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A PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW
OF REFORM

BY

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

(Now printed for the first time)

TOGETHER WITH AN

INTRODUCTION AND APPENDIX

BY

T. W. ROLLESTON

HUMPHREY MILFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK

TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY

I920

PRINTED IN ENGLAND
AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

INTRODUCTION

The work by Shelley which is here printed
for the first time is contained in about 200
pages of a small vellum-covered note-book,
which includes also a few jottings for poems,
and casual scribblings. It was in the posses-
sion of Lady Shelley, the poet's daughter-in-
law. By her it was presented to her friend
the Rev. Stopford A. Brooke, on whose death,
in March 191 6, it came to his daughter, the
wife of the present writer, with the wish that
I should examine it, and if it seemed desirable
give it to the world. This was a labour of
love, but also, owing to the character of the
MS., one of considerable difficulty, and it
could not be thought of until the claims of
work in connexion with the war were at an
end. The present edition is the answer to the
question which I had to decide, and I trust
1 shall be held justified in believing that so
important a work of Shelley's prime should no
longer be left unpublished.

Besides its literary contents, the little
volume has an interesting feature in the shape
of a drawing made by Shelley on the cover.
This is the most elaborate and careful drawing
which we have from his hand, and I think it
may be said to prove that Shelley had

iv <iA Philosophical View of ^Reform

remarkable natural talent as an artist. His
great contemporary, Goethe, at a certain time
of his life, longed to be a painter, and strove
with all his might to qualify himself for that
calling rather than for literature, but he has
left nothing which in mastery or poetic vision
can compare with this. Unfortunately the
drawing has been a good deal defaced and has
suffered from a dint or scrape made by some
heavy and sharp object. The size and shape
of the little book suggest that it was meant
to be carried in the pocket, and it probably
accompanied its owner in many roamings by
sea and land. A facsimile of the drawing is
prefixed to the present volume.

The work which, just a hundred years ago,
was committed to these pages, is unfinished and
in the condition of a first draft. In places the
difficulty of transcription has been great.
Shelley's handwriting when he wrote his final
copy for the printer was both beautiful and
clear, but his first drafts were blotted, scrawled,
and interlined to a degree which once made
Trelawney — or so he tells us — mistake a
famous lyric of Shelley's for a sketch of a
duck-pond. There is nothing quite so bad
as this in the present MS., and some of it is
as clear as one could wish, but there are many
passages which it took much time and pains
to decipher with certainty.

Introduction v

The MS. presented other difficulties too.
Sometimes Shelley would remodel the latter
part of a sentence and substitute a different
form of expression without making the con-
sequential changes in the grammar of the
first part. In these cases I have silently made
such grammatical changes as are called for.
I have also corrected a few errors in spelling
(where these are not a form of the period, like
c antient ') and have inserted words obviously
omitted in the writer's haste. Such additions
are printed in italics. In some cases Shelley
has enclosed a passage in square brackets,
indicating apparently that he had not quite
made up his mind whether it should appear in
that particular place or elsewhere. These
brackets have been retained in the printed
text. The division of chapters is Shelley's
own, but the marginal guides to various sub-
sections of the work have been added by me.

The first mention which we have of this
Essay is contained in a letter of Shelley to
Leigh Hunt, dated May 26th, 1820 :

4 Do you know ', he writes, ' any publisher or bookseller
who would publish for me an octavo volume, entitled "A
Philosophical View of Reform " ? It is boldly but tem-
perately written, and, I think, readable. It is intended
for a kind of standard book for the philosophical reformers,
politically considered like Jeremy Bentham's, something,
and perhaps more systematic. I will send it sheet by
sheet. Will you ask and think for me ? !

a 3

vi td Philosophical View of 'Reform

Nothing further seems to have come of this
proposal.

The MS. opens with a scheme of four heads
under which the subject of political reform
was to be treated :

i . Sentiment of the Necessity of Change.

2. Practicability and Utility of such Change.

3. State of Parties as regards it.

4. Probable Mode — Desirable Mode.
This was repeated at the close of the intro-
ductory chapter, but in a slightly different
form, the first head being expanded into two.
The work as we actually have it consists of an
introductory chapter of the nature of a rapid
historical review, not mentioned in the scheme
— and of two further chapters corresponding
respectively to the first and the fourth heads
of the scheme. The second and third heads
are not treated in this draft.

It was doubtless the unfinished condition of
the MS., coupled with the feeling that all
Shelley's prose work is of subordinate interest
as compared with his poetry, that led to the
suppression for a hundred years of a work on
which he himself set considerable store. The
century has brought us round again to an
hour which is singularly opportune for a
consideration of his ideas, for, in some
particulars, the situation of public affairs at
present reproduces very closely that amidst

Introduction vii

which, and to act on which, Shelley composed
his treatise. England had in 1820 just
emerged from a long period of warfare. She
had emerged victoriously, but the country
was full of distress and unrest. The National
Debt had risen to what was then con-
sidered an appalling figure. Prices of all the
necessaries of life had soared up just as they
have done at present. The vast development
of mechanical industry, which in the economic
sense saved the situation — even if it laid what
Shelley calls l mines of mischief* to the en-
dangerment of future civilization — had not yet
appeared on the horizon. England was facing
a very threatening future under the rule,
broadly speaking, of the country gentlemen
and the Church of England, with some
admixture of what Shelley calls the c new
aristocracy ', the profiteers and speculators to
whom the war had brought much wealth and
a growing power. The working-classes on
whom the system of taxation weighed with
intolerable oppression had practically no
voice in the still unreformed Parliament. In
a situation like this it needed little argument
to establish the necessity for reform of some
kind, and it is of interest to see what kind of
reform Shelley thought applicable to the case
and by what means he hoped to bring it into
being. Here I think we shall be struck with
the moderation of his views. He certainly

viii aA Philosophical View of Inform

had extreme political opinions. He was still
entirely under the dominion of the ideas of
the French Revolution — ideas of the natural
equality and goodness of man and of the
inherent viciousness of power when centred in
a few individuals, with its beneficence and
virtue, if only it were equally distributed to
everybody. But he realized quite clearly that
these ideas could not be applied at one stroke
to the existing situation in England. The
first thing to be done was to gain for the
people at large a real share in the Government.
In this he was in accord with all the serious
political thought of his time, and if he had
lived a dozen years longer he would have
seen it done. In his views on the question of
property he was certainly no Communist.
What a man had honestly earned was right-
fully his, to hold and to bequeath. But there
were dishonest and wrongful ways of procuring
or of using property, and for property so
acquired or used he had no respect. He
believed, however, that these means would
not flourish in any State where property and
political rights were reasonably well distri-
buted among the whole population.

Of the nature of National Credit and
Finance he had no understanding, and he
offers a drastic and quite impracticable scheme
for dealing with the National Debt, but in
most other respects his ideas on the reforms

Introduction ix

to be taken in hand were neither impossible,

nor unreasonable, nor unjust. Even as regards

the National Debt he appears to have modified

his views. In writing to *C. T. ' on June 29th, U W&

1822, he argues not for repudiation, but for

reduction of interest :

1 England appears to be in a desperate condition, Ireland
still worse ; and no class of those who subsist on the public
labour will be persuaded that their claims on it must be
diminished. But the government must content itself with
less in taxes, the landholder must submit to receive less
rent, and the fundholder a diminished interest, or they
will all get nothing. I once thought to study these affairs,
and write or act in them.1 I am glad that my good genius
said, refrain. I see little public virtue, and I foresee that
the contest will be one of blood and gold.'

But Shelley's impulses, in their violent
reaction against wrong and tyranny, some-
times led him into extravagance and self-
contradiction. He was writing immediately
under the influence of the c Peterloo Massacre',
when a large Reform Meeting, assembled, it is
true, in defiance of a Government prohibition,
but entirely peaceful and well-behaved, was
charged without notice by cavalry, and several
persons killed. This event, which had deeply

1 Perhaps an allusion to this work, among other matters.
The whisper of the good genius was directed, it would
appear, rather as a warning to Shelley not to entangle
himself in a hopeless struggle in a field for which he was
ill equipped, than to instil any misgivings about the funda-
mental soundness of his ideas.

x aA ^Philosophical View of *%eform

stirred English opinion, was in Shelley's mind
when he wrote his wild attack on the soldier's
profession (p. 68). How much this attack
was mere passionate impulse and how little
it was reasoned opinion is clear from the fact
that for Shelley the profession of arms lost all
its vice when it was exercised at sea ! Sailors
were not usually employed to ride down
peaceful reformers or to drive starving crowds
back to their dens, and therefore he found no
difficulty (p. 56) in demanding a well-paid
and well-equipped Navy to keep envious
Continental Powers from descending on the
happy shores of the England of his dreams.

As Professor Dowden has said, in discussing
the ! Philosophical View of Reform ' in his
'Life of Shelley',1 we have no other docu-
ment which tells us so much of that side of
Shelley's mind which was directed to politics.
Every side of the mind of a great poet is
worth knowing, and on the side of Shelley's
mind which is revealed to us in these pages,
there is nothing that does him dishonour.
It is true that the work is unfinished. Not
only does it end in the midst of a sentence,
but there are passages in it here and there
which, if they had been written in their final
form, we may be sure would have been

1 Vol. ii, p. 291 et seq.

Introduction xi

written otherwise. In one case a long passage
(pp. 29, 30) actually was rewritten, in order to
be incorporated in another work, the i Defence
of Poetry ' ; and to compare the two versions
is to get an interesting glimpse into the work-
shop of a master of language. But as we see
by the many corrections and cancellations, a
great deal of care and thought were certainly
spent on the MS. as we have it now ; we can
trace Shelley's spirit in every line of it, and
for the many things which it alone tells us of
his outlook on the world of a hundred years
ago, his country to-day may be inclined to
welcome this last addition that yet remains to
be made to the published work of her greatest
lyric poet.

T. W. ROLLESTON.

Aprils 1920.

A PHILOSOPHICAL VIEW OF
REFORM

i st. Sentiment of the Necessity of change.
2nd. Practicability and Utility of such
change.

3rd. State of Parties as regards it.

4th. Probable Mode — Desirable Mode.

Let us believe not only that it is necessary
because it is just and ought to be, but
necessary because it is inevitable and must be.

CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION

Those who imagine that their personal The Rise
interest is directly or indirectly concerned in ofModem
maintaining the power in which they are .^esPot"
clothed by the existing institutions of English
Government do not acknowledge the necessity
of a material change in those institutions.
With this exception, there is no inhabitant of
the British Empire of mature age and perfect
understanding not fully persuaded of the
necessity of Reform.

From the dissolution of the Roman Em-
pire, that vast and successful scheme for the
enslaving of the most civilised portion or

2 *A Philosophical View of Reform

mankind, to the epoch of the French Revolu-
tion, have succeeded a series of schemes,
on a smaller scale, operating to the same
effect. Names borrowed from the life and
opinions of Jesus Christ were employed as
symbols of domination and imposture ; and
a system of liberty and equality — for such was
the system planted by that great Reformer —
was perverted to support oppression. Not
his doctrines, for they are too simple and
direct to be susceptible of such perversion,
but the mere names. Such was the origin of
the Catholic Church, which, together with the
several dynasties then beginning to consolidate
themselves in Europe, means, being interpreted,
a plan according to which the cunning and
selfish few have employed the fears and hopes
of the ignorant many to the establishment of
their own power and the destruction of the
real interests of all.
The Re- The Republics and municipal Governments
sistance Qf Italy opposed for some time a systematic
a y* and effectual resistance to the all-surrounding
tyranny. The Lombard League defeated the
armies of the despot in open field, and until
Florence was betrayed to those polished
tyrants, the Medici, Freedom had one citadel
wherein it could find refuge from a world
which was its enemy. Florence, long balanced,
divided and weakened the strength of the
Empire and the Popedom. To this cause, if

e*df ^Philosophical View of l{eform 3

to anything, was due the undisputed supe-
riority of Italy in literature and the arts over
all its contemporary nations, that union of
energy and of beauty which distinguishes
from all other poets the writings of Dante,
that restlessness of fervid power which
expressed itself in painting and sculpture, and
in daring architectural forms, and from which,
and conjointly from the creations of Athens,
its predecessor and its image, Raphael and
Michael Angelo drew the inspiration which
created those forms and colours now the
astonishment of the world. The father of
our own literature, Chaucer, wrought from the
simple and powerful language of a nursling
of this Republic the basis of our own litera-
ture. And thus we owe, among other causes,
the exact condition belonging to intellectual
existence to the generous disdain of submission
which burned in the bosoms of men who filled
a distant generation and inhabited other lands.

