Parson Malthus (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: laws; they will form a society without law or government or any kind of force, for no such things are needed when every man listens to reason, and contents himself with plain living and high thinking. In our present society it is distribution and not production that is at fault. There is more than enough of wealth for all, but unluckily it is not equally shared amongst all. One man has too much, another little or nothing. In the new society reason will change all that. Reason tells us that, if we make an equal division, not only of the good things of this life but of the labour of making them, then we shall secure a production quite sufficient for the needs of plain livers, at the cost of perhaps half-an-hour's labour in a day from each of them. Each of them will, therefore, have leisure, which is the true riches; and he will use the time for his own moral and intellectual improvement. In this way, by the omnipotence of truth and the power of persuasion, not by the power of the sword or by violent revolutions, perfection and happiness will in time be established on the earth. Godwin made no essential change in these views either in the later edition of the " Political Justice" (1796) or in the "Enquirer" (1797). "Among the faithless, faithful only he," when the excesses of the Terror made even Mackintosh a lukewarm reformer. Nothing in Godwin's life is more admirable then the perfect confidence with which he holds fast to his old faith in democratic principles and in the perfectibility of man. If it is obstinacy, it is very like devotion; and perhaps the only author who t shows an equal constancy is Condorcet, marked out for death as a Girondist, and writing in his hiding-place, almost under the eyes of the Convention, his eager book on the "Progress of the Species." Noth...