The system of equality which Mr Godwin proposes is, without doubt, by far the most beautiful and engaging of any that has yet appeared.  An amelioration of society to be produced merely by reason and conviction wears much more the promise of permanence than any change effected and maintained by force.  The unlimited exercise of private judgement is a doctrine inexpressibly grand and captivating and has a vast superiority over those systems where every individual is in a manner the slave of the public.  The substitution of benevolence as the master-spring and moving principle of society, instead of self-love, is a consummation devoutly to be wished.  In short, it is impossible to contemplate the whole of this fair structure without emotions of delight and admiration, accompanied with ardent longing for the period of its accomplishment.  But, alas! that moment can never arrive.  The whole is little better than a dream, a beautiful phantom of the imagination.  These ‘gorgeous palaces’ of happiness and immortality, these ‘solemn temples’ of truth and virtue will dissolve, ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision’, when we awaken to real life and contemplate the true and genuine situation of man on earth.  Mr Godwin, at the conclusion of the third chapter of his eighth book, speaking of population, says: 

There is a principle in human society, by which population is perpetually kept down to the level of the means of subsistence.  Thus among the wandering tribes of America and Asia, we never find through the lapse of ages that population has so increased as to render necessary the cultivation of the earth.

This principle, which Mr Godwin thus mentions as some mysterious and occult cause and which he does not attempt to investigate, will be found to be the grinding law of necessity, misery, and the fear of misery.

The great error under which Mr Godwin labours throughout his whole work is the attributing almost all the vices and misery that are seen in civil society to human institutions.  Political regulations and the established administration of property are with him the fruitful sources of all evil, the hotbeds of all the crimes that degrade mankind.  Were this really a true state of the case, it would not seem a hopeless task to remove evil completely from the world, and reason seems to be the proper and adequate instrument for effecting so great a purpose.  But the truth is, that though human institutions appear to be the obvious and obtrusive causes of much mischief to mankind, yet in reality they are light and superficial, they are mere feathers that float on the surface, in comparison with those deeper seated causes of impurity that corrupt the springs and render turbid the whole stream of human life.

Mr Godwin, in his chapter on the benefits attendant on a system of equality, says: