Henry Noel Brailsford

“ 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 great share in this moral elevation would come from the destruction of the inequality of the sexes, which Condorcet preached in France while Mary Wollstonecraft was its pioneer in England. That inequality has been ruinous even to the sex which it favoured, and rests in nothing but an abuse of force. To remove it is not merely to raise the status of women but to increase family happiness, and to reform morals. Wars too will end, and with them a constant menace to liberty. The ultimate dream is a perpetual confederation of mankind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ A faith is worth the cathedral it builds. A myth is worth the poem it inspires.
If Shelley's ultimate view of reality is [Pg 230] vague, a thing to be shadowed in myths and hinted in symbols, there is nothing indefinite in his view of the destinies of mankind. Here he marched behind Godwin, and Godwin hated vagueness. His intellect had assimilated all the steps in the argument for perfectibility. It emerges in places in its most dogmatic form. Institutions make us what we are, and to free us from their shackles is to liberate virtue and unleash genius. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ It conveys in the form of an eventful personal history the essence of the criticism against society, which had inspired Political Justice. Godwin's imagination was haunted by a persistent nightmare, in which a lonely individual finds arrayed against him all the prejudices of society, all the forms of convention, all the forces of law. They hurl themselves upon him in a pitiless pursuit, and wherever he flees, the pervading corruptions, the ingrained cowardices of over-governed mankind beset his feet like gins and pitfalls. ”

“ The law treated a wife as the chattel of her husband, denied her the disposal of her own property, even when it was the produce of her own labour, sanctioned his use of violence to her person, and refused (as indeed it still in part does) to recognise her rights as a parent. But the state of the law reflected only too faithfully the opinions of society, and these opinions in their turn formed the minds of women. Civilised people amuse themselves to-day by detecting how much of the old prejudices still lurk in a shamefaced half-consciousness in the minds of modern men. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They saw that by a resolute effort to change the environment of institutions and customs which educate us, we can change ourselves. They liberated us not so much from "priests and kings" as from the deadlier tyranny of the belief that human nature, with all its imperfections, is an innate character which it were vain to hope to reform. Their teaching is a tonic to the will, a reminder still eloquent, still bracing, that among the forces which make history the chief is the persuasion of the understanding, the conscious following of a rational ideal. ”

“ 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 Helvétius had done. ”

“ All his native humanity and acquired polish is in the end turned to cruelty by the influence of a worship of honour and reputation which make him "the fool of fame." As the absorbing story unfolds itself, we realise (if indeed we are not too much enthralled by the plot to notice the moral) that all the institutions of society and law are nicely adjusted to give the moral errors of the great their utmost scope. Society is a vast sounding-board which echoes the first whispers of their private folly, until it swells into a deafening chorus of cruelty and wrong. ”

“ Godwin, as became the philosopher of the movement, set his hopes on the slower working of education: to make men wise was to make them free. Paine was the pamphleteer of the human camp. He saw mankind as an embattled legion and believed, true man of action that he was, that freedom could be won like victory by the impetus of a resolute charge. He quotes the epigram of his fellow-soldier, Lafayette, "For a nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free it is sufficient that she wills it." Godwin would have sent men to school to liberty ”

“ 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. ”

“ Political Justice brought its author instant fame. Society was for a moment intimidated by the boldness of the attack. The world was in a generous mood, and men did not yet resent Godwin's flattering suggestion that they were demigods who disguised their own greatness. He had assailed all the accepted dogmas and venerable institutions of contemporary civilisation, from monarchy to marriage, but it was only after several years that society recovered its breath, and turned to rend him. ”

“ For the crudest statement of it we need not go to men who defended despotism and convention in other departments of life. The most repulsive of all definitions of the principle of sex-subjection is to be found in Rousseau:—"The education of women should always be relative to that of men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable; these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy." ”

“ To these young men the excitement was in his picture of a free community from which laws and coercion had been eliminated, and in which property was in a continual flux actuated by the stream of universal benevolence. They resolved to found a community based on Godwinian principles, and to free themselves from the cramping and dwarfing influences of a society ruined by laws and superstitions, they lit on the simple expedient of removing themselves beyond its reach. They lacked the manhood and the simplicity which had turned more prosaic natures into agitators and reformers. ”

“ All attempts to impede its progress are vain. It will roll rapidly along, and as well may tyrants imagine that by placing their feet upon the earth they can stop its diurnal motion, as that they shall be able by efforts the most virulent and pertinacious to extinguish the light of reason and philosophy, which happily for mankind is everywhere spreading around us." It was in this atmosphere of enthusiasm and devotion that Political Justice was written. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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? ”