When this resistance was overpowered, The Re-
as what resistance to fraud and tyranny has formation,
not been overpowered ? another was even then
maturing. The progress of philosophy and
civilization which ended in that imperfect
emancipation of mankind from the yoke of
priests and kings called the Reformation, had
already commenced. Exasperated by their
long sufferings, inflamed by the sparks of that
superstition from the flames of which they were

4 e^T ^Philosophical View of Reform

emerging, the poor rose against their natural
enemies, the rich, and repaid with bloody in-
terest the tyranny of ages. One of the signs
of the times was that the oppressed peasantry
rose like the negro slaves of West Indian plan-
tations, and murdered their tyrants when they
were unaware. So dear is power that the
tyrants themselves neither then, nor now, nor
ever, left or leave a path to freedom but through
their own blood. The contest then waged
under the names of religion which have
seldom been any more than popular and visible
symbols which express power in some shape
or other, asserted by one party and dis-
claimed by the other, ended ; and the result,
though partial and imperfect, is perhaps the
most animating that the philanthropist can
contemplate in the history of man. The
Republic of Holland, which has been so long
an armoury of the arrows of learning by which
superstition has been wounded even to death,
was established by this contest. What though
the name of Republic — and by whom but by
conscience-stricken tyrants would it be ex-
tinguished— is no more ? The Republics of
Switzerland derived from this event their
consolidation and their union.
The Eng- From England then first began to pass
lish Re- away the stain of conquest. The exposure of
a certain portion of religious imposture drew
with it an enquiry into political imposture,

nascence.

zA Philosophical View of 'Rgform 5

and was attended with an extraordinary
exertion of the energies of intellectual power.
Shakespeare and Lord Bacon and the great
writers of the age of Elizabeth and James I
were at once the effects of the new spirit in
men's minds, and the causes of its more
complete development. By rapid gradations
the nation was conducted to the temporary
abolition of aristocracy and episcopacy, and to
the mighty example which, c in teaching
nations how to live \ England afforded to the
world— of bringing to public justice one of
those chiefs of a conspiracy of privileged
murderers and robbers whose impunity had
been the consecration of crime. [The maxim
that criminals should be pitied and reformed,
not detested and punished, alone affords a
source of . . . .]

After the selfish passions and temporizing The Re_
interests of men had enlisted themselves to volution of
produce and establish the Restoration of l6$%-
Charles II the unequal combat was renewed
under the reign of his successor, and that
compromise between the unextinguishable
spirit of Liberty, and the ever watchful spirit
of fraud and tyranny, called the Revolution
had place. On this occasion monarchy and
aristocracy and episcopacy were at once
established and limited by law. Unfortu-
nately they lost no more in extent of power
than they gained in security of possession.

6 *A Philosophical View of %eform

Meanwhile those by whom they were estab-
lished acknowledged and declared that the
Will of the People was the source from which
those powers, in this instance, derived the
right to subsist. A man has no right to
be a King or a Lord or a Bishop but so long
as it is for the benefit of the People and so
long as the People judge that it is for their
benefit that he should impersonate that
character. The solemn establishment of this
maxim as the basis of our constitutional law,
more than any beneficial and energetic appli-
cation of it to the circumstances of the era of
its promulgation, was the fruit of that vaunted
event. Correlative with this series of events
in England was the commencement of a new
epoch in the history of the progress of
civilization and society.1

That superstition which has disguised itself
under the name of the system of Jesus sub-
sisted under all its forms, even where it had
been separated from those things especially
considered as abuses by the multitude, in the
shape of an intolerant and oppressive hierarchy.
Catholics massacred Protestants and Protestants

1 Here follows a passage which Shelley has scored out :
' I am unwilling to attribute any great share in the improve-
ment of a being so intellectual as man to a circumstance so
entirely accidental and mechanical as the invention of
printing. This was one among a multitude of causes
radiating to a single centre/ — (Ed.)

<t£ Philosophical View of Reform 7

proscribed Catholics, and extermination was the
sanction of each faith within the limits of the
power of its professors. The New Testament is
in everyone's hand, and the few who ever read
it with the simple sincerity of an unbiassed
judgement may perceive how distinct from
the opinions of any of those professing them-
selves orthodox were the doctrines and the
actions of Jesus Christ. At the period of the
Reformation this test was applied, this judge-
ment formed of the then existing hierarchy,
and the same compromise was then made
between the spirit of truth and the spirit of im-
posture after the struggle which ploughed up
the area of the human mind, as was made in the
particular instance of England between the
spirit of freedom and the spirit of tyranny at that
event called the Revolution. In both instances
the maxims so solemnly recorded remain as
trophies of our difficult and incomplete victory,
planted on the enemies' soil. The will of the
People to change their government is an ac-
knowledged right in the Constitution of Eng-
land. The protesting against religious dogmas
which present themselves to his mind as false
is the inalienable prerogative of every human
being.

The new epoch was marked by the com- Religious
mencement of deeper enquiries into the point anc* *W°"
of human nature than are compatible with an ^™?

8 aA Philosophical View of ^Reform

unreserved belief in any of those popular mis-
takes upon which popular systems of faith with
respect to the cause and agencies of the uni-
verse, with all their superstructure of political
arid religious tyranny,1 are built. Lord Bacon,
Spinoza, Hobbes, Boyle, Montaigne, regulated
the reasoning powers, criticized the history,
exposed the past errors by illustrating their
causes and their connexion, and anatomized the
inmost nature of social man. Then, with a less
interval of time than of genius, followed Locke
and the philosophers of his exact and intelli-
gible but superficial school. Their illustrations
of some of the minor consequences of the
doctrines established by the sublime genius
of their predecessors were correct, popular,
simple and energetic. Above all, they indi-
cated inferences the most incompatible with the
popular religions and the established govern-
ments of Europe. [Philosophy went now into
the enchanted forest of the demons of worldly
power, as the pioneer of the overgrowth of
ages.] Berkeley and Hume, and Hartley at
a later age, following the traces of these in-

1 Here, in a footnote, comes an unfinished sentence
apparently intended to be worked into the above passage :
' Regular and graduated systems of alternate slavery and
tyranny, by which all except the lowest and the largest
class were to be gainers in the materials of subsistence and
ostentation at the expense of that class, the means being
fraud and force, were established in the shape of feudal
monarchies upon the ruins of the . . . '

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<iA Philosophical View of ^form 9

ductions, have clearly established the certainty
of our ignorance with respect to those obscure
questions which under the name of religious
truths have been the watchwords of contention
and symbols of unjust power ever since they
were distorted by the narrow passions of the
immediate followers of Jesus from that meaning
to which philosophers are even now restoring
them. A crowd of writers in France seized
upon the most popular topics of these doctrines,
and developing those particular portions of the
new philosophy which conducted to inferences
at war with the dreadful oppressions under
which that country groaned, made familiar to
mankind the falsehood of the mediaeval pre-
tences of their religious and political oppressors.
Considered as philosophers their error seems
to have consisted chiefly in a limitation of
view ; they told the truth, but not the whole
truth. This might have arisen from the
terrible sufferings of their countrymen inviting
them rather to apply a portion of what had
already been discovered to their immediate
relief, than to pursue one interest, the
abstractions of thought, as the great philoso-
phers who preceded them had done, for the
sake of a future and more universal advantage.
Whilst that philosophy which, burying itself
in the obscure part of our nature, regards the
truth and falsehood of dogmas relating to the
cause of the universe, and the nature and

I o &£ Philosophical View of ^Reform

manner of man's relation with it, was thus
stripping Power of its darkest mask, Political
Philosophy, or that which considers the
relations of man as a social being, was assum-
ing a precise form. That philosophy indeed
sprang from and maintained a connexion with
that other as its parent. What would Swift
and Bolingbroke and Sidney and Locke and
Montesquieu, or even Rousseau, not to speak
of political philosophers of our own age,
Godwin and Bentham, have been but for
Lord Bacon, Montaigne and Spinoza, and
the other great luminaries of the preceding
epoch ? Something excellent and eminent,
no doubt, the least of these would have been,
but something different from and inferior to
what they are. A series of these writers
illustrated with more or less success the
principles of human nature as applied to man
in political society. A thirst for accommo-
dating the existing forms according to which
mankind are found divided to those rules of
freedom and equality which have been dis-
covered as being the elementary principles
according to which the happiness resulting
from the social union ought to be produced
and distributed, was kindled by these enquiries.
Contemporary with this condition of the
intellect all the powers of mankind, though in
most cases under forms highly inauspicious
began to develop themselves with uncommon

tA Philosophical View of %eform 1 1

energy. The mechanical sciences attained to
a degree of perfection which, though obscurely
foreseen by Lord Bacon, it had been accounted
madness to have prophesied in a preceding age.
Commerce was pursued with a perpetually
increasing vigour, and the same area of the
Earth was perpetually compelled to furnish
more and more subsistence. The means and
sources of knowledge were thus increased
together with knowledge itself, and the
instruments of knowledge. The benefit of
this increase of the powers of man became, in
consequence of the inartificial1 forms into
which mankind was distributed, an instrument
of his additional evil. The capabilities ot
happiness were increased, and applied to the
augmentation of misery. Modern society is
thus an engine assumed to be for useful
purposes, whose force is by a system of subtle
mechanism augmented to the highest pitch,
but which, instead of grinding corn or raising
water acts against itself and is perpetually
wearing away or breaking to pieces the wheels
of which it is composed. The result of the
labours of the political philosophers has been
the establishment of the principle of Utility
as the substance, and liberty and equality as
the forms according to which the concerns of

1 Sic in the MS. The intention must have been to
write ' artificial % unless by 'inartificial' Shelley meant
badly designed. — (Ed.)

1 2 (&f Philosophical View of Reform

human life ought to be administered. By
this test the various institutions regulating
political society have been tried, and as the
undigested growth of the private passions,
errors, and interests of barbarians and oppres-
sors have been condemned. And many new
theories, more or less perfect, but all superior
to the mass of evil which they would supplant,
have been given to the world.
The The system of government in the United

United States of America was the first practical
States. illustration of the new philosophy. Sufficiently
remote, it will be confessed, from the accuracy
of ideal excellence is that representative system
which will soon cover the extent of that vast
Continent. But it is scarcely less remote from
the insolent and contaminating tyrannies under
which, with some limitation of the terms as
regards England, Europe groaned at the
period of the successful rebellion of America.
America holds forth the victorious example
of an immensely populous, and as far as the
external arts of life are concerned, a highly
civilized community administered according to
republican forms. It has no king, that is it has
no officer to whom wealth and from whom cor-
ruption flow. It has no hereditary oligarchy,
that is it acknowledges no order of men privi-
leged to cheat and insult the rest of the mem-
bers of the State, and who inherit the right
of legislating and judging which the principles

vt Philosophical View of Reform 1 3

of human nature compel them to exercise to
their own profit and to the detriment of those
not included within their peculiar class. It
has no established Church, that is no system
of opinions respecting the abstrusest questions
which can be the topics of human thought,
founded in an age of error and fanaticism,
and opposed by law to all other opinions,
defended by prosecutions, and sanctioned by
enormous grants given to idle priests and
forced from the unwilling hands of those
who have an interest in the cultivation and
improvement of the soil. It has no false
representation, whose consequences are cap-
tivity, confiscation, infamy and ruin, but a true
representation. The will of the many is
represented in the assemblies and by the officers
entrusted with the administration of the
executive power almost as directly as the will
of one person can be represented by the will
of another. [This is not the place for dilating
upon the inexpressible advantages (if such
advantages require any manifestation) of a self-
governing Society, or one which approaches it
in the degree of the Republic of the United
States.] Lastly, it has an institution by which
it is honourably distinguished from all other
governments which ever existed. It con-
stitutionally acknowledges the progress of
human improvement, and is framed under
the limitation of the probability of more simple

1 4 <±A Philosophical View of Reform

views of political science being rendered
applicable to human life. There is a law by
which the constitution is reserved for revision
every ten years. Every other set of men who
have assumed the office of legislation, and
framing institutions for future ages, with far
less right to such an assumption than the
founders of the American Republic, regarded
their work as the wisest and the best that
could possibly have been produced : these
illustrious men looked upon the past history
of their species and saw that it was the
history of his mistakes, and his sufferings
arising from his mistakes ; they observed the
superiority of their own work to all the works
which had preceded it, and they judged it
possible that other political institutions would
be discovered having the same relation to those
which they had established which they bear to
those which have preceded them. They pro-
vided therefore for the application of these
contingent discoveries to the social state with-
out the violence and misery attendant upon
such change in less modest and more imperfect
governments. The United States, as we
would have expected from theoretical deduc-
tion, affords an example, compared with the old
governments of Europe and Asia, of a free,
happy, and strong people.1 Nor let it be said

1 Its error consists not in the not representing the will
of the people as it is, but in not providing for the full

*A Philosophical View of ^form 1 5

that they owe their superiority rather to the
situation than to their government. Give
them a king, and let that king waste in
luxury, riot and bribery the same sum which
now serves for the entire expenses of their
government. Give them an aristocracy, and
let that aristocracy legislate for the people.
Give them a priesthood, and let them bribe
with a tenth of the produce of the soil a certain
set of men to say a certain set of words.
Pledge the larger portion of them by financial
subterfuges to pay the half of their property or
earnings to another portion, and let the
proportion of those who enjoy the fruits of
the toil of others without toiling themselves be
three instead of one. Give them a Court of
Chancery and let the property, the liberty and
the interest in the dearest concerns, the exercise
of the sacred rights of a social being depend
upon the will of one of the most servile crea-
tions of that kingly and oligarchical and priestly
power to which every man, in proportion as

development and the most salutary condition of that will.
For two conditions are necessary to a theoretically perfect
government, and one of them alone is adequately fulfilled
by the most perfect of practical governments, the Republic
of the United States : to represent the will of the people
as it is. To provide that that will should be as wise and
just as possible. In a certain extent the mere representation
of public will produces in itself a wholesome condition of it,
and in this extent America fulfils imperfectly and indirectly
the last and most important condition of perfect govern-
ment.— (Author's Note.)

