ty. [Footnote:
Both Hazlitt and Shelley thought that Malthus was playing to the
boxes, by sophisms "calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into
a security of everlasting triumph" (Revolt of Islam, Preface). Bentham
refers in his Book of Fallacies (Works, ii. p. 462) to the unpopularity
of the views of Priestley, Godwin, and Condorcet: "to aim at perfection
has been pronounced to be utter folly or wickedness."] Vice and misery
and the inexorable laws of population were a godsend to rescue the state
from "the precipice of perfectibility." We can understand the alarm
occasioned to believers in the established constitution of things, for
Godwin's work--now virtually forgotten, while Malthus is still appealed
to as a discoverer in social science--produced an immense effect on
impressionable minds at the time. All who prized liberty, sympathised
with the downtrodden, and were capable of falling in love with social
ideals, hailed Godwin as an evangelist. "No one," said a contemporary,
"was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after; and wherever
liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off." Young
graduates left the Universities to throw themselves at the feet of the
new Gamaliel; students of law and medicine neglected their professional
studies to dream of "the renovation of society and the march of
mind." Godwin carried with him "all the most sanguine and fearless
understandings of the time." [Footnote: Hazlitt, Spirit of the Age:
article on Godwin (written in 1814).]

The most famous of his disciples were the poets Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Southey, and afterwards Shelley. Wordsworth had been an ardent
sympathiser with the French Revolution. In its early days he had visited
Paris:

An emporium then
Of golden expectations and receiving
Freights every day from a new world of hope.

He became a Godwinian in 1795, when the Terror had destroyed his faith
in Revolutionary France. Southey, who had come under the influence of
Rousseau, was initiated by Coleridge into Godwin's theories, and
in their utopian enthusiasm they formed the design of founding a
"pantisocratic" settlement in America, to show how happiness could be
realised in a social environment in which duty and interest coincide and
consequently all are virtuous. The plan anticipated the experiments
of Owen and Cabet; but the pantisocrats did not experience the
disappointments of the socialists, for it was never carr