No economists are more reproached with their want of idealism than Malthus and his brethren. As the French Revolutionists were said to believe that the death of their old rulers would of itself bring happiness and good government, so these writers were said to teach that the mere removal of hindrances would lead to the best possible production and distribution of the good things of this life. The ideal state then, as far as wealth was concerned, would be anarchy _plus_ the police constable. Godwin would have dispensed with the constable. “Give a state liberty enough,” he says, “and vice cannot exist in it.”[100] But neither he nor the economists desired a merely negative change or removal of hindrances. Their political reformation was to be, like the Protestant, only successful as it went beyond image-breaking. Malthus, it will be seen,[101] is far from being an unqualified advocate of _laissez faire_; and, in all cases where he did desire it, he wished to make the state small only to make public opinion great. Godwin was not far away from him here. If he was wrong in attributing too much evil to institutions, and too little to human nature, he has furnished his own correction. The _Political Justice_ disclaimed all sympathy with violence; it taught that a political reform was worthless unless effected peacefully by reason; and Malthus[102] has the same cure for social evils—argument and instruction. The difference between them is, that Malthus takes more into account the unreasonableness as well as the reasonableness of men. In essentials they are agreed. The thorough enlightenment of the people, which includes their moral purification as well as their intellectual instruction, is to complete the work of mending all, in which men are to be fellow-workers with God—so runs the teaching of Malthus and all the greatest economists of the last hundred years. Whether the evils of competition are many or few, serious or trifling, depends largely on the character of the competitors; and the more free we make the competition, the more thoroughly we must educate the competitors. Adam Smith was well aware of this; he recommended school-boards a hundred years before the Acts of 1870 and 1872;[103] and Malthus was not behind him.[104] They are aware that the more completely we exclude the interference of Government, the more actively we must employ every other moral and social agency. Whether Malthus was prepared to exclude the interference of Government entirely, even under this condition, we shall see by-and-by.