Revolu
tion

1 6 tA Philosophical View of Reform

he is of an enquiring and philosophic mind
and of a sincere and honourable disposition is
a natural and necessary enemy. Give then,
as you must if you give them these things,
a great standing army to cut down the people
if they murmur. If any American should see
these words, his blood would run cold at the
imagination of such a change. He well knows
that the prosperity and happiness of the United
States if subjected to such institutions would
be no more.
The The just and successful Revolt of America

French corresponded with a state of public opinion in
Europe of which it was the first result. The
French Revolution was the second. The
oppressors of mankind had enjoyed (O that
we could say suffered) a long and undisturbed
reign in France, and to the pining famine, the
shelterless destitution of the inhabitants of that
country had been added and heaped up insult
harder to bear than misery. For the feudal
system (the immediate causes and conditions
of its institution having become obliterated)
had degenerated into an instrument not only
of oppression but of contumely, and both were
unsparingly inflicted. Blind in the possession
of strength, drunken as with the intoxication
of ancestral greatness, the rulers perceived not
that increase of knowledge in the subject
which made its exercise insecure. They called
soldiers to hew down the people when

<t£ ^Philosophical View of Reform 1 7

their power was already past. The tyrants
were, as usual, the aggressors. The oppressed,
having been rendered brutal, ignorant, servile
and bloody by slavery, having had the
intellectual thirst, excited in them by the pro-
gress of civilization, satiated from fountains
of literature poisoned by the spirit and the
form of monarchy, arose to take a dreadful
revenge on their oppressors. Their desire to
wreak revenge, to this extent, in itself a
mistake, a crime, a calamity, arose from the
same source as their other miseries and errors,
and affords an additional proof of the
necessity of that long-delayed change which it
accompanied and disgraced. If a just and
necessary revolution could have been accom-
plished with as little expense of happiness and
order in a country governed by despotic as in
one governed by free laws, equal liberty and
justice would lose their chief recommendations
and tyranny be divested of its most revolting
attributes. Tyranny entrenches itself within the
existing interests of the best and most refined
citizens of a nation and says c If you dare
trample upon these, be free \ Though these
terrible conditions shall not be evaded, the
world is no longer in a temper to decline the
challenge.

The French were what their literature is
(excepting Montaigne and Rousseau, and some
few of the . . . ) weak, superficial, vain, with

1 8 asf Philosophical View of 'T^eform

little imagination, and with passions as well as
judgements cleaving to the external forms of
things. Not that they are organically different
from the inhabitants of the nations who have
become ... or rather not that their organical
differences, whatever they may amount to,
incapacitate them from arriving at the exercise
of the highest powers to be attained by man.
Their institutions made them what they were.
Slavery and superstition, contumely and the
tame endurance of contumely, and the habits
engendered from generation to generation out
of this transmitted inheritance of wrong, created
the thing which has extinguished what has been
called the likeness of God in man. The
Revolution in France overthrew the hierarchy,
the aristocracy and the monarchy, and the
whole of that peculiarly insolent and oppressive
system on which they were based. But as it
only partially extinguished those passions
which are the spirit of these forms a reaction
took place which has restored in a certain
limited degree the old system. In a degree,
indeed, exceedingly limited, and stript of all
its antient terrors, the hope of the Monarchy
of France, with his teeth drawn and his claws
pared, may succeed in maintaining the formal
witness of most imperfect and insecure
dominion.1 The usurpation of Bonaparte and

1 The foregoing sentence was left by Shelley in a chaotic
and indecipherable condition. The restoration I have

sA ^Philosophical View of 'Reform 1 9

then the Restoration of the Bourbons were
the shapes in which this reaction clothed itself,
and the heart of every lover of liberty was
struck as with palsy on the succession of these
events. But reversing the proverbial expres-
sion of Shakespeare, it may be the good which
the Revolutionists did lives after them, their
ills are interred with their bones. But the
military project of government of the great
tyrant having failed, and there being even
no attempt — and, if there were any attempt,
there being not the remotest possibility of
re-establishing the enormous system of tyranny
abolished by the Revolution, France is, as
it were, regenerated. Its legislative assemblies
are in a certain limited degree representations
of the popular will, and the executive power
is hemmed in by jealous laws. France occupies
in this respect the same situation as was
occupied by England at the restoration of
Charles II. It has undergone a revolution
(unlike in the violence and calamities which
attended it, because unlike in the abuses
which it was excited to put down) which may
be paralleled with that in our own country
which ended in the death of Charles I. The
authors of both Revolutions proposed a greater
and more glorious object than the degraded
passions of their countrymen permitted them

attempted gives the sense intended, but is conjectural in
some particulars.

20 <*A ^Philosophical View of ^Re form

to attain. But in both cases abuses were
abolished which never since have dared to show
their face. There remains in the natural order
of human things that the tyranny and perfidy
of the reigns of Charles II and James II (for
these were less the result of the disposition of
particular men than the vices which would
have been engendered in any but an extra-
ordinary man by the natural necessities of
their situation) perhaps under a milder form
and within a shorter period should produce
the institution of a Government in France
which may bear the same relation to the state
of political knowledge existing at the present
day, as the Revolution under William III
bore to the state of political knowledge
existing at that period.
The Lib- Germany, which is, among the great nations
eration 0f Europe, one of the latest civilized, with the
of Ger- exception of Russia, is rising with the fervour
of a vigorous youth to the assertion of those
rights for which it has that desire arising from
knowledge, the surest pledge of victory. The
deep passion and the bold and Aeschylean
vigour of the imagery of their poetry, the
enthusiasm, however distorted, the purity,
truth and comprehensiveness of their religious
sentiments, their language which is the many-
sided mirror of every changing thought, their
sincere, bold and liberal spirit of criticism,
their subtle and deep philosophy mingling

many.

sA Philosophical View of Reform 2 1

fervid intuitions into truth with obscure error
(for the period of just distinction is yet to
come) and their taste and power in the plastic
arts, prove that they are a great People. And
every great nation either has been or is or will
be free. The panic-stricken tyrants of that
country promised to their subjects that their
governments should be administered according
to republican forms, they retaining merely the
right of hereditary chief magistracy in their
families. This promise, made in danger, the
oppressors dream that they can break in
security. And everything in consequence
wears in Germany the aspect of rapidly
maturing revolution.

In Spain and in the dependencies of Spain Despot-
good and evil in the forms of Despair and ism in
Tyranny are struggling face to face. That paln'
great people have been delivered bound hand
and foot to be trampled upon and insulted by
a traitorous and sanguinary tyrant, a monster
who makes credible all that might have been
doubted in the history of Nero, Christiern,
Muley Ismael or Ezzelin J — the persons who

1 ' Christiern ' is the king now commonly known as
Christian II, perpetrator of the Massacre of Stockholm,
1520, and many other atrocities. Muley Ismael, who
tortured one of his sons to death, was emperor of Morocco
1673-1727. Ezzelin or Eccelin de Romano, Lord of
Padua in the thirteenth century, left a name which has
become a byword for cruelty which struck even his own
age with horror. — (Ed.)

22 <±A Philosophical View of Reform

have thus delivered them were that hypocritical
knot of conspiring tyrants, who proceeded
upon the credit they gained by putting down
the only tyrant among them who was not a
hypocrite, to undertake the administration of
those arrondissements * of consecrated injustice
and violence which they deliver to those who
the nearest resemble them under the name of
the c kingdoms of the earth '. This action
signed a sentence of death, confiscation, exile
or captivity against every philosopher and
patriot in Spain. The tyrant Ferdinand, he
whose name is held a proverb of execration,
found natural allies in all the priests and
military chiefs and a few of the most dis-
honourable of that devoted country. And the
consequences of military despotism and the
black, stagnant, venomous hatred which priests
in common with eunuchs seek every opportunity
to wreak upon the portion of mankind exempt
from their own unmanly disqualifications is
slavery. And what is slavery — in its mildest
form hideous, and, so long as one amiable or
great attribute survives in its victims, rankling
and intolerable, but in its darkest shape as it
now exhibits itself in Spain it is the essence of
all and more than all the evil for the sake of
an exemption from which mankind submit to
the mighty calamity of government. It is

1 Italics indicated in MS. — (Ed.)

<±A ^Philosophical View of %ejorm 23

a system of insecurity of property, and of
person, of prostration of conscience and under-
standing, it is famine heaped upon the greater
number and contumely heaped upon all,
defended by unspeakable tortures employed
not merely as punishments but as precautions,
by want, death and captivity, and the applica-
tion to political purposes of the execrated and
enormous instruments of religious cruelty.
Those men of understanding, integrity, and
courage who rescued their country from one
tyrant are exiled from it by his successor and
his enemy and their legitimate king. Tyrants,
however they may squabble among themselves,
have common friends and foes. The taxes
are levied at the point of the sword. Armed
insurgents occupy all the defensible mountains
of the country. The dungeons are peopled
thickly, and persons of every sex and age have
the fibres of their frame torn by subtle torments.
Boiling water (such is an article in the last
news from Spain) is poured upon the legs of
a noble Spanish lady newly delivered, slowly
and cautiously, that she may confess what she
knows of a conspiracy against the tyrant, and
she dies, as constant as the slave Epicharis,1

1 Tacitus tells her story {Ann. xv. 57). She slew
herself, fearing to reveal under renewed torture the names
of her accomplices in a conspiracy against Nero :
More nobly dead, tho' but a freedwoman
Than many a Roman swoln with pedigree. — (Ed.)

24 && Philosophical View of Reform

imprecating curses upon her torturers and
passionately calling upon her children. These
events, in the present condition of the under-
standing and sentiment of mankind, are the
rapidly passing shadows, which forerun
successful insurrection,1 the ominous comets
of our republican poet perplexing great
monarchs with fear of change.2 — Spain, having
passed through an ordeal severe in proportion
to the wrongs and errors which it is kindled
to erase must of necessity be renovated. Spain
produced Calderon and Cervantes, what else
did it but breathe, thro the tumult of the des-
potism and superstition which invested them,
the prophecy of a glorious consummation ?

1 After ' insurrection ' in the MS. come the words, ' the
lean-looking prophets whispering fearful change'. The
metaphor of the * ominous comets ' was evidently intended
to be substituted for the lean prophets, but as the latter
phrase was not struck out I record it here. — (Ed.)

2 \ On the other side,
Incensed with indignation, Satan stood
Unterrified, and like a comet burn'd,
That fires the length of Ophiuchus huge
In the arctic sky, and from his horrid hair
Shakes pestilence and war.'

Paradise Lost, Bk. II.

Shelley has mingled, in his recollection, the above passage
with another from Paradise Lost, Bk. I, where Milton
speaks of the sun which

1 in dim eclipse disastrous twilight sheds

On half the nations, and with fear of change

Perplexes monarchs \ — (Ed.)

aA ^Philosophical View of ^Reform 25

The independents of South America are as South
it were already free. Great Republics are America,
about to consolidate themselves in a portion
of the globe sufficiently vast and fertile to
nourish more human beings than at present
occupy, with the exception perhaps of China,
the remainder of the inhabited earth. Some
indefinite arrears of misery and blood remain to
be paid to the Moloch of oppression. These,
to the last drop and groan it will inflict by its
ministers. But not the less are they inevitably
enfranchised. The Great Monarchies of Asia
cannot, let us confidently hope, remain un-
shaken by the earthquake which is shaking to
dust the c mountainous strongholds ' of the
tyrants of the Western world.

Revolutions in the political and religious India,
state of the Indian peninsula seem to be
accomplishing, and it cannot be doubted but
the zeal of the missionaries of what is called
the Christian faith will produce beneficial
innovation there, even by the application of
dogmas and forms of what is here an outworn
incumbrance. The Indians have been enslaved
and cramped in the most severe and paralysing
forms which were ever devised by man ; some of
this newenthusiasm ought to be kindled among
them to consume it and leave them free, and
even if the doctrines of Jesus do not penetrate
through the darkness of that which those who
profess to be his followers call Christianity,

£

26 zA Philosophical View of ^B^ form

there will yet be a number of social forms
modelled upon those European feelings from
which it has taken its colour substituted to
those according to which they are at present
cramped, and from which, when the time for
complete emancipation shall arrive, their
disengagement may be less difficult, and under
which their progress to it may be the less
imperceptibly slow. Many native Indians
have acquired, it is said, a competent know-
ledge in the arts and philosophy of Europe,
and Locke and Hume and Rousseau are
familiarly talked of in Brahminical society.
But the thing to be sought is that they should,
as they would if they were free, attain to a
system of arts and literature of their own. —
Of Persia we know little, but that it has been
the theatre of sanguinary contests for power,
and that it is now at peace. The Persians ap-
pear to be from organization * a beautiful
refined and impassioned people and would prob-
ably soon be infected by the contagion of good.
The The Turkish Empire is in its last stage of

Turkish ruin, and it cannot be doubted but that the
Empire. t-me js appr0aching when the deserts of Asia
Minor and of Greece will be colonized by the
overflowing population of countries less en-
slaved and debased, and that the climate and
the scenery which was the birthplace of all

1 Across this passage is written the word carets indi-
cating that something was to be supplied later. — (Ed.)

<lA Philosophical View of l^eform zj

that is wise and beautiful will not remain for
ever the spoil of wild beasts and unlettered
Tartars. — In Syria and Arabia the spirit of
human intellect has roused a sect of people
called Wahabees, who maintain the Unity of
God, and the equality of man, and their
enthusiasm must go on ' conquering and to
conquer ! even if it must be repressed in its
present shape. — Egypt having but a nominal
dependence upon Constantinople is under the
government of Ottoman Bey,1 a person of
enlightened views who is introducing European
literature and art, and is thus beginning that
change which Time, the great innovator, will
accomplish in that degraded country ; and by
the same means its sublime and enduring
monuments may excite lofty emotions in the
hearts of the posterity of those who now
contemplate them without admiration. —
The Jews, that wonderful people which has
preserved so long the symbols of their
union may reassume their ancestral seats
and

Lastly, in the West Indian islands, first The

West

1 This person sent his. nephew to Lucca to study t ..

European learning, when his nephew asked with reference
to some branch of study at enmity with Mahometanism
whether he was permitted to engage in it, he replied, ' You
are at liberty to do anything which will not injure another \
— (Author's Note.)

