ions and free in their
actions.

Equally clear is it that the establishment of religion and all systems
of tests must be abolished. They make for hypocrisy, check advance in
speculation, and teach us to estimate a disinterested sincerity at a
cheap rate. We need not fear disorder as a consequence of complete
liberty of speech. "Arguments alone will not have the power, unassisted
by the sense or the recollection of oppression or treachery to hurry the
people into excesses. Excesses are never the offspring of speculative
reason, are never the offspring of misrepresentation only, but of power
endeavouring to stifle reason, and to traverse the commonsense of
mankind."

A more original deduction from Godwin's demand for the unlimited freedom
of opinion, was that he objected vehemently to any system of national
education. Condorcet had drawn up a marvellously complete project for
universal compulsory education, with full liberty indeed for the
teachers, whose technical competence alone the State would guarantee,
and with a scheme of free scholarships, an educational "ladder" more
generous than anything which has yet been realised in fact. Godwin
objects that State-regulated institutions will stereotype knowledge and
make for an undesirable permanence and uniformity in opinion. They
diffuse what is known and forget what remains to be known. They erect a
system of authority and separate a tenet from the evidence on which it
rests, so that beliefs cease to be perceptions and become prejudices. No
Government is to be trusted with the dangerous power to create and
regulate opinions through its schools. Such a power is, indeed, more
dangerous than that of an Established Church, and would be used to
strengthen tyranny and perpetuate faulty institutions.

Godwin, needless to say, takes, as did Condorcet, the side of frankness
in the controversy which was a test of democratic faith in this
generation--whether "political imposture" is allowable, and whether a
statesman should encourage the diffusion of "salutary prejudices" among
the unlearned, the poor and women. This was indeed the main eighteenth
century defence for monarchy and aristocracy. Kings and governors are
not wiser than other men, but it is useful that they should be thought
so. Such imposture, Godwin argued, is as futile as the parallel use by
religion of the pains and penalties of the afterworld. It is the sober
who are demoralised by it, and not the lawless who are d