eterred. 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 g