upreme, 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