d political bonds. Wordsworth
escaped, not by discovering a logical defect in the argument, but by
yielding to the protest of his emotions. The system, he thought, was
fatal to all the affections which had made life dear to him; to the
vague 'intimations' which, whatever else they might be, had yet power
to give harmony to our existence.

By degrees he adopted a new diagnosis of the great political evils. On
one side, he sympathised with Scott's sense of the fatal effects upon
the whole social organism. Among his noblest poems are the 'Brothers'
and 'Michael,' to which he specially called the attention of Fox. They
were intended, he explained, to show the surpassing value of the
domestic affections conspicuous among the shepherds and 'statesmen' of
the northern dales. He had now come to hold that the principles of
Godwin and his like were destructive to the most important elements of
human welfare. The revolutionists were not simply breaking the fetters
of the simple peasant, but destroying the most sacred ties to which
the peasant owed whatever dignity or happiness he possessed.
Revolution, in short, meant anarchy. It meant, therefore, the
destruction of all that gives real value to life. It was, as he held,
one product of the worship of the 'idol proudly named the "wealth of
nations,"'[633] selfishness and greed replacing the old motives to
'plain living and high thinking.' Wordsworth, in short, saw the ugly
side of the industrial revolution, the injury done to domestic life by
the factory system, or the substitution of a proletariate for a
peasantry, and the replacement of the lowest social order by a vast
inorganic mob. The contemporary process, which was leading to
pauperism and to the evils of the factory system, profoundly affected
Wordsworth, as well as the impulsive Southey; and their frequent
denunciations gave colour to the imputations that they were opposed to
all progress. Certainly they were even morbidly alive to the evil
aspects of the political economy of Malthus and Ricardo, which to them
seemed to prescribe insensibility and indifference to most serious and
rapidly accumulating evils.

Meanwhile, Wordsworth was also impressed by the underlying
philosophical difficulties. The effect of the revolutionary principles
was to destroy the religious sentiment, not simply by disproving this
or that historical statement, but by making the whole world prosaic
and matter-of-fact. His occasional outbursts agains