwin with his usual decision of mind, has no doubt
about the solution. He would save Fenelon as the more valuable life, and
above all Fenelon's manuscript, and the maid, he is quite sure, would
wish to give her life for his. Something (the modern reader will object)
might be urged on the other side. Just because he was a saint, it might
be argued that he was the fitter of the two to face the great adventure,
and one may be sure that he himself would have thought so. A philosopher
who gives his life for a kitten will have advanced the Kingdom of
Heaven. The chambermaid, moreover, may have in her a potentiality of
love and happiness which are worth many a masterpiece of French prose.
But Godwin has not yet exhausted his moral problem. How, if the maid
were my mother, wife or benefactress? Once more he gives his unflinching
answer. Justice still requires of me in the interests of mankind to
save the more valuable life. "What magic is there in the pronoun 'my' to
overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?" My mother may be a fool, a
liar, or a thief. Of what consequence then, is it that she is "mine"?
Gratitude ought not to blind me to my duty, though she have suckled me
and nursed me. The benevolence of a benefactor ought indeed to be
esteemed, but not because it benefited me. A benefactor ought to be
esteemed as much by another as by me, solely because he benefited a
human being. Gratitude, in short, has no place in justice or virtue, and
reason declines to recognise the private affections.
Such, crudely stated, is Godwin's famous doctrine of "universal
benevolence." The virtuous man is like Swift's Houyhnhnms, noble
quadrupeds, wholly governed by reason, who cared for strangers as well
as for the nearest neighbour, and showed the same affection for their
neighbour's offspring as for their own. The centre of Godwin's moral
teaching was yet another Socratic thought. Politics are "the proper
vehicle of a liberal morality," and morals concern our relation to the
whole body of mankind. To realise justice is our prime concern as
rational beings, and society is nothing but embodied justice. Justice
deals with beings capable of pleasure and pain. Here we are partakers of
a common nature with like faculties for suffering or enjoyment.
"Justice," then, "is that impartial treatment of every man in matters
that relate to his happiness, which is measured solely by a
consideration of the properties of the receiver and the capacity of him
who gives." Every man with whom I am in contact is a sentient being, and
one should be as much to me as another, save indeed where equity
corrects equality, by suggesting to me that one individual may be of
more value than another, because of his greater power to benefit
mankind. Justice exacts from us the application of our talents, time,
and resources with the single object of producing the greatest sum of
benefit to sentient beings. There is no limit to what I am bound to do
for the general weal. I hold my person and property both in trust on
behalf of mankind. A man who needs L10 has an absolute claim on me, if I
have it, unless it can be shown that the money could be more
beneficially applied. Every shilling I possess is irrevocably assigned
by some claim of eternal justice. Every article of property, it follows,
should belong to him in whose hands it will be of most benefit, and the
instrument of the greatest happiness.
It is the love of distinction which attends wealth in corrupt societies
that explains the desire for luxury. We desire not the direct pleasure
to be derived from excessive possessions, but the consideration which is
attached to it. Our very clothes are an appeal to the goodwill of our
neighbours, and a refuge from their contempt. Society would be
transformed if the distinction were reversed, if admiration were no
longer rendered to the luxurious and avaricious and were accorded only
to talent and virtue. Let not the necessity of rewarding virtue be
suggested as a justification for the inequalities of fortune. Shall we
say, to a virtuous man: "If you show yourself deserving, you shall have
the essence of a hundred times more food than you can eat, and a hundred
times more clothes than you can wear. You shall have a patent for taking
away from others the means of a happy and respectable existence, and for
consuming them in riotous and unmeaning extravagance." Is this the
reward that ought to be offered to virtue, or that virtue should stoop
to take? Godwin is at his best on this theme of luxury: "Every man may
calculate in every glass of wine he drinks, and every ornament he
annexes to his person, how many individuals have been condemned to
slavery and sweat, incessant drudgery, unwholesome food, continual
hardships, deplorable ignorance and brutal insensibility, that he may be
supplied with these luxuries. It is a gross imposition that men are
accustomed to put upon themselves, when they talk of the property
bequeathed to them by their ancestors. The property is produced by the
daily labour of men who are now in existence. All that the ancestors
bequeathed to them was a mouldy patent which they show as a title to
extort from their neighbours what the labour of those neighbours has
produced."
It is a flagrant immorality that one man should have the power to
dispose of the produce of another man's toil, yet to maintain this power
is the main concern of police and legislation. Morality recognises two
degrees of property, (1) things which will produce the greatest benefit,
if attributed to me, in brief the necessities of life, my food, clothes,
furniture and apartment; (2) the empire which every man may claim over
the produce of his own industry, even over that part of it which ought
not to be used and appropriated by himself. Every man is a steward. But
subject to censure and remonstrance, he must be free to dispose of his
property as his own understanding shall dictate. The ideal is equality,
and all society should be what Coleridge called a Pantisocracy. It is
wrong for any one to enjoy anything, unless something similar is
accessible to all, and wrong to produce luxuries until the elementary
wants of all are satisfied. But it would be futile and wrong to attempt
to equalise property by positive enactment. It would be useless until
men are virtuous, and unnecessary when they are so. The moment
accumulation and monopoly are regarded by any society as dishonourable
and mischievous, the revolution in opinion will ensure that comforts
shall tend to a level.
Godwin objects to the plans put forward in France during the Revolution
for interfering with bequests and inheritance. He would, however, check
the incentives to accumulation by abolishing the feudal system,
primogeniture, titles and entail. Property is sacred--that good men may
be free to give it away. Reform public opinion, and a man engaged in
amassing wealth would soon hide his treasures as carefully as he now
displays them. The first step is to rob wealth of its distinction.
