r Parr was called by
flatterers the Whig Johnson, and Mackintosh enjoyed in Whig society a
reputation as a brilliant talker, and an encyclopaedic mind which reminds
us of Macaulay's later fame. They had both to make their peace with the
world and to bury their compromised past; the easiest way was to fall
upon Godwin.

Malthus was a more worthy antagonist, though Godwin did not yet perceive
how formidable his attack in reality was. To the picture of human
perfection he opposed the nightmare of an over-populated planet, and
combated universal benevolence by teaching that even charity is an
economic sin. English society cares little either for Utopias or for
science. But it welcomes science with rapture when it destroys Utopias.
If Godwin had pricked men's consciences, Malthus brought the balm.
Altruism was exposed at length for the thing it was, an error in the
last degree unscientific and uneconomic. The rickety arithmetic of
Malthusianism was used against the revolutionary hope, exactly as a
travestied version of Darwinianism was used in our own day against
Socialism. Godwin preserved his dignity in this controversy and made
concessions to his critics with a rare candour. But while he abandons
none of his fundamental doctrines, one feels that he will never fight
again.

Only once in later years did Godwin the philosopher break his silence,
and then it was to attempt in 1820 an elaborate but far from impressive
answer to Malthus. The history of that controversy has been brilliantly
told by Hazlitt. It seems to-day too distant to be worth reviving. Our
modern pessimists write their jeremiads not about the future
over-population of the planet, but about the declining birth-rate. That
elaborate civilisations shows a decline in fertility is a fact now so
well recognised, that we feel no difficulty in conceding to Godwin that
the reasonable beings of his ideal community might be trusted to show
some degree of self-control.

Godwin possessed two of the cardinal virtues of a thinker, courage and
candour. No fear of ridicule deterred him from pushing his premises to
their last conclusion; no false shame restrained him in a controversy
from recanting an error. He discarded the wilder developments of his
theory of "universal benevolence," and gave it in the end a form which
has ceased to be paradoxical. When he wrote _Political Justice_ he was a
celibate student who had escaped much of the formative experience of a
normal lif