2 The rest of this passage about the Jews is missing. —
(Ed.)

28 nA ^Philosophical View of T^eform

from the disinterested yet necessarily cautious
measures of the English Nation, and then
from the infection of the spirit of Liberty in
France, the deepest stain upon civilized man
is fading away. Two nations of free negroes
are already established ; one, in pernicious
mockery of the usurpation over France, an
empire, the other a republic ; l both animating
yet terrific spectacles to those who inherit
around them the degradation of slavery and
the spirit of dominion.

Such is a slight sketch of the general con-
dition of the hopes and aspirations of the
human race to which they have been conducted
after the obliteration of the Greek republics by
the successful tyranny of Rome, — its internal
liberty having been first abolished, — and by
those miseries and superstitions consequent
upon them, which compelled the human race
to begin anew its difficult and obscure career
of producing, according to the forms of society,
the greatest portion of good.
The Meanwhile England, the particular obj ect for

Crisis in the sake of which these general considerations
England, jjave been stated on the present occasion, has
arrived, like the nations which surround it,

1 The negro Republic of Liberia was founded by
manumitted American slaves in 1820. In Haiti the
negro Dessalines proclaimed himself * emperor ' in 1 804,
and in Shelley's day the monarchy was contested by several
negro chiefs. — (Ed.)

&£ ^Philosophical View of ^ form 29

at a crisis in its destiny.1 The literature of
England, an energetic development of which
has ever followed or preceded a great and free
development of the national will, has arisen, as
it were, from a new birth. In spite of that low-
thoughted envy which would underrate, thro
a fear of comparison with its own insignifi-
cance, the eminence of contemporary merit, it
is felt by the British that this is in intellectual
achievements a memorable age, and we live
among such philosophers and poets as surpass
beyond comparison any who have appeared in
our nation since its last struggle for liberty.
For the most unfailing herald, or companion,
or follower, of an universal employment of
the sentiments of a nation to the production
of a beneficial change is poetry, meaning by
poetry an intense and impassioned power of
communicating intense and impassioned im-
pressions respecting man and nature. The
persons in whom this power takes its abode
may often, as far as regards many portions of
their nature, have little correspondence with
the spirit of good of which it is the minister.
But although they may deny and abjure, they
are yet compelled to serve that which is seated
on the throne of their own soul.2 And what-

1 The passage on contemporary English literature from
this point to the end of the paragraph was used by Shelley
with some verbal alterations in the conclusion of his essay,
A Defence of Poetry. — (Ed.)

2 Across the page Shelley has here written the words,

30 vi Philosophical View of Reform

ever systems they may have professed by
support, they actually advance the interests of
Liberty.1 It is impossible to read the pro-
ductions of our most celebrated writers, what-
ever may be their system relating to thought
or expression, without being startled by the
electric life which there is in their words. They
measure the circumference or sound the depths
of human nature with a comprehensive and
all-penetrating spirit at which they are them-
selves perhaps most sincerely astonished, for it
is less their own spirit than the spirit of their
age. They are the priests of an unappre-
hended inspiration, the mirrors of gigantic
shadows which futurity casts upon the present ;
the words which express what they conceive
not ; the trumpet which sings to battle and
feels not what it inspires ; the influence which
is moved not but moves. Poets and philo-
sophers are the unacknowledged legislators
of the world.

But, omitting these more abstracted con-
siderations, has there not been and is there

'In this sense Religion may be called Poetry; though
distorted from the beautiful simplicity of its truth —
Coleridge has said that every poet was religious, the con-
verse, that every religious man must be a poet was more
true*. — (Ed.)

1 At this point come the words, ' Poets and philosophers
are the unacknowledged legislators of the world \ Shelley
afterwards closed the paragraph with this fine sentence,
forgetting, however, to strike it out here. — (Ed.)

qA ^Philosophical View of Reform 3 1

not in England a desire of change arising
from the profound sentiment of the exceed-
ing inefficiency of the existing institutions
to provide for the physical and intellectual
happiness of the people ? It is proposed in
this work1 (1) to state and examine the
present condition of this desire, (2) to elucidate
its causes and its object, (3) to show the
practicability and utility, nay the necessity of
change, (4) to examine the state of parties as
regards it, and (5) 2 to state the probable, the
possible, and the desirable mode in which it
should be accomplished.

1 We have here an intercalation of a few jottings on
themes to be expanded later : ( Before the F. R. a bitter
state of public mind — The panic-giving arrows — All the
great writers full of hope — Not necessary to debate here on
the grounds of Reform — that to come in next chap.' — (Ed.)

2 Shelley has here inadvertently written • 4th \ — (Ed.)

CHAPTER II

Move-
ments of
English
opinion.

ON THE SENTIMENT OF THE NECESSITY
OF CHANGE

Two circumstances arrest the attention of
those who turn their regard to the present
political condition of the English nation —
first, that there is an almost universal sentiment
of the approach of some change to be wrought
in the institutions of the government, and
secondly, the necessity and the desirableness
of such a change. From the first of these
propositions, it being matter of fact, no person
addressing the public can dissent. The latter,
from a general belief in which the former
flows and on which it depends, is matter of
opinion, but one which to the mind of all,
excepting those interested in maintaining the
contrary is a doctrine so clearly established
that even they, admitting that great abuses
exist, are compelled to impugn it by insisting
upon the specious topic, that popular violence,
by which they alone could be remedied, would
be more injurious than the continuance of
those abuses. But as those who argue thus
derive for the most part great advantage and
convenience from the continuance of these
abuses, their estimation of the mischiefs of

zA Philosophical View of <rR^eform 3 3

popular violence as compared with the mis-
chiefs of tyrannical and fraudulent forms of
government are likely, from the known prin-
ciples of human nature, to be exaggerated.
Such an estimate comes too with a worse grace
from them, who if they would, in opposition
to their own unjust advantage, take the lead
in reform, might spare the nation from the
inconveniences of the temporary dominion of
the poor, who by means of that degraded
condition which their insurrection would be
designed to ameliorate, are sufficiently in-
capable of discerning their own glorious and
permanent advantage, tho' surely less incapable
than those whose interests consist in proposing
to themselves an object perfectly opposite to
and utterly incompatible with that advantage.1
These persons propose to us the dilemma of
submitting to a despotism which is notoriously
gathering like an avalanche year by year,
or taking the risk of something which it must
be confessed bears the aspect of revolution.
To this alternative we are reduced by the
selfishness of those who taunt us with it.
And the history of the world teaches us not
to hesitate an instant in the decision, if
indeed the power of decision be not already
past.

The establishment of King William III

1 The words ' I meant the government party ' are here
intercalated.— (Ed.)

F

34 ^ ^Philosophical View of %eform

Political on the throne of England has already been
Forces m referred to as a compromise between liberty
England anc* despotism. The Parliament of which
that event was the act had ceased to be in an
emphatic sense a representation of the people.
The Long Parliament was the organ of the
will of all classes of people in England since
it effected the complete revolution in a tyranny
consecrated by time. But since its meeting
and since its dissolution a great change had
taken place in England. Feudal manners and
institutions having become obliterated, mono-
polies and patents having been abolished,
property and personal liberty having been
rendered secure, the nation advanced rapidly
towards the acquirement of the elements of
national prosperity.1 Population increased, a
greater number of hands were employed in
the labours of agriculture and commerce,
towns arose where villages had been, and the
proportion borne by those whose labour
produced the materials of subsistence and
enjoyment to those who claim for themselves

1 At this point the following passage, enclosed in lines
to indicate that its exact position was not yet determined^
is intercalated : ' But for want of just regulations for the
distribution of these materials — which is indeed the great
problem of government — the elements of prosperity and
power became when combined the sources of despotism
and misery/ Where I have supplied 'these materials'
Shelley wrote ' these elements ', but crossed it out without
supplying any alternative. — (Ed.)

*A Philosophical View of Pgform 35

a superfluityof these materials began to increase
indefinitely. A fourth class therefore made its
appearance in the nation, the unrepresented
multitude. Nor was it so much that villages
which sent no members to Parliament became
great cities, and that towns which had been
considerable enough to send members dwindled
from local circumstances into villages. This
cause no doubt contributed to the general
effect of rendering the Commons' House a less
complete representation of the people. Yet
had this been all, though it had ceased to be
a legal and actual it might still have been
a virtual Representation of the People. But
universally the nation became multiplied into
a denomination which had no constitutional
presence in the State. This denomination
had not existed before, or had existed only to
a degree in which its interests were sensibly
interwoven with that of those who enjoyed
a constitutional presence. Thus the pro-
portion borne by the Englishmen who pos-
sessed the faculty of suffrage to those who
were excluded from that faculty at the several
periods of 1641 and 1688 had changed by
the operation of these causes from 1 to 8 to
1 to 20. The rapid and effectual progress by
which it changed from 1 to 20 to one
to many hundreds in the interval between
1688 and 1 8 19 is a process, to those familiar
with the history of the political economy of that

36 %4 ^Philosophical View of T^eform

period, which is rendered by these principles
sufficiently intelligible. The number there-
fore of those who have influence on the
government, even if numerically the same as
at the former period, was relatively different.
And a sufficiently just measure is afforded
of the degree in which a country is enslaved
or free, by the consideration of the relative
number of individuals who are admitted to
the exercise of political rights. Meanwhile
another cause was operating of a deeper and
more extensive nature. The class who com-
pose the Lords must, by the advantages of
their situation as the great landed proprietors,
possess a considerable influence over nomina-
tion to the Commons. This influence, from
an original imperfection in the equal distribu-
tion of suffrage, was always enormous, but it
is only since it has been combined with the
cause before stated that it has appeared to be
fraught with consequences incompatible with
public liberty. In 1641 this influence was
almost wholly inoperative to pervert the
counsels of the nation from its own advantage.
But at that epoch the enormous tyranny of the
agents of the royal power weighed equally
upon all denominations of men, and united all
counsels to extinguish it ; add to which, the
nation, as stated before, was in a very con-
siderable degree fairly represented in Parlia-
ment. The common danger which was the

cA ^Philosophical View of ^Rgform 37

bond of union between the aristocracy and the
people having been destroyed, the former
systematized their influence through the per-
manence of hereditary right, whilst the latter
were losing power by the inflexibility of the
institutions which forbade a just accommoda-
tion to their numerical increase. After the
operations of these causes had commenced,
the accession of William III placed a seal
upon forty years of Revolution.

The government of this country at the Monarchy
period of 1688 was regal, tempered by aristo- and Aris-
cracy, for what conditions of democracy attach tocracy-
to an assembly one portion of which was imper-
fectly nominated by less than a twentieth part
of the people, and another perfectly nominated
by the nobles ? For the nobility, having by
the assistance of the people imposed close
limitations upon the royal power, finding that
power to be its natural ally and the people
(for the people from the increase of their
numbers acquired greater and more important
rights whilst the organ through which those
rights might be asserted grew feebler in propor-
tion to the increase of the cause of those rights
and of their importance) its natural enemy,
made the Crown the mask and pretence or
their own authority. At this period began
that despotism of the oligarchy of party, which
under colour of administering the executive
power lodged in the king, represented in truth

38 vf Philosophical View of ^form

the interest of the rich. When it is said by
political reasoners, speaking of the interval
between 1688 and the present time, that the
royal power progressively increased, they use
an expression which suggests a very imperfect
and partial idea. The power which has in-
creased is that entrusted with the administra-
tion of affairs, composed of men responsible
to the aristocratical assemblies, or to the
reigning party in those assemblies, which
represents those orders of the nation which
are privileged, and will retain power as long
as it pleases them and must be divested of
power as soon as it ceases to please them.
The power which has increased therefore is
the power of the rich. The name and office
of king is merely the mask of this power, and
is a kind of stalking-horse used to conceal
these c catchers of men ', whilst they lay their
nets. Monarchy is only the string which ties
the robber's bundle. Though less contume-
lious and abhorrent from the dignity of human
nature than an absolute monarchy, an oligarchy
of this nature exacts more of suffering from
the people because it reigns both by the
opinion generated by imposture, and the
force which that opinion places within its
grasp.
The ^ At the epoch adverted to, the device of
public credit was first systematically applied
as an instrument of government. It was em-

National
Debt.

td ^Philosophical View of ^form 39

ployed at the accession of William III less as
a resource for meeting the financial exigencies
of the state than as a bond to connect those
in the possession of property with those who
had, by taking advantage of an accident of
party, acceded to power. In the interval
elapsed since that period it has accurately ful-
filled the intention of its establishment, and
has continued to add strength to the govern-
ment even until the present crisis. Now this
device is one of those execrable contrivances
of misrule which overbalance the materials of
common advantage produced by the progress
of civilization and increase the number of
those who are idle in proportion to those who
work, whilst it increases, through the factitious
wants of those indolent, privileged persons,
the quantity of work to be done. The rich,
no longer being able to rule by force, have
invented this scheme that they may rule by
fraud. The most despotic governments of
antiquity were strangers to this invention,
which is a compendious method of extorting
from the people far more than praetorian
guards, and arbitrary tribunals, and excise
officers created judges in the last resort, would
ever wring. Neither the Persian monarchy
nor the Roman empire, where the will of one
person was acknowledged as unappealable law,
ever extorted a twentieth part the proportion
now extorted from the property and labour

40 <zA Philosophical View of Reform

Metallic of the inhabitants of Great Britain. The
Currency, precious metal s have been from the earliest
records of civilization employed as the signs
of labour and the titles to an unequal distri-
bution of its produce. The Government of1
a country is necessarily entrusted with the
affixing to certain portions of these metals
a stamp, by which to mark their genuineness ;
no other is considered as current coin, nor
can be a legal tender. The reason of this is
that no alloyed coin should pass current, and
thereby depreciate the genuine, and by aug-
menting the price of the articles which are the
produce of labour defraud the holders of that
which is genuine of the advantages legally
belonging to them. If the Government itself
abuses the trust reposed in it to debase the
coin, in order that it may derive advantage
from the unlimited multiplication of the mark
entitling the holder to command the labour
and property of others, the gradations by
which it sinks, as labour rises, to the level of
their comparative values, produces public con-
fusion and misery. The foreign exchange
meanwhile instructs the Government how tem-
porary was its resource. This mode of making
the distribution of the sign of labour a source
of private aggrandisement at the expense of

1 The words italicized were crossed out by Shelley, but
as he did not supply anything to take their place I restore
them. — (Ed.)

zA ^Philosophical View of Reform 41

public confusion and loss was not wholly
unknown to the nations of antiquity.

