Chapter 5. William Godwin

¹ P. 12. (References, unless otherwise indicated, are to the first edition. The pagination is consecutive in the two volumes; volume 1 runs from p. 1 to p. 378; and vol. 2 from p. 379 to p. 895.)

¹ P. 17.

² P. 18.

¹ P. 31.

² P. 63.

³ Second edition, vol. 1, p. 46.

¹ Pp. 20–22.

² P. 25.

³ P. 19.

⁴ Second edition, p. 5.

¹ Pp. 33–34.

² P. 35.

³ Pp. 36–42.

⁴ P. 81.

¹ P. 796.

² P. 432.

³ P. 112.

¹ P. 83.

² P. 84.

³ P. 199. Readers of Mr. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, hardly need to be reminded how close Godwin stands to certain phases of Puritanism. Mr. Tawney quotes one Puritan divine as saying ‘every penny which is laid out... must be done as by God's own appointment.’ Further, it is an irrational act, and therefore not fit for a rational creature, to love any one farther than reason will allow us.... It very often taketh up men's minds so as to hinder their love to God.’ Apart from the fact that ‘love to God’ is replaced by ‘the dictates of Justice, there is almost identity of language.

¹ P. 151.

² P. 156.

³ Second edition, vol. 1, p. 202.

⁴Ibid. vol. 1, p. 198.

⁵ P. 163.

⁶ P. 844.

⁷ P. 842.

¹ P. 844.

² Pp. 845–846.

³ P. 848.

⁴ It is dangerous to criticise marriage, and probably a large measure of the offence that Godwin caused in his day was attributable to his proposals for the abolition of marriage. The pages which deal with this question are so characteristic of Godwin, that if one were called upon to choose from the 900 pages of Political Justice one extract as illustrative of the full flavour of Godwin, one would select this. The whole cannot be quoted here, but the following snippets may be illuminating.

‘It is absurd to expect that the inclinations and wishes of two human beings should coincide through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and to live together, is to subject them to some inevitable portion of thwarting, bickering and unhappiness.... The supposition that I must have a companion for life, is the result of a complication of vices. It is the dictate of cowardice, and not of fortitude. It flows from the desire of being loved and esteemed for something that is not desert.

‘But the evil of marriage as it is practised in European countries lies deeper than this. The habit is, for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex to come together, to see each other for a few times and under circumstances full of delusion, and then to vow to each other eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are presented with the strongest imaginable temptation to become the dupes of falsehood. They are led to conceive it their wisest policy to shut their eyes upon realities, happy if by any perversion of intellect they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of their companion. The institution of marriage is a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgments in the daily affair of their life, must always have a crippled judgment in every other concern. We ought to dismiss our mistake as soon as it is detected; but we are taught to cherish it. We ought to be incessant in our search after virtue and worth; but we are taught to check our inquiry, and shut our eyes upon the most attractive and admirable objects. Marriage is law, and the worst of all laws.... Add to this, that marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties. So long as two human beings are forbidden by positive institution to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice is alive and vigorous. So long as I seek to engross one woman to myself, and to prohibit my neighbour from proving his superior desert and reaping the fruits of it, I am guilty of the most odious of all monopolies’ (pp. 849–850).

¹ P. 79.

² P. 380.

³ Pp. 148–149.

¹ P. 169.

² P. 430.

³ P. 171.

⁴ P. 182.

⁵ Second edition, vol. 1, p. 242.

⁶ P. 383.

⁷ P. 397.

¹ P. 423.

² P. 435.

³ P. 441.

⁴ P. 454.

⁵ P. 442. It may be a digression, but it is perhaps worth observing that the words ‘virtue’ and ‘virtuous’ (in Montesquieu, vertu and vertueux) are obviously full of dangers. Cruden's Concordance informs us that the words virtue and virtuous or virtuously each occur four times only in the Scriptures. The most familiar phrase, which covers two of these instances in the Synoptic Gospels, is that ‘Virtue had gone out of him.’ Virtue in fact means capacity or strength. Lemuel's ‘virtuous woman,’ formerly held up as a model to countless generations in young ladies’ seminaries, is primarily a hard-working, capable, efficient business woman: She worketh willingly with her hands; she bringeth her food from afar; she considered a field and buyeth it; her candle goeth not out by night; she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness. In fact she is anything but a good woman in the worst sense of the term. In the light of this, Montesquieu's observation, like many other apparent profundities, turns out to be something of a platitude. He makes it clear that he is talking of ‘political virtue’ (may we substitute political capacity?); and he says that in a monarchy, as indeed in any state where everything is managed from the top, you cannot expect the people, who are excluded from affairs, to show political capacity. In different language, it is a familiar point in J. S. Mill's argument for restricting the functions of government. But in Godwin, the quotation conveys, and is designed to convey, an entirely different implication. Lastly, and irrelevantly, in what sense may articles of virtue be described as virtuous articles?

⁶ P. 461.

¹ P. 569.

² P. 570.

¹ Pp. 570–571.

² P. 552.

³ Pp. 574–575.

⁴ P. 564.

⁵ P. 565.

⁶ P. 576.

¹ Pp. 577–578.

² P. 766.

³ Pp. 766–769.

⁴ Pp. 769–770.

⁵ Pp. 771–772.

¹ P. 381.

² P. 773.

³ See The Statesman. How much of (this) Plato there is in Godwin, or how much of Godwin there is in Plato, may be very briefly indicated in the reproduction of three disconnected sentences. ‘The best thing of all is not that the law should rule, but that a man should rule supposing him to have wisdom and royal power.’ The reason is that ‘Law does not perfectly comprehend what is noblest and most just for all and therefore cannot enforce what is best. The differences of men and actions, and the endless irregular movements of human things, do not admit of any universal and simple rule.’ Consequently, law is ‘like an obstinate and ignorant tyrant, who will not allow anything to be done contrary to his appointment, or any question to be asked—not even in sudden changes of circumstances, when something happens to be better than what he commanded for someone’ (Jowett's Plato, vol. 4, pp. 496–497).

⁴ P. 713.

⁵ P. 690.

¹ Pp. 720–722.

² P. 747.

³ Pp. 789–790.

¹ P. 797.

² P. 194.

³ P. 203. Godwin's faith in the human response to ‘demonstration’ is infantile beyond words. It occurs everywhere. Take this at random: ‘Ten pages that should contain an absolute demonstration of the true interests of mankind in society could not otherwise be prevented from changing the face of the globe, than by the literal destruction of the paper on which they were written’ (p. 211).

⁴ Pp. 222–223.

¹ P. 227.

² P. 858.

³ P. 820.

¹ P. 831.

² P. 834.

³ P. 870.