ke more money saves from
his income and adds to his capital, and this capital he either employs
himself in the maintenance of productive labour, or he lends it to some
other person who will probably employ it in this way. He benefits the
state because he adds to its general capital, and because wealth
employed as capital not only sets in motion more labour than when spent
as income, but the labour is besides of a more valuable kind. But the
avaricious man of Mr Godwin locks up his wealth in a chest and sets in
motion no labour of any kind, either productive or unproductive. This
is so essential a difference that Mr Godwin's decision in his essay
appears at once as evidently false as Dr Adam Smith's position is
evidently true. It could not, indeed, but occur to Mr Godwin that some
present inconvenience might arise to the poor from thus locking up the
funds destined for the maintenance of labour. The only way, therefore,
he had of weakening this objection was to compare the two characters
chiefly with regard to their tendency to accelerate the approach of
that happy state of cultivated equality, on which he says we ought
always to fix our eyes as our polar star.

I think it has been proved in the former parts of this essay that such
a state of society is absolutely impracticable. What consequences then
are we to expect from looking to such a point as our guide and polar
star in the great sea of political discovery? Reason would teach us to
expect no other than winds perpetually adverse, constant but fruitless
toil, frequent shipwreck, and certain misery. We shall not only fail in
making the smallest real approach towards such a perfect form of
society; but by wasting our strength of mind and body, in a direction
in which it is impossible to proceed, and by the frequent distress
which we must necessarily occasion by our repeated failures, we shall
evidently impede that degree of improvement in society, which is really
attainable.

It has appeared that a society constituted according to Mr Godwin's
system must, from the inevitable laws of our nature, degenerate into a
class of proprietors and a class of labourers, and that the
substitution of benevolence for self-love as the moving principle of
society, instead of producing the happy effects that might be expected
from so fair a name, would cause the same pressure of want to be felt
by the whole of society, which is now felt only by a part. It is to the
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