But the modern scheme of public credit is Mischiefs
a far subtler and more complicated contrivance of Paper
of misrule. All great transactions of personal Currency»
property in England are managed by signs
and that is by the authority of the possessor
expressed upon paper, thus representing in a
compendious form his right to so much
gold, which represents his right to so much
labour. A man may write on a piece of paper
what he pleases ; he may say he is worth a
thousand when he is not worth a hundred
pounds. If he can make others believe this,
he has credit for the sum to which his name
is attached. And so long as this credit lasts,
he can enjoy all the advantages which would
arise out of the actual possession of that sum
he is believed to possess. He can lend two
hundred to this man and three to that other,
and his bills, among those who believe
that he possesses this sum, pass like money.
Of course in the same proportion as bills of
this sort, beyond the actual goods or gold and
silver possessed by the drawer, pass current,
they defraud those who have gold and
silver and goods of the advantages legally
attached to the possession of them, and they
defraud the labourer and artizan of the
advantages attached to increasing the nominal
price of labour, and such a participation in

42 <t4 Philosophical View of cBseform

them as their industry might command, whilst
they render wages fluctuating and add to the
toil of the cultivator and manufacturer.1

The existing government of England in
substituting a currency of paper for one of
gold has had no need to depreciate the
currency by alloying the coin of the country ;
they have merely fabricated pieces of paper
on which they promise to pay a certain sum.
The holders of these papers came for payment
in some representation of property universally
exchangeable. They then declared that the
persons who held the office for that payment
could not be forced by law to pay. They
declared subsequently that these pieces of
paper were the current coin of the country.
Of this nature are all such transactions of
companies and banks as consist in the circu-
lation of promissory notes to a greater amount
than the actual property possessed by those
whose names they bear. They have the effect of
augmenting the prices of provision, and of
benefiting at the expense of the community
the speculators in this traffic. One of the
vaunted effects of this system is to increase
the national industry, that is, to increase the
labours of the poor and those luxuries of the
rich which they supply. To make a manu-
facturer work 1 6 hours when he only
worked 8. To turn children into lifeless and
1 Artizan.

dA 'Philosophical View of 'Reform 43

bloodless machines at an age when other-
wise they would be at play before the cottage
doors of their parents. To augment inde-
finitely the proportion of those who enjoy the
profit of the labour of others, as compared
with those who exercise this labour. To screw
up . . .'

The consequences of this transaction have The New
been the establishment of a new aristocracy, Aristo-
which has its basis in funds as the old one cracy*
has its basis in force. The hereditary land-
owners in England derived their title from
royal grants — they are fiefs bestowed by
conquerors, or church-lands. Long usage
has consecrated the abstraction of the word
aristocracy from its primitive meaning to that
ordinary sense which signifies that class of
persons who possess a right to the produce of
the labour of others, without dedicating to
the common service any labour in return.
This class of persons, whose existence is a
prodigious anomaly in the social system, has

1 Caetera desunt. A passage marked out from the text
by enclosing lines is here introduced: ' In a treatise devoted
to general considerations it would be superfluous to enter
into the mode in which this has been done; those who
desire to see a full elucidation of that made may read
Cobbett's Paper against Gold. Our present business is with
consequences. I would awaken, from a consideration that
the present miseries of our country are nothing necessarily
inherent in the stage of civilization at which we have
arrived, foresight and hope.' — (Ed.)

44 *A ^Philosophical View of ^Reform

ever constituted an inseparable portion of it,
and there has never been an approach in
practice towards any plan of political society
modelled on equal justice, at least in the
complicated mechanism of modern life. Man-
kind seem to acquiesce, as in a necessary
condition of the imbecility of their own will
and reason, in the existence of an aristocracy.
With reference to this imbecility, it has
doubtless been the instrument of great social
advantage, although that advantage would
have been greater which might have been
produced according to the forms of a just
distribution of the goods and evils of life.
The object therefore of all enlightened
legislation, and administration, is to enclose
within the narrowest practicable limits this
order of drones. The effect of the financial
impostures of the modern rulers of England
has been to increase the number of the drones.
Instead of one aristocracy, the condition to
which, in the present state of human affairs,
the friends of virtue and liberty are willing to
subscribe as to an inevitable evil, they have
supplied us with two aristocracies. The one,
consisting in great land proprietors, and wealthy
merchants who receive and interchange the
produce of this country with the produce of
other countries : in this, because all other
great communities have as yet acquiesced in
it, we acquiesce. Connected with the members

<t£ Philosophical View of Inform 45

of it is a certain generosity and refinement of
manners and opinion which, although neither
philosophy nor virtue, has been that acknow-
ledged substitute for them which at least is a
religion which makes respected those venerable
names. The other aristocracy is one of attornies
and excisemen and directors and government
pensioners, usurers, stockjobbers, country
bankers, with their dependents and descendants.
These are a set of pelting wretches in whose
employment there is nothing to exercise even
to their distortion the more majestic faculties
of the soul. Though at the bottom it is all
trick, there is something frank and magnificent
in the chivalrous disdain of infamy connected
with a gentleman. There is something to
which — until you see through the base false-
hood upon which all inequality is founded —
it is difficult for the imagination to refuse
its respect, in the faithful and direct dealings
of the substantial merchant. But in the
habits and lives of this new aristocracy created
out of an increase in public calamities, and
whose existence must be determined by their
termination, there is nothing to qualify our
disapprobation. They eat and drink and
sleep, and in the intervals of these things
performed with most vexatious ceremony and
accompaniments they cringe and lie.1 They

1 The following passage occurs here, marked off from
the text by enclosing lines : ' The first persons described

46 <*A ^Philosophical View of Reform

Labour,
under the
double
aris-
tocracy.

poison the literature of the age in which
they live by requiring either the antitype
of their own mediocrity in books, or such
stupid and distorted and inharmonious ideal-
isms as alone have the power to stir their
torpid imaginations. Their hopes and fears
are of the narrowest description. Their
domestic affections are feeble, and they have
no others. They think of any commerce
with their species but as a means, never as an
end, and as a means to the basest forms of
personal advantage.

If this aristocracy had arisen from a false
and depreciated currency to the exclusion of
the other, its existence would have been
a moral calamity and disgrace, but it would
not have constituted an oppression. But the
hereditary aristocracy who had the political
administration of affairs took the measures
which created this other for purposes pecu-
liarly its own. Those measures were so
contrived as in no manner to diminish the
wealth and power of the contrivers. The
lord does not spare himself one luxury, but
the peasant and artizan are assured of many
necessary J things. To support the system of

are those who are the instruments of the fraud, and the
merchants and the country gentlemen may be excused for
believing that their existence is connected with the per-
manence of the best practicable forms of social order.' —
(Ed.)

1 Shelley first wrote ' assured of their necessities '. The

nA Philosophical View of Reform 47

social order according to its supposed unavoid-
able constitution, those from whose labour all
those external accommodations which distin-
guish a civilized being from a savage arise,
worked, before the institution of this double
aristocracy, light hours. And of these only
the healthy were compelled to labour, the
efforts of the old, the sick and the immature
being dispensed with, and they maintained by
the labour of the sane, for such is the plain
English of the poor-rates. That labour
procured a competent share of the decencies
of life, and society seemed to extend the
benefits of its institution even to its most
unvalued instrument. Although deprived of
those resources of sentiment and knowledge
which might have been their lot could the
wisdom of the institutions of social forms
have established a system of strict justice, yet
they earned by their labour a competency in
those external materials of life which, and not
the loss of moral and intellectual excellence, is
supposed to be the legitimate object of the
desires and murmurs of the poor. Since the
institution of this double aristocracy, however,
they have often worked not ten but twenty
hours a day. Not that the poor have rigidly
worked twenty hours, but that the worth of
the labour of twenty hours now, in food and

last two words were then crossed out, and above them is
written ' many necessit things \ — (Ed.)

48 <*A Philosophical View of Reform

clothing, is equivalent to the worth of ten
hours then. And because twenty hours can-
not, from the nature of the human frame,
be exacted from those who before performed
ten, the aged and the sickly are compelled
either to work or starve. Children who
were exempted from labour are put in
requisition, and the vigorous promise of the
coming generation blighted by premature
exertion. For fourteen hours' labour, which
they do perforce, they receive — no matter in
what nominal amount — the price of seven.
They eat less bread, wear worse clothes,
are more ignorant, immoral, miserable and
desperate. This then is the condition of the
lowest and largest class, from whose labour
the whole materials of life are wrought, of
which the others are only the receivers or the
consumers. They are more superstitious,
for misery on earth begets a diseased expecta-
tion and panic-stricken faith in miseries be-
yond the grave. c God ', they argue, c rules
this world as well as that ; and assuredly since
his nature is immutable, and his powerful
will unchangeable, he rules them by the same
laws.' The gleams of hope which speak of
Paradise seem like the flames in Milton's hell
only to make darkness visible, and all things
take their colour from what surrounds them.
They become revengeful —

But the condition of all classes of society,

*A ^Philosophical View of %eform 49

excepting those within the privileged pale, TheUr-
is singularly un prosperous, and even they Sency of
experience the reaction of their own short- Re*orm*
sighted tyranny in all those sufferings and
deprivations which are not of a distinctly
physical nature, in the loss of dignity, simpli-
city and energy, and in the possession of all
those qualities which distinguish a slave-driver
from a proprietor. Right government being
an institution for the purpose of securing
such a moderate degree of happiness to men
as has been experimentally practicable, the
sure character of misgovern men t is misery,
and first discontent and, if that be despised,
then insurrection, as the legitimate expression
of that misery. The public right to demand
happiness is a principle of nature ; the
labouring classes, when they cannot get food
for their labour, are impelled to take it by
force. Laws and assemblies and courts of
justice and delegated powers placed in balance
and in opposition are the means and the form,
but public happiness is the substance and the
end of political institutions. Whenever this
is attainted in a nation, not from external
force, but from the internal arrangement and
divisions of the common burthens of defence
and maintenance, then there is oppression.
And then arises an alternative between Reform,
or the institution of a military Despotism, or
a Revolution in which parties, one striving

H

50 (±A Philosophical View of ^ form

after ill-digested systems of democracy, and

the other clinging to the outworn abuses of

power, leave the few who aspire to more than

the former and who would overthrow the

latter at whatever expense, to waiter1 that

modified advantage which, with the temperance

and the toleration which both regard as a

crime, might have resulted from the occasion

which they let pass in a far more signal

manner.

The con- The propositions which are the consequences

dition of or the corollaries of the preceding reasoning,

England. and to which it seems to have conducted

us are : —

— That the majority of the people of Eng-
land are destitute and miserable, ill-clothed,
ill-fed, ill-educated.

— That they know this, and that they are
impatient to procure a reform of the cause of
this abject and wretched state.

— That the cause of this misery is the un-
equal distribution which, under the form of
the national debt, has been surreptitiously made
of the products of their labour and the products
of the labour of their ancestors ; for all
property is the produce of labour.

— That the cause of that cause is a defect in
the government,

1 Shelley wrote ' until ' instead of 5 for ', but finished
his sentence confusedly without providing a verb for
* advantage \ — (Ed.)

aA Philosophical View of Reform 5 1

— That if they knew nothing of their condi-
tion, but believed that all they endured and all
they were deprived of arose from the unavoid-
able conditions of human life, this belief being
an error, and one the endurance of which
enforces an injustice, every enlightened and
honourable person, whatever may be the
imagined interest of his peculiar class, ought
to excite them to the discovery of the true
state of the case, and to the temperate but
irresistible vindication of their rights.

