consequences then are we to expect from looking to such a point
as our guide and polar star in the great sea of political
discovery? Reason would teach us to expect no other than winds
perpetually adverse, constant but fruitless toil, frequent
shipwreck, and certain misery. We shall not only fail in making
the smallest real approach towards such a perfect form of
society; but by wasting our strength of mind and body, in a
direction in which it is impossible to proceed, and by the
frequent distress which we must necessarily occasion by our
repeated failures, we shall evidently impede that degree of
improvement in society, which is really attainable.

It has appeared that a society constituted according to Mr
Godwin's system must, from the inevitable laws of our nature,
degenerate into a class of proprietors and a class of labourers,
and that the substitution of benevolence for self-love as the
moving principle of society, instead of producing the happy
effects that might be expected from so fair a name, would cause
the same pressure of want to be felt by the whole of society,
which is now felt only by a part. It is to the established
administration of property and to the apparently narrow principle
of self-love that we are indebted for all the noblest exertions
of human genius, all the finer and more delicate emotions of the
soul, for everything, indeed, that distinguishes the civilized
from the savage state; and no sufficient change has as yet taken
place in the nature of civilized man to enable us to say that he
either is, or ever will be, in a state when he may safely throw
down the ladder by which he has risen to this eminence.

If in every society that has advanced beyond the savage