argument was irresistible, and the single touch of emotion at the end was worthy of a great orator. A few lines depicted these men who, moved by public spirit, had acted in good faith within the law, as it had been universally understood in England, overwhelmed by a sudden extension of its most terrible articles, applied to them without precedent or warning. Should the awful sentence be read over these men, that they should be hanged (but not until they were dead), and then, still living, suffer the loss of their members and see their bowels torn out? The ghastly barbarity of the whole procedure could not have been more effectively exposed. Looking back upon this trial there is no reason to think that the reformers exaggerated its importance. Had the Government won its case, it must have succeeded in destroying the very possibility of opposition or agitation in England. It was believed that no less than three hundred signed warrants lay ready for issue on the day that Hardy and his friends were convicted. But the stroke was too daring, the threat too impudent. When the trial began, the prosecution lightened its own task by dropping the charge against Holcroft and three of his comrades. But for nine days the charge was pressed against Thomas Hardy, and when he was acquitted a further six days was spent in the effort to convict Horne Tooke, and four in a last vain attempt to succeed against Thelwall.

The popular victory checked the excesses of the reaction. As Holcroft wrote: "The whole power of Government was directed against Thomas Hardy: in his fate seemed involved the fate of the nation, and the verdict of Not Guilty appeared to burst its bonds, and to have released it from inconceivable miseries and ages of impending slavery." The reaction, indeed, was restrained; but so also was the movement of reform. The subsequent history of its leaders is one of unheroic failure, and of an unpopularity which was harder to endure than danger. Windham referred to the twelve in debate as "acquitted felons," and Holcroft was constrained first to produce his plays under a borrowed name, and then to seek a refuge in voluntary exile on the continent. The passions roused by the Terror arrested the progress of the revolutionary movement in England. The alarms and glories of the struggle with Napoleon buried it in oblivion.

It is this complex experience which lies behind Godwin's political writings. The French Revolution produced its simple effects in Burke and Tom Paine—revolt and disgust in the one, enthusiasm and hope in the other. In Godwin the reaction is more complicated. He retained to the last his ardent faith in progress, and the perfectibility of mankind. No events could shake that, but it was the work of experience to reinforce all the native individualism of his confident and self-reliant temper, to harden into an extreme dogma that general belief in laissez faire which was the common property of most of the English progressives of his day, and to beget in him not merely a doubt in the efficacy of violent revolutions, but a dislike of all concerted political effort and the whole collective work of political associations. He had felt the lash of repression, saved one friend from the hangman, and seen others depart for Botany Bay: he remained to the end, the uncompromising foe of every species of governmental coercion. He had listened to Horne Tooke perorating "hanging matters" at the Corresponding Society; he had seen the "electric ruby" circulating at its dinners; he had witnessed the collapse of Thomas Hardy's painstaking and methodical organisation. The fruit of all these experiences was the first statement in European literature of philosophic anarchism—a statement which hardly yields to Tolstoy's in its trenchant and unflinching logic.

"Logic" is more often a habit of consecutive and reasoned writing than the source of a thinker's opinion. The logical writer is the man who can succeed in displaying plausible reasons for what he believes by instinct, or knows by experience. There is history and temperament behind the coldest logic. The history which set Godwin against all State action, whether undertaken in defence of order or privilege, or on behalf of reform, is to be read in the excesses of Pitt and the futilities of the Corresponding Society. The question of temperament involves a subtler psychological judgment. If you feel in yourself something less than the heroic temper which will make a militant agitation or a violent revolution against the monstrous ascendency of privilege and ordered force, you are lucky if you can convince yourself that agitation is commonly mischievous, and association but a means of combating one evil by creating another. Godwin was certainly no coward. But he was fortunate in evolving a theory which excused him from attempting the more dangerous exploits of civic courage. His ideal was the Stoic virtue, the isolated strength, which can stand firm in passive protest against oppression and wrong. He stood firm, and Pitt was content to leave him standing.

We have seen the first bold statement of the hope which the French Revolution kindled in Dr. Price's Old Jewry sermon. We have watched the brave incautious effort to realise it in the plans of the Corresponding Society. In these crowded years that began with the fall of the Bastille and closed with the Terror, it was to enter on yet another phase, and in this last incarnation the hope was very near despair. To men in the early prime of life, aware of their powers and their gift of influence, the Revolution came as a call to action. To a group of still younger men, poets and thinkers, forming their first eager views of life in the leisure of the Universities, it was above all a stimulus to fancy. Godwin was their prophet, but they built upon his speculations the superstructure of a dream that was all their own. For some years, Coleridge, Southey, and Wordsworth were caught and held in the close web of logic which Godwin gave to the world in 1793 in the first edition of Political Justice. Wordsworth read and studied and continually discussed it. Southey confessed that he "read and studied and all but worshipped Godwin." Coleridge wrote a sonnet which he afterwards suppressed in which he blesses his "holy guidance" and hymns Godwin "with an ardent lay."