constancy to reason. We should desire neither violent
change nor the stagnation that inflames and produces revolutions. Our
prayer to governments should be, "Do not give us too soon; do not give
us too much; but act under the incessant influence of a disposition to
give us something."

These are the reflections of a man who wrote amid the Terror. He had
seen the Corresponding Society at work, and the experience made him more
than sceptical of any form of association in politics, and led him into
a curiously biassed argument, rhetorical in form, forensic in substance.
Temporary combinations may be necessary in a time of turmoil, or to
secure some single limited end, such as the redress of a wrong done to
an individual. Where their scope is general and their duration long
continued, they foster declamation, cabal, party spirit and tumult. They
are frequented by the artful, the intemperate, the acrimonious, and
avoided by the sober, the sceptical, the contemplative citizen. They
foster a fallacious uniformity of opinion and render the mind quiescent
and stationary. Truth disclaims the alliance of marshalled numbers. The
conditions most favourable to reasoned enquiry and calm persuasion are
to be found in small and friendly circles. The moral beauty of the
spectacle offered by these groups of friends united to pursue truth and
foster virtue, will render it contagious. So the craggy steep of science
will be levelled and knowledge rendered accessible to all.

The conception of the State which Godwin sought to supplant was itself
limited and negative. Government was little else in his day than a means
for internal defence against criminals and for external defence against
aggression. For the rest, it helped landlords to enclose commons, kept
down wages by poor relief and in a muddle-headed way interfered with the
freedom of trade. But its central activity was the repression of crime,
and for Godwin's system the test question was his handling of the
problem of crime and punishment. He was no Platonist, but not for the
first time we discover him in a familiar Socratic position. "Do you
punish a man," asked Socrates, "to make him better or to make him
worse?" Godwin starts by rejecting the traditional conception of
punishment. The word means the infliction of evil upon a vicious being,
not merely because the public advantage demands it, but because there is
a certain fitness and propriety in making suffering the accompaniment of