Wealth is acquired to-day in over-reaching our neighbours, and spent in
insulting them. Establish equality on a firm basis of rational opinion,
and you cut off for ever the great occasion of crime, remove the
constant spectacle of injustice with all its attendant demoralisation,
and liberate genius now immersed in sordid cares.
"In a state of society where men lived in the midst of plenty, and where
all shared alike the bounties of nature, the sentiments of oppression,
servility and fraud would inevitably expire. The narrow principle of
selfishness would vanish. No man being obliged to guard his little
store, or provide with anxiety and pain for his restless wants, each
would lose his individual existence in the thought of the general good.
No man would be an enemy to his neighbour, for they would have no
subject of contention, and of consequence philanthropy would resume the
empire which reason assigns her. Mind would be delivered from her
perpetual anxiety about corporal support, and freed to expatiate in the
field of thought, which is congenial to her. Each would assist the
enquiries of all."
Unnecessary tasks absorb most of our labour to-day. In the ideal
community, Godwin reckons that half an hour's toil from every man daily
will suffice to produce the necessities of life. He modified this
sanguine estimate in a later essay (_The Enquirer_) to two hours. He
dismisses all objections based on the sloth or selfishness of human
nature, by the simple answer that this happy state of things will not be
realised until human nature has been reformed. Need individuality
suffer? It need fear only the restraint imposed by candid public
opinion. That will not be irksome, because it will be frank. We shrink
from it to-day, only because it takes the form of clandestine scandal
and backbiting. Godwin contemplates no Spartan plan of common labour or
common meals. "Everything understood by the term co-operation is in some
sense an evil." To be sure, it may be indispensable in order to cut a
canal or navigate a ship. But mechanical invention will gradually make
it unnecessary. The Spartans used slaves. We shall make machines our
helots. Indeed, so odious is co-operation to a free mind, that Godwin
marvels that men can consent to play music in concert, or can demean
themselves to execute another man's compositions, while to act a part in
a play amounts almost to an offence against sincerity. Such
extravagances as this passage are amongst the most precious things in
_Political Justice_. Godwin was a fanatic of logic who warns us against
his individualist premises by pressing them to a fantastic conclusion.
The sketch of the ideal community concludes with a demolition of the
family. Cohabitation, he argued, is in itself an evil. It melts opinions
to a common mould, and destroys the fortitude of the individual. The
wishes of two people who live together can never wholly coincide. Hence
follow thwartings of the will, bickering and misery. No man is always
cheerful and kind. We manage to correct a stranger with urbanity and
good humour. Only when the intercourse is too close and unremitted do we
degenerate into surliness and invective. In an earlier chapter Godwin
had formulated a general objection to all promises, which reminds us of
Tolstoy's sermons from the same individualistic standpoint on the text,
"Swear not at all." Every conceivable mode of action has its tendency to
benefit or injure mankind. I am bound in duty to one course of action in
every emergency--the course most conducive to the general welfare. Why,
then, should I bind myself by a promise? If my promise contradicts my
duty it is immoral, if it agrees with it, it teaches me to do that from
a precarious and temporary motive which ought to be done from its
intrinsic recommendations. By promising we bind ourselves to learn
nothing from time, to make no use of knowledge to be acquired. Promises
depose us from a full use of our understanding, and are to be tolerated
only in the trivial engagements of our day-to-day existence. It follows
that marriage is an evil, for it is at once the closest form of
cohabitation, and the rashest of all promises. Two thoughtless and
romantic people, met in youth under circumstances full of delusion, have
bound themselves, not by reason but by contract, to make the best, when
they discover their deception, of an irretrievable mistake. Its maxim
is, "If you have made a mistake, cherish it." So long as this
institution survives, "philanthropy will be crossed in a thousand ways,
and the still augmenting stream of abuse continue to flow."
Godwin has little fear of lust or license. Men will, on the whole,
continue to prefer one partner, and friendship will refine the grossness
of sense. There are worse evils than open and avowed inconstancy--the
loathsome combination of deceitful intrigue with the selfish monopoly
of property. That a child should know its father is no great matter, for
I ought not in reason to prefer one human being to another because he is
"mine." The mother will care for the child with the spontaneous help of
her neighbours. As to the business of supplying children with food and
clothing, "these would easily find their true level and spontaneously
flow from the quarter in which they abounded to the quarter that was
deficient." There must be no barter or exchange, but only giving from
pure benevolence without the prospect of reciprocal advantage.
The picture of this easy-going Utopia, in which something will always
turn up for nobody's child, concludes with two sections which exhibit in
nice juxtaposition the extravagance and the prudence of Godwin. We may
look forward to great physical changes. We shall acquire an empire over
our bodies, and may succeed in making even our reflex notions conscious.
We must get rid of sleep, one of the most conspicuous infirmities of the
human frame. Life can be prolonged by intellect. We are sick and we die
because in a certain sense we consent to suffer these accidents. When
the limit of population is reached, men will refuse to propagate
themselves further. Society will be a people of men, and not of
children, adult, veteran, experienced; and truth will no longer have to
recommence her career at the end of thirty years. Meanwhile let the
friends of justice avoid violence, eschew massacres, and remember that
prudent handling will win even rich men for the cause of human
perfection.
So ends _Political Justice_, the strangest amalgam in our literature of
caution with enthusiasm, of visions with experience, of French logic
with English tactlessness, a book which only genius could have made so
foolish and so wise.