ayed 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.