A Reform in England is most just and The Mal-
necessary. What ought to be that reform ? thusian

A writer of the present day (a priest of Falacy-
course, for his doctrines are those of a eunuch
and of a tyrant) has stated that the evils of
the poor arise from an excess of population,
and after they have been stript naked by the
tax-gatherer and reduced to bread and tea
and fourteen hours of hard labour by their
masters, and after the frost has bitten their
defenceless limbs, and the cramp has wrung
like a disease within their bones, and hunger
and the suppressed revenge of hunger has
stamped the ferocity of want like the mark of
Cain upon their countenance, that the last tie
by which Nature holds them to the benignant
earth whose plenty is garnered up in the
strongholds of their tyrants, is to be divided ;
that the single alleviation of their sufferings

52 zA ^Philosophical View of Reform

and their scorns, the one thing which made it
impossible to degrade them below the beasts,
which amid all their crimes and miseries
yet separated a cynical and unmanly con-
tamination, an anti-social cruelty, from all the
soothing, elevating and harmonious gentleness
of the sexual intercourse and the humaniz-
ing charities of domestic life which are its
appendages — that this is to be obliterated.
They are required to abstain from marrying
under penalty of starvation. And it is threat-
ened to deprive them of that property which
is as strictly their birthright as a gentleman's
land is his birthright, without giving them
any compensation but the insulting advice to
conquer, with minds undisciplined in the
habits of higher gratification, a propensity
which persons of the most consummate
wisdom have been unable to resist, and which
it is difficult to admire a person for having
resisted. The doctrine of this writer is that
the principle of population, when under no
dominion of moral restraint, is outstripping
the sustenance produced by the labour of man,
and that not in proportion to the number of
inhabitants, but operating equally in a thinly
peopled community as in one where the
population is enormous, being not a preven-
tion but a check. So far a man might have
been conducted by a train of reasoning which,
though it may be shown to be defective,

*A ^Philosophical View of Reform 5 3

would argue in the reasoner no selfish or
slavish feelings. But he has the hardened
insolence to propose as a remedy that the
poor should be compelled (for what except
compulsion is a threat of the confiscation of
those funds which by the institutions of their
country had been set apart for their sustenance
in sickness or destitution ?) to abstain from
sexual intercourse, while the rich are to be
permitted to add as many mouths to consume
the products of the labours of the poor as they
please. [The rights of all men are intrinsically
and originally equal and they forgo the asser-
tion of all of them only that they may the
more securely enjoy a portion.] If any new
disadvantages are found to attach to the
condition of social existence, those disadvan-
tages ought not to be borne exclusively by
one class of men, nor especially by that class
whose ignorance leads them to exaggerate the
advantages of sensual enjoyment, whose
callous habits render domestic endearments
more important to dispose them to resist the
suggestion to violence and cruelty by which
their situation ever exposes them to be
tempted, and all whose other enjoyments are
limited and few, whilst their sufferings are
various and many. In this sense I cannot
imagine how the advocates of equality could
so readily have conceded that the unlimited
operation of the principle of population affects

54 *<£ ^Philosophical View of Reform

the truth of these theories. On the contrary,
the more heavy and certain are the evils of
life, the more injustice is there in casting the
burden of them exclusively on one order in
the community. They seem to have conceded
it merely because their opponents have inso-
lently assumed it. Surely it is enough that
the rich should possess to the exclusion of the
poor all other luxuries and comforts, and
wisdom and refinement, the least envied but
the most deserving of envy among all their
privileges !
Prelimina- What is the Reform that we desire ? Be-
ries to fore we aspire after theoretical perfection in
Reform. tke amelioration of our political state, it is
necessary that we possess those advantages
which we have been cheated of, and of which
the experience of modern times has proved
that nations even under the present conditions
are susceptible. We would regain these.
We would establish some form of government
which might secure us against such a series
of events as have conducted us to a persua-
sion that the forms according to which it is
now administered are inadequate to that pur-
pose.

We would abolish the national debt.
We would disband the standing army.
We would, with every possible regard to
the existing rights of the holders, abolish sine-
cures.

aA Philosophical View of Reform 5 5

We would, with every possible regard to
the existing interests of the holders, abolish
tithes, and make all religions, all forms of
opinion respecting the origin and govern-
ment of the Universe, equal in the eye of the
law.1

We would make justice cheap, certain and
speedy, and extend the institution of juries to
every possible occasion of jurisprudence.

The national debt was contracted chiefly in Liquida-
two liberticide wars, undertaken by the tion of
privileged classes of the country- the first for f'!ie *?a"

\L ' rr 1 r J • • tional

the ineffectual purpose or tyrannizing over j)e\>tt
one portion of their subjects, the second, in
order to extinguish the resolute spirit of ob-
taining their rights in another. The labour
which this money represents, and that which
is represented by the money wrung for pur-
poses of the same detestable character out of
the people since the commencement of the
American war would, if properly employed,
have covered our land with monuments of
architecture exceeding the sumptuousness and
the beauty of Egypt and Athens ; it might
have made every peasant's cottage, surrounded
with its garden, a little paradise of comfort, .
with every convenience desirable in civilized

1 Shelley does not make it clear whether the tithes were
to be merely abolished, or appropriated by the State. The
yield of tithe rent charge for England and Wales is at
present about £2,800,000. — (Ed.)

5 6 <^4 Philosophical View of T^eform

life ; neat tables and chairs, good beds, and
a collection of useful books ; and our ships
manned by sailors well-paid and well-clothed,
might have kept watch round this glorious
island against the less enlightened nations
which assuredly would have envied, until
they could have imitated, its prosperity.1 But
the labour which is expressed by these sums
has been diverted from these purposes of
human happiness to the promotion of slavery,
and that attempt at dominion, and a great
portion of the sum in question is debt and
must be paid. Is it to remain unpaid for ever,
an eternal rent-charge upon the land from
which the inhabitants of these islands draw
their subsistence ? This were to pronounce
the perpetual institution of two orders of
aristocracy, and men are in a temper to endure
one with some reluctance. Is it to be paid
now ? If so what are the funds, or when
and how is it to be paid ? The fact is that
the national debt is a debt not contracted by
the whole nation towards a portion of it, but
a debt contracted by the whole mass of the
privileged classes towards one particular por-
tion of those classes. If the principal were
paid, the whole property of those who possess

1 This sum could not have amounted to less than two
thousand millions. It would be a curious problem in
political economy to calculate the precise degree of comfort
and of ornament represented by it, — (Author's Note.)

<i/t 'Philosophical View of ^ form 57

property must be valued and the public
creditor, whose property would have been
included in this estimate, satisfied out of the
proceeds. It has been said that all the land
in the nation is mortgaged for the amount of
the national debt. This is a partial statement.
Not only all the land in the nation, but all the
property of whatever denomination, all the
houses and the furniture and the goods and
every article of merchandise, and the property
which is represented by the very money lent
by the fund-holder, who is bound to pay
a certain portion as debtor whilst he is entitled
to receive another certain portion as creditor.
The property of the rich is mortgaged : to
use the language of the law, let the mortgagee
foreclose.

If the principal of this debt were paid,1 it
would be the rich who alone could, and justly
they ought to pay it. It would be a mere
transfer among persons of property. Such
a gentleman must lose a third of his estate,
such a citizen a fourth of his money in the
funds ; the persons who borrowed would have
paid, and the juggling and complicated system
of paper finance be suddenly at an end. As
it is, the interest is chiefly paid by those who
had no hand in the borrowing, and who are

1 After due reductions had been made so as to make an
equal value, taking corn for the standard, be given as was
received. — (Author's Note.)

I

58 id Philosophical View of ^form

sufferers in other respects from the conse-
quences of those transactions in which the
money was spent.

The payment of the principal of what is
called the national debt, which it is pretended
is so difficult a problem, is only difficult to
those who do not see who is the debtor, and
who the creditor, and who the wretched
sufferers from whom they both wring the
taxes which under the form of interest is given
by the former and accepted by the latter.1
It is from the labour of those who have no
property that all the persons who possess
property think to extort the perpetual interest
of a debt, the whole of which the latter know
they could not persuade the former to pay,
but by conspiring with them in an imposture
which makes the third class pay what the first
neither received by their sanction nor spent
for their benefit and what the second never
lent to them. They would both shift from
themselves and their posterity to the labour

1 Shelley inadvertently wrote ' latter ' for * former ' and
vice versa throughout the passage, forgetting apparently
that he named the creditor first and then the debtor. I have
altered the order of ' creditor ' and ' debtor ' to square with
the context. ' Former ' throughout the whole confused
passage means ' debtor ' and ' latter ' ' creditor ', the
labourers being the ' third class \ The argument is that
the wealthy and privileged class who lend money to the
State are practically the same people upon whom both
principal and interest are spent. (Ed.)

aA ^Philosophical View ofcReform 59

of the present and of all succeeding generations
the payment of the interest of their own debt,
because the payment of the principal would
be no more than a compromise and transfer
of property between each other, by which the
nation would be spared 44 millions a year,
which now is paid to maintain in luxury and
indolence the public debtors and to protect
them from the demand of their creditors upon
them, who, being part of the same body, and
owing as debtors whilst they possess a claim
as creditors, agree to abstain from demanding
the principal which they must all unite to pay,
for the sake of receiving an enormous interest
which is principally wrung out of those who
had no concern whatever in the transaction.
One of the first acts of a reformed government
would undoubtedly be an effectual scheme for
compelling these to compromise their debt
between themselves.

When I speak of persons of property I
mean not every man who possesses any right
of property ; I mean the rich. Every man
whose scope in society has a plebeian and
intelligible utility, whose personal exertions
are more valuable to him than his capital ;
every tradesman who is not a monopolist, all
surgeons and physicians, and artists, and
farmers, all those persons whose profits spring
from honourably and honestly exerting their
own skill and wisdom or strength in greater

6o %/$ ^Philosophical View of l^eform

abundance than from the employment or
money to take advantage of their fellow-
citizens' starvation for their profit, are those
who pay, as well as those more obviously
understood by the labouring classes, the in-
terest of the national debt. It is the interest
of all these persons as well as that of the poor
to insist upon the payment of the principal.

For this purpose the form ought to be as
simple and succinct as possible. The opera-
tions deciding who was to pay, at what time,
and how much, and to whom, divested of
financial chicanery, are problems readily to be
determined. The common tribunals may be
invested with legal jurisdiction to award the
proportion due upon the several claim of each.
Property Labour and skill and the immediate wages
Just and 0f laDOur anc} skiU \s a property of the most
njust* sacred and indisputable right, and the founda-
tion of all other property. And the right of
a man1 to property in the exertion of his own
bodily and mental faculties, or on the produce
and free reward from and for that exertion is
the most inalienable of rights.1 If however he
takes by violence and appropriates to himself
through fraudulent cunning, or receives from
another property so acquired, his claim to
that property is of a far inferior force. We
may acquiesce, if we evidently perceive an

1 Struck out in MS. but no alternative phrases pro-
vided.— (Ed.)

%4 ^Philosophical View of 'Reform 6 1

overbalance of public advantage in submission
under this claim ; but if any public emergency
should arise, at which it might be necessary
to satisfy, by a tax on capital, the claims of
a part of the nation by a contribution from
such national resources as may with the least
injustice be appropriated to that purpose,
assuredly it would not be on labour and skill,
the foundation of all property, nor on the
profits and savings of labour and skill, which
are property itself, but on such possessions
which can only be called property in a modified
sense, as have from their magnitude and their
nature an evident origin in violence or im-
posture.

Thus there are two descriptions of property
which, without entering into the subtleties of
a more refined moral theory as applicable to
the existing forms of society, are entitled to
two very different measures of forbearance
and regard. And this forbearance and regard
have by political institutions usually been
accorded by an inverse reason from what is
just and natural. Labour, industry, economy,
skill, genius, or any similar powers honourably
and innocently exerted are the foundations of
one description of property, and all true
political institutions ought to defend every
man in the exercise of his discretion with
respect to property so acquired. Of this
kind is the principal part of the property

62 <zA Philosophical View of ^form

enjoyed by those who are but one degree re-
moved from the class which subsists by daily
labour. [Yet there are instances of persons
in this class who have procured their property
by fraudulent and violent means, as there are
instances in the other of persons who have
acquired their property by innocent or honour-
able exertion. All political science abounds
with limitations and exceptions.] — Property
thus acquired men leave to their children.
Absolute right becomes weakened by descent,
just because it is only to avoid the greater
evil of arbitrarily interfering with the dis-
cretion of every man in matters of property
that the great evil of acknowledging any
person to have an exclusive right to property
who has not created it by his skill or labour
is admitted, and secondly because the mode of
its having been originally acquired is forgotten,
and it is confounded with property acquired
in a very different manner ; and the principle
upon which all property justly exists, after
the great principle of the general advantage,
becomes thus disregarded and misunderstood.
Yet the privilege of disposing of property by
will is one necessarily connected with the exist-
ing forms of domestic life ; and exerted merely
by those who having acquired property by
industry or who preserve it by economy,
would never produce any great and invidious
inequality of fortune. A thousand accidents

vt Philosophical View of Inform 63

would perpetually tend to level the accidental
elevation, and the signs of property would
perpetually recur to those whose deserving
skill might attract or whose labour might
create it.

