These remarks are no more than obiter dicta but they show how the doctrine of Progress was influencing those who were temperamentally the least likely to subscribe to extravagant theories.

4.

The outbreak of the French Revolution evoked a sympathetic movement among English progressive thinkers which occasioned the Government no little alarm.  The dissenting minister Dr. Richard Price, whose Observations on Civil Liberty (1776), defending the action of the American colonies, had enjoyed an immense success, preached the sermon which provoked Burke to write his Reflections; and Priestley, no less enthusiastic in welcoming the Revolution, replied to Burke.  The Government resorted to tyrannous measures; young men who sympathised with the French movement and agitated for reforms at home were sent to Botany Bay.  Paine was prosecuted for his Rights of Man, which directly preached revolution.  But the most important speculative work of the time, William Godwin’s Political Justice, escaped the censorship because it was not published at a popular price. [Footnote:  Godwin had helped to get Paine’s book published in 1791, and he was intimate with the group of revolutionary spirits who were persecuted by the Government.  A good account of the episode will be found in Brailsford’s Shelley, Godwin, and their Circle.]

The Enquiry concerning Political Justice, begun in 1791, appeared in 1793.  The second edition, three years later, shows the influence of Condorcet’s Sketch, which had appeared in the meantime.  Godwin says that his original idea was to produce a work on political science to supersede Montesquieu.  The note of Montesquieu’s political philosophy was respect for social institutions.  Godwin’s principle was that social institutions are entirely pernicious, that they perpetuate harmful prejudices, and are an almost insuperable obstacle to improvement.  If he particularly denounced monarchical government, he regarded all government as evil, and held that social progress would consist, not in the reformation of government, but in its abolition.  While he recognised that man had progressed in the past, he considered history mainly a sequence of horrors, and he was incapable of a calm survey of the course of civilisation.  In English institutions he saw nothing that did not outrage the principles of justice and benevolence.  The present state of humanity is about as bad as it could be.

It is easy to see the deep influence which the teaching of Rousseau exercised on Godwin.  Without accepting the theory of Arcadia Godwin followed him in unsparing condemnation of existing conditions.  Rousseau and Godwin are the two great champions in the eighteenth century of the toiling and suffering masses.  But Godwin drew the logical conclusion from Rousseau’s premisses which Rousseau hesitated to draw himself.  The French thinker, while he extolled the anarchical state of uncivilised society, and denounced government as one of the sources of its corruption, nevertheless sought the remedy in new social and political institutions.  Godwin said boldly, government is the evil; government must go.  Humanity can never be happy until all political authority and social institutions disappear.