It is a commonplace with historians that the French Revolution would have been very different without Voltaire and Rousseau to prepare the way for it. Hunger and new ideas are two advocates of change which always plead best in each other’s company; hunger makes men willing to act, and the new ideas give them matter for enactment. In France, when the crisis came in 1789, the new ideas were not far to seek. Writers of Utopias, from Plato to More, and from Rousseau to Ruskin, have always adopted one simple plan: they have struck out the salient enormities of their own time and inserted the opposite, as when men imagine heaven they think of their dear native country with its discomforts left out. Inequality at home had made Frenchmen ready to dote on a vision of equality when Rousseau presented it to them, and the state of Nature was the state of France reversed. Philosophically, the theorists of the Revolution traced their descent to Locke, and their ideas were not long in recrossing the Channel to visit their birthplace. Even if Englishmen had not had in America a visible Utopia, or, at least, Arcadia, there was hunger enough in England to recommend the new ideas to every rank in society. This is the reason why, in 1793, Godwin’s book was so successful. It was not only a good English statement of the French doctrines of equality, and therefore a book for the times, but it had a vigour of its own, and was no mere translation. Rousseau and Raynal had thought it necessary to sacrifice universal improvement to universal equality; they saw (or thought they saw) that the two could not go together, and they counted equality so desirable that they were willing to purchase it at the expense of barbarism. Now, they were perhaps more logical than Godwin; equality may mean barbarism. But Godwin’s ideal was at least higher than theirs; he thought of civilization and equality as quite compatible, for he thought that when all men were truly civilized they would of their own accord restore equality. As he left everything to reason and nothing to force, his book was in theory quite harmless; but the tendency of it seemed dangerous, for it criticized the British constitution in a free way to which the British nation was not accustomed. In England, moreover, the people have always confounded ideas with persons. They were not in love with liberty when it took the form of an American “War of Independence” against England, and, even if equality had pleased them in 1789, they would have nothing of it after the Terror. They forsook Fox for Burke, and went to war for a sentiment. At the time when Malthus wrote, the bulk of the English people had lost their enthusiasm for the new ideas. It needed some fortitude to call oneself a Reformer, or even a Whig, when Napoleon had overrun Italy and was facing us in Egypt. Pitt held all persons seditious who did not believe in the wisdom of the war.