But there is another species of property
which has its foundation in usurpation, or
imposture, or violence, without which, by the
nature of things, immense possessions of gold
or land could never have been accumulated.
Of this nature is the principal part of the
property enjoyed by the aristocracy and by
the great fundholders, the majority of whose
ancestors never either deserved it by their
skill and talents or acquired and created it by
their personal labour. It could not be that
they deserved it, for if the honourable exertion
of the most glorious and imperial faculties of
our nature had been the criterion of the
possession of property the posterity of Shake-
speare, of Milton, of Hampden, would be the
wealthiest proprietors in England. It could
not be that they acquired it by legitimate in-
dustry, for, besides that the real mode of
acquisition is matter of history, no honourable
profession or honest trade, nor the hereditary
exercise of it, ever in such numerous instances
accumulated so much as the masses of pro-
perty enjoyed by the ruling orders in England.
They were either grants from the feudal
sovereigns whose right to what they granted

64 <tA Philosophical View of ^Reform

was founded upon conquest or oppression,
both a denial of all right ; or they were lands
of the antient Catholic clergy which according
to the most acknowledged principles of public
justice reverted to the nation at their suppres-
sion, or they were the products of patents and
monopolies, an exercise of sovereignty which
it is astonishing that political theorists have
not branded as the most pernicious and odious
to the interests of a commercial nation ;z or
in later times such property has been accu-
mulated by dishonourable cunning and the
taking advantage of a fictitious paper currency
to obtain an unfair power over labour and the
fruits of labour.

Property thus accumulated, being trans-
mitted from father to son, acquires, as pro-
perty of the more legitimate kind loses, force
and sanction, but in a very limited manner.
For not only on an examination and re-
currence to first principles is it seen to have
been founded on a violation of all that to
which the latter owes its sacredness, but it is
felt in its existence and perpetuation as a
public burthen, and known as a rallying point

1 A paragraph which has no apparent connexion with
the text is here intercalated: 'There are three sets of
people, one who can place a thing to another in an intelli-
gible light, another who can understand it when so com-
municated, and a third who can neither discover or
understand it.' — (Ed.)

<*A Philosophical View of cf{eform 65

to the ministers of tyranny, having the pro-
perty of a snowball, gathering as it rolls, and
rolling until it bursts.

The national debt, as has been stated, is The
a debt contracted by a particular class in the ^eJ?ta^e
nation towards a portion of that class. It is ° e u
sufficiently clear that this debt was not con-
tracted for the purpose of the public advantage.
Besides there was no authority in the nation
competent to a measure of this nature. The
usual vindication of national debts is that
they are in an overwhelming measure con-
tracted for the purpose of defence against
a common danger, for the vindication of the
rights and liberties of posterity, and that it is
just that posterity should bear the burthen of
payment. This reasoning is most fallacious.
The history of nations presents us with a
succession of extraordinary emergencies, and
thro their present imperfect organization their
existence is perpetually threatened by new and
unexpected combinations and developments of
foreign or internal force. Imagine a situation
of equal emergency to occur to England as that
which the ruling party assume to have occurred
as their excuse for burthening the nation
with the perpetual payment of £45,000,000
annually. Suppose France, Russia, and
Germany were to enter into a league against
Britain, the one to avenge its injuries, the
second to satisfy its ambition, the third to

K

66 i/t ^Philosophical View of 'Reform

soothe its jealousy. Could the nation bear
£90,000,000 of yearly interest ? must there
be twice as many luxurious and idle persons ?
must the labourer receive for 28 hours' work
what he now receives for 14, what he once
received for seven ? But this argument

Reform What is meant by a Reform of Parliament ?

or Revo- If England were a Republic governed by one
lution. assembly ; if there were no chamber of
hereditary aristocracy which is at once an
actual and a virtual representation of all who
attain through rank or wealth superiority over
their countrymen ; if there were no king who
is as the rallying point of those whose tendency
is at once to gather 2 and to confer that power
which is consolidated at the expense of the
nation, then . . .

The advocates of universal suffrage have
reasoned correctly that no individual who is
governed can be denied a direct share in the
government of his country without supreme
injustice. If one pursues the train of
reasonings which have conducted to this
conclusion, we discover that systems of social
order still more incompatible than universal
suffrage with any reasonable hope of instant
accomplishment appear to be that which should

1 A blank page follows here. — (Ed.)

2 The word 'gather* is struck out but nothing sub-
stituted for it. — (Ed.)

aA Philosophical View of %eform 67

result from a just combination of the elements
of social life. I do not understand why
those reasoners who propose at any price
an immediate appeal to universal suffrage,
because it is that which it is injustice to
withhold, do not insist, on the same ground,
on the immediate abolition, for instance, of
monarchy and aristocracy, and the levelling of
inordinate wealth, and an agrarian distribution,
including the parks and chases of the rich, of
the uncultivated districts of the country. No
doubt the institution of universal suffrage
would by necessary consequence immediately
tend to the temporary abolition of these
forms ; because it is impossible that the
people, having attained the power, should
fail to see, what the demagogues now conceal
from them, the legitimate consequence of the
doctrines through which they had attained it.
A Republic, however just in its principle and
glorious in its object, would through the
violence and sudden change which must
attend it, incur a great risk of being as rapid
in its decline as in its growth. It is better
that they should be instructed in the whole
truth ; that they should see the clear grounds
of their rights, the objects to which they
ought to tend ; and be impressed with the
just persuasion that patience and reason and
endurance are the means of a calm yet irresis-
tible progress. A civil war, which might be

68 <tA Philosophical View of Reform

engendered by the passions attending on this
mode of reform, would confirm in the mass of
the nation those military habits which have
been already introduced by our tyrants, and
with which liberty is incompatible. From
the moment that a man is a soldier, he
becomes a slave. He is taught obedience ;
his will is no longer, which is the most sacred
prerogative of men, guided by his own
judgement. He is taught to despise human
life and human suffering ; this is the universal
distinction of slaves. He is more degraded
than a murderer ; he is like the bloody knife
which has stabbed and feels not : a murderer
we may abhor and despise ; a soldier, is by
profession, beyond abhorrence and below
contempt.

CHAPTER III

PROBABLE MEANS

That the House of Commons should The
reform itself, uninfluenced by any fear that House of
the people would, on their refusal, assume to c°m™ons
itself that office, seems a contradiction. What form#
need of Reform if it expresses the will and
watches over the interests of the public ? And
if, as is sufficiently evident, it despises that
will and neglects that interest, what motives
would incite it to institute a reform which the
aspect of the times renders indeed sufficiently
perilous, but without which there will speedily
be no longer anything in England to dis-
tinguish it from the basest and most abject
community of slaves that ever existed.

One motive \ . .

The great principle of Reform consists in Theory
every individual giving his consent to the of Popular
institution and the continuous existence of the Govern"
social system which is instituted for his
advantage and for the advantage of others in

1 A blank page follows here. — (Ed.)

70 zA ^Philosophical View of Reform

his situation.1 As in a great nation this is
practically impossible, masses of individuals
consent to qualify other individuals, whom
they delegate to superintend their concerns.
These delegates have constitutional authority
to exercise the functions of sovereignty ;
they unite in the highest degree the legislative
and executive functions. A government that
is founded on any other basis is a government
of fraud or force and ought on the first
convenient occasion to be overthrown. The
first principle of political reform is the natural
equality of men, not with relation to their pro-
perty but to their rights. That equality in pos-
sessions which Jesus Christ so passionately
taught is a moral rather than a political truth
and is such as social institutions cannot with-
out mischief inflexibly secure. Morals and
politics can only be considered as portions
of the same science, with relation to a system
of such absolute perfection as Plato and
Rousseau and other reasoners have asserted,
and as Godwin has with irresistible eloquence
systematised and developed. Equality in
possessions must be the last result of the
utmost refinements of civilization ; it is one
of the conditions of that system of society

1 This is impossible in great nations and the most
enlightened theorists have therefore proposed dividing them
into a great multiplicity of federated republics. — (Pencilled
note by the author.)

t4 ^Philosophical View of %eform 7 1

towards which, with whatever hope of ultimate
success, it is our duty to tend. We may and
ought to advert to it as to the elementary
principle, as to the goal, unattainable, perhaps,
by us but which, as it were, we revive in our
posterity to pursue. We derive tranquillity
and courage and grandeur of soul from
contemplating an object which is, because we
will it, and may be, because we hope and
desire it, and must be if succeeding generations
of the enlightened sincerely and earnestly
seek it.

But our present business is with the
difficult and unbending realities of actual life,
and when we have drawn inspiration from
the great object of our hopes it becomes us
with patience and resolution to apply ourselves
to accommodating our theories to immediate
practice.

That Representative Assembly called the The First
House of Commons ought questionless to be Step to
immediately nominated by the great mass of Reform»
the people. The aristocracy and those who
unite in their own persons the vast privileges
conferred by the possession of inordinate
wealth are sufficiently represented by the
House of Peers and by the King. Those
theorists who admire and would put into
action the mechanism of what is called the
British Constitution would acquiesce in this
view of the question. For if the House of

yz <tA ^Philosophical View of l^eform

Peers be a permanent representation of the
privileged classes, if the regal power be
no more than another form, and a form
still more advisedly to be so regarded, of
the same representation, whilst the House of
Commons is not chosen by the mass of the
population, what becomes of that democratic
element upon the presence of which it has
been supposed that the waning superiority
of England over the surrounding nations has
depended ?
Universal Any sudden attempt at universal suffrage
Suffrage, would produce an immature attempt at a
Republic. It is better that an object so
inexpressibly great and sacred should never
have been attempted than that it should be
attempted and fail. It is no prejudice to the
ultimate establishment of the boldest political
innovations that we temporize so that when
they shall be accomplished they may be ren-
dered permanent.

Considering the population of Great
Britain and Ireland as twenty millions and
the representative assembly as five hundred,
each member ought to be the expression of
the will of 40,000 persons ; of these two- thirds
would consist of women and children and
persons under age ; the actual number of
voters therefore for each member would be
1 3,333. The whole extent of the empire might
be divided into five hundred electoral depart-

*A ^Philosophical View of cR^form 73

ments or parishes, and the inhabitants assemble
on a certain day to exercise their rights of
suffrage.

Mr. Bentham and other writers have Female
urged the admission of females to the right Suffrage.
of suffrage ; this attempt seems somewhat
immature. Should my opinion be the result
of despondency, the writer of these pages
would be the last to withhold his vote from
any system which might tend to an equal
and full development of the capacities of all
living beings.

The system of voting by ballot which some Objec-
reasoners have recommended is attended with tionstothe
obvious inconveniences. It withdraws the ^a^ot-
elector from the eye of his country, and his
neighbours, and permits him to conceal the
motives of his vote, which, if concealed,
cannot but be dishonourable ; when, if he had
known that he had to render a public account
of his conduct, he would never have permitted
them to guide him. There is in this system
of voting by ballot and of electing a member of
the Representative Assembly as a churchwarden
is elected something too mechanical. The
elector and the elected ought to meet one
another face to face, and interchange the
meanings of actual presence and share some
common impulses, and, in a degree, under-
stand each other. There ought to be the
common sympathy of the excitements of a

L

74 &( Philosophical View of Reform

popular assembly among the electors them-
selves. The imagination would thus be
strongly excited and a mass of generous and
enlarged and popular sentiments be awakened,
which would give the vitality of . . .

That republican boldness of censuring and
judging one another which has indeed existed
in England under the title of' public opinion ',
though perverted from its true uses into an
instrument of prejudice and calumny, would
then be applied to its genuine purpose. Year
by year the people would become more sus-
ceptible of assuming forms of government
more simple and beneficial.

It is in this publicity of the exercise of
sovereignty that the difference between the
republics of Greece and the monarchies of
Asia consisted.
The crisis If the existing government shall compel the
ofMon- nation to take the task of reform into its
archy. own hands, one of the most obvious con-
sequences of such a circumstance would be the
abolition of monarchy and aristocracy. Why,
it will then be argued, if the subsisting con-
dition of social forms is to be thrown into
confusion, should these things be endured ?
Is it because we think that an hereditary king
is cheaper and wiser than an elected President,
or a House of Lords and a Bench of Bishops
an institution modelled by the wisdom of the
most refined and civilized periods, beyond

aA Philosophical View of Reform 75

which the wit of mortal man can furnish
nothing more perfect ? In case the subsisting
Government should compel the people to
revolt to establish a representative assembly
in defiance of them, and to assume in that
assembly an attitude of resistance and defence,
this question would probably be answered in
a very summary manner. No friend of man-
kind and of his country can desire that such
a crisis should suddenly arrive ; but still less,
once having arrived, can he hesitate under
what banner to array his person and his power.
At the peace, Europe would have been con-
tented with strict economy and severe retrench-
ment, and some direct and intelligible plan
for producing that equilibrium between the
capitalists and the landholders which is de-
risively styled the payment of the national
debt : had this system been adopted, they
probably would have refrained from exact-
ing Parliamentary Reform, the only secure
guarantee that it would have been pursued.
Two years ago it might still have been
possible to have commenced a system of
gradual reform. The people were then in-
sulted, tempted and betrayed, and the peti-
tions of a million of men rejected with disdain.
Now they are more miserable, more hopeless,
more impatient of their misery. Above all,
they have become more universally aware of
the true sources of their misery. It is

y6 td Philosophical View of <r%eform

possible that the period of conciliation is past,
and that after having played with the confi-
dence and cheated the expectations of the
people, their passions will be too little under
discipline to allow them to wait the slow,
gradual and certain operation of such a Reform
as we can imagine the constituted authorities
to concede.
Gradual Upon the issue of this question depends

Reform. the Species 0f reform which a philosophical
mind should regard with approbation. If
Reform shall be begun by this existing
government, let us be contented with a
limited beginning, with any whatsoever open-
ing ; let the rotten boroughs be disfran-
chised and their rights transferred to the
unenfranchised cities and districts of the
nation ; it is no matter how slow, gradual and
cautious be the change ; we shall demand
more and more with firmness and moderation,
never anticipating but never deferring the
moment of successful opposition, so that the
people may become habituated to exercising
the functions of sovereignty, in proportion
as they acquire the possession of it. If this
reform could begin from within the Houses
of Parliament, as constituted at present, it
appears to me that what is called moderate
reform, that is a suffrage whose qualification
should be the possession of a certain small pro-
perty, and triennial parliaments, would be

vt ^Philosophical View of 'Reform yy

a system in which for the sake of obtaining
without bloodshed or confusion ulterior im-
provements of a more important character, all
reformers ought to acquiesce. Not that such
are first principles, or that they would pro-
duce a system of perfect social institutions or
one approaching to such. But nothing is more
idle than to reject a limited benefit because we
cannot without great sacrifices obtain an un-
limited one. We might thus reject a Repre-
sentative Republic, if it were obtainable, on
the plea that the imagination of man can
conceive of something more absolutely per-
fect. Towards whatever we regard as perfect,
undoubtedly it is no less our duty than it is
our nature to press forward ; this is the
generous enthusiasm which accomplishes not
indeed the consummation after which it
aspires, but one which approaches it in a degree
far nearer than if the whole powers had not
been developed by a delusion. — It is in politics
rather than in religion that faith is meri-
torious.

