n echo of this thought. Godwin's friend, Holcroft, embodied
it in a striking metaphor: "Men do not become what by nature they are
meant to be, but what society makes them. The generous feelings and
higher propensities of the soul are, as it were shrunk up, scared,
violently wrenched, and amputated, to fit us for our intercourse in the
world, something in the manner that beggars maim and mutilate their
children to make them fit for their future situation in life."

The men of the Revolution phrased that idea each in his own way,
according as they had been influenced, primarily, by Rousseau,
Helvetius, or Condorcet. It gave to their controversy with Burke the
appearance, not so much of a dispute between rival schools, as of a
dialogue between men who spoke to each other in unknown tongues.

* * * * *

Burke condescended to reason with Dr. Price. But the main answer of
authority to the friends of the French Revolution, was the answer which
Burke prescribed for "infidels"--"a refutation by criminal justice." A
curious parallel movement towards extremes went on simultaneously in the
two camps. While Burke separated himself from Fox, split the Whig party,
and devoted his genius to the task of fanning the general English
dislike of the Revolution into a panic rage of anger and fear, the
progressive camp in its turn was gradually captured by the
"intellectuals," and passed from a humdrum demand for political reform
into a ferment of moral and social speculation. Societies grew up in
all the chief centres of population, always with the same programme. "An
honest Parliament. An annual Parliament. A Parliament wherein each
individual will have his representative." Of these the most active, the
most extreme, and the best organised was undoubtedly the London
Corresponding Society.

It was founded by a Scottish boot-maker named Thomas Hardy. The sober,
limited character of the man is plain to read in his records and
pamphlets. The son of a sea-captain, who had had his education in a
village school in Perthshire where the scholars paid a penny a week, he
was a leading member of the Scots' Kirk in Covent Garden, and had drawn
his political education not at all from godless French philosophers, but
from the Protestant fanatic, Lord George Gordon, and from Dr. Price's
book on the American War. He gathered his own friends together to found
his society, and nine of them met for the first time in the "Bell"