inherent tendency to moralise which has sometimes been a
weakness, and sometimes has given them surprising strength.

Like the other poets of the Romantic Movement Shelley expended
his emotion on three main objects--politics, nature, and love.
In each of these subjects he struck a note peculiar to himself,
but his singularity is perhaps greatest in the sphere of
politics. It may be summed up in the observation that no
English imaginative writer of the first rank has been equally
inspired by those doctrines that helped to produce the French
Revolution. That all men are born free and equal; that by a
contract entered into in primitive times they surrendered as
much of their rights as was necessary to the well-being of the
community, that despotic governments and established religions,
being violations of the original contract, are encroachments on
those rights and the causes of all evil; that inequalities of
rank and power can be abolished by reasoning, and that then,
since men are naturally good, the golden age will return--these
are positions which the English mind, with its dislike of the
'a priori', will not readily accept. The English Utilitarians,
who exerted a great influence on the course of affairs, and the
classical school of economists that derived from them, did
indeed hold that men were naturally good, in a sense. Their
theory was that, if people were left to themselves, and if the
restraints imposed by authority on thought and commerce were
removed, the operation of ordinary human motives would produce
the most beneficent results. But their theory was quite
empirical; worked out in various ways by Adam Smith, Bentham,
and Mill, it admirably suited the native independence of the
English character, and was justified by the fact that, at the