If the Houses of Parliament obstinately If Reform
and perpetually refuse to concede any reform be de"
to the people, my vote is for universal suf-
frage and equal representation. But, it is
asked, how shall this be accomplished in defi-
ance of and in opposition to the constituted
authorities of the nation, they who possess
whether with or without its consent the com-

78 aA ^Philosophical View of ^Rgform

mand of a standing army and of a legion of spies
and police officers, and hold the strings of that
complicated mechanism with which the hopes
and fears of men are moved like puppets ?
They would disperse any assembly really
chosen by the people, they would shoot and
hew down any multitude, without regard to
sex or age, as the Jews did the Canaanites,
which might be collected in its defence, they
would calumniate, imprison, starve, ruin and
expatriate every person who wrote or acted or
thought or might be suspected to think against
them ; misery and extermination would fill
the country from one end to another.

This question I would answer by another.

Will you endure to pay the half of your
earnings to maintain in luxury and idleness
the confederation of your tyrants as the
reward of a successful conspiracy to defraud
and oppress you ? Will you make your
tame cowardice and the branding record of it
the everlasting inheritance of your posterity ?
Not only this, but will you render by your
torpid endurance this condition of things as
permanent as the system of caste in India, by
which the same horrible injustice is per-
petrated under another form ?

Assuredly no Englishmen by whom these
propositions are understood will answer in the
affirmative ; and the opposite side of the
alternative remains.

(tA ^Philosophical View of (%eform 79

When the majority in any nation arrive at a
conviction that it is their duty and their interest
to divest the minority of a power employed
to their disadvantage, and the minority are
sufficiently mistaken as to believe that their
superiority is tenable, a struggle must ensue.

If the majority are enlightened, united, im-
pelled by a uniform enthusiasm and animated
by a distinct and powerful appreciation of their
object, and feel confidence in their undoubted
power — the struggle is merely nominal. The
minority perceive the approaches of the
development of an irresistible force, by the
influence of the public opinion of their weak-
ness, on those political forms of which no
government but an absolute despotism is
devoid. They divest themselves of their
usurped distinctions ; the public tranquillity
is not disturbed by the revolution.

But these conditions may only be imper- The
fectly fulfilled by the state of a people grossly Organiza-
oppressed and impotent to cast off the load. ^°° of
Their enthusiasm may have been subdued by e orm*
the killing weight of toil and sufFering ; they
may be panic-stricken and disunited by their
oppressors, and the demagogues, the influence
of fraud may have been sufficient to weaken
the union of classes which compose them by
suggesting jealousies, and the position of the
conspirators, although it is to be forced by
repeated assaults, may be tenable until the

80 vt ^Philosophical View of cR^eform

siege can be vigorously urged. The true
patriot will endeavour to enlighten and to
unite the nation and animate it with enthu-
siasm and confidence. For this purpose he
will be indefatigable in promulgating political
truth. He will endeavour to rally round one
standard the divided friends of liberty, and
make them forget the subordinate objects
with regard to which they differ by appealing
to that respecting which they are all agreed.
He will promote such open confederation
among men of principle and spirit as may tend
to make their intentions and their efforts con-
verge to a common centre. He will discourage
all secret associations, which have a tendency,
by making the nation's will develop itself in
a partial and premature manner, to cause
tumult and confusion. He will urge the
necessity of exciting the people frequently to
exercise their right of assembling, in such
limited numbers as that all present may be
actual parties to the proceedings of the day.
Lastly, if circumstances had collected a con-
siderable number as at Manchester z on the
memorable 16th of August, if the tyrants
command the troops to fire upon them or cut
them down unless they disperse, he will
exhort them peaceably to defy the danger,
and to expect without resistance the onset of
the cavalry, and wait with folded arms the

1 Referring to the \ Peterloo ' massacre of 1 819. — (Ed.)

aA ^Philosophical View of Reform 8 1

event of the fire of the artillery and receive
with unshrinking bosoms the bayonets of the
charging battalions. Men are every day
persuaded to incur greater perils for a less
manifest advantage. And this, not because
active resistance is not justifiable when all
other means shall have failed, but because in
this instance temperance and courage would
produce greater advantages than the most
decisive victory. In the first place, the
soldiers are men and Englishmen, and it is
not to be believed that they would massacre
an unresisting multitude of their countrymen
drawn up in unarmed array before them, and
bearing in their looks the calm, deliberate
resolution to perish rather than abandon the
assertion of their rights. In the confusion of
flight the ideas of the soldier become confused,
and he massacres those who fly from him by
the instinct of his trade. In the struggles of
conflict and resistance he is irritated by a
sense of his own danger, he is flattered by
an apprehension of his own magnanimity in
incurring it, he considers the blood of his
countrymen at once the price of his valour,
the pledge of his security. He applauds
himself by reflecting that these base and dis-
honourable motives will gain him credit among
his comrades and his officers who are animated
by the same. But if he should observe
neither resistance nor flight he would be

M

82 <zA Philosophical View of %eform

reduced to confusion and indecision. Thus
far, his ideas were governed by the same law
as those of a dog who chases a flock of sheep
to the corner of a field, and keeps aloof when
they make a parade of resistance. But the
soldier is a man and an Englishman. This
unexpected reception would probably throw
him back upon a recollection of the true
nature of the measures of which he was made
the instrument, and the enemy might be con-
verted into the ally.

The patriot will be foremost to publish the
boldest truths in the most fearless manner,
yet without the slightest tincture of personal
malignity. He would encourage all others to
the same efforts and assist them to the utmost
of his power with the resources both of his
intellect and fortune. He would call upon
them to despise imprisonment and persecution
and lose no opportunity of bringing public
opinion and the power of the tyrants into
circumstances of perpetual contest and oppo-
sition.
The All might however be ineffectual to pro-

Danger of duce so uniform an impulse of the national
Quietism. wiU as to preclude a further struggle. The
strongest argument, perhaps, for the necessity
of Reform, is the inoperative and unconscious
abjectness to which the purposes of a con-
siderable mass of the people are reduced.
They neither know nor care — They are sink-

%4 Philosophical View of ^Reform 83

ing into a resemblance with the Hindoos and
the Chinese, who were once men as they are.
Unless the cause which renders them passive
subjects instead of active citizens be removed,
they will sink with accelerated gradations into
that barbaric and unnatural civilization which
destroys all the differences among men. It is
in vain to exhort us to wait until all men shall
desire Freedom whose real interest will con-
sist in its establishment. It is in vain to
hope to enlighten them whilst their tyrants
employ the utmost artifices of all their com-
plicated engine to perpetuate the infection of
every species of fanaticism and error from
generation to generation. The advocates of
Reform ought indeed to leave no effort un-
exerted, and they ought to be indefatigable
in exciting all men to examine.

But if they wait until those neutral politi-
cians whose opinions represent the actions of
this class are persuaded that some effectual
reform is necessary, the occasion will have
passed or will never arrive, and the people will
have exhausted their strength in ineffectual
expectation and will have sunk into incurable
supineness. It was principally the effect of a,
similar quietism that the populous and exten-
sive nations of Asia have fallen into their
existing decrepitude ; and that anarchy, in-
security, ignorance and barbarism, the symp-
toms of the confirmed disease of monarchy,

84 v$ ^Philosophical View of ^E^eform

have reduced nations of the most delicate
physical and intellectual organization and
under the most fortunate climates of the
globe to a blank in the history of man.1
P*e The reasoners who incline to* the opinion

pectreo tkat ^ .g nQt sufgc;ent g^gg tne innovators

should produce a majority in the nation, but
that we ought to expect such an unanimity
as would preclude anything amounting to a
serious dispute, are prompted to this view of
the question by the dread of anarchy and
massacre. Infinite and inestimable calamities
belong to oppression, but the most fatal of
them all is that mine of unexploded mischief3
which it has practiced 4 beneath the foundations
of society, and with which, c pernicious to one
touch ' s it threatens to involve the ruin of the

1 Shelley was not better informed about the East than
most Europeans of his day. The philosophy and the art
of India, China, and Japan have, in spite of their des-
potisms, contributed a wonderful chapter to the spiritual
history of mankind. — (Ed.)

2 Crossed out in the MS. but no substitute provided.
-(Ed.)

3 Crossed out, and ' calamity ' substituted, but the latter
was also crossed out, and the intention was apparently to
revert to \ mischief. — (Ed.)

4 ' Practiced ' is an odd word. We should have expected
'planted'; but Shelley perhaps had in his mind the
Elizabethan sense of the verb to ' practice ', meaning to do
something treacherous and malignant. — (Ed.)

5 ' Pernicious to one touch ' is a reminiscence of Milton's
lines in Paradise Lost, Book VI :

tA ^Philosophical View of Reform 85

entire building together with its own. But
delay merely renders this mischief more tre-
mendous, not the less inevitable. For the
utmost may now be the crisis of the social
disease which is rendered thus periodical,
chronic and incurable.1

The savage brutality of the populace is
proportioned to the arbitrary character of their
government, and tumults and insurrections
soon, as in Constantinople, become consistent
with the permanence of the causing evil, of
which they might have been the critical deter-
mination.

The public opinion in England ought first Methods
to be excited to action, and the durability of of Agita-
those forms within which the oppressors en- tlon-
trench themselves brought perpetually to the
test of its operation. No law or institution
can last if this opinion be decisively pro-
nounced against it. For this purpose govern-
ment ought to be defied, in cases of question-
able result, to prosecute for political libel. All
questions relating to the jurisdiction of magis-
trates and courts of law respecting which any

. . . Part incentive reed
Provide, pernicious with one touch to fire
referring to the artillery of the rebel angels. — (Ed.)

1 This sentence, which is interlined in the text, seems
obscure in form, but the intention is clearly to represent the
'crisis', i.e. the explosion of the mischief, as better than
a disease made chronic by delay in treatment. For the
word 'utmost' Shelley first wrote 'worst'. — (Ed.)

86 <iA Philosophical View of ^forrn

doubt could be raised ought to be agitated
with indefatigable pertinacity. Some two or
three of the popular leaders have shown the
best spirit in this respect ; they only want
system and co-operation. The taxgatherer
ought to be compelled in every practicable
instance to distrain, whilst the right to impose
taxes, as was the case in the beginning of
the resistance to the tyranny of Charles I
is formally contested by an overwhelming
multitude of defendants before the courts of
common law. Confound the subtlety of
lawyers with the subtlety of the law. The
nation would thus be excited to develop itself,
and to declare whether it acquiesced in the
existing forms of government. The manner
in which all questions of this nature might
be decided would develop the occasions, and
afford a prognostic as to the success, of more
decisive measures. Simultaneously with this
active and vigilant system of opposition,
means ought to be taken of solemnly con-
veying the sense of large bodies and various
denominations of the people in a manner the
most explicit to the existing depositaries of
power. Petitions, couched in the actual
language of the petitioners, and emanating
from distinct assemblies, ought to load the
tables of the House of Commons. The poets,
philosophers and artists ought to remonstrate,
and the memorials entitled their petitions

aA Philosophical View of %e form 87

might shew the universal conviction they
entertain of the inevitable connection between
national prosperity and freedom, and the
cultivation of the imagination and the cultiva-
tion of scientific truth, and the profound
development of moral and metaphysical en-
quiry. Suppose the memorials to be severally
written by Godwin, Hazlitt and Bentham and
Hunt, they would be worthy of the age and
of the cause ; radiant and irresistible like the
meridian sun they would strike all but the
eagles who dared to gaze upon its beams
with blindness and confusion. These appeals
of solemn and emphatic argument from those
who have already a predestined existence
among posterity, would appal the enemies of
mankind by their echoes from every corner
of the world in which the majestic literature
of England is cultivated ; it would be like a
voice from beyond the dead of those who will
live in the memories of men, when they must
be forgotten ; it would be Eternity warning
Time.

Let us hope that at this stage of the pro-
gress of Reform, the oppressors would feel
their impotence and reluctantly and imper-
fectly concede some limited portion of the
rights of the people, and disgorge some
morsels of their undigested prey. In this
case, the people ought to be exhorted by
everything ultimately dear to them to pause

88 vt ^Philosophical View of Reform

until by the exercise of those rights which
they have regained they become fitted to
demand more. It is better that we gain what
we demand by a process of negociation which
should occupy twenty years than that by
communicating a sudden shock to the interests
of those who are the depositaries and depen-
dents of power we should incur the calamity
which their revenge might inflict upon us by
giving the signal of civil war. If, after all,
they consider the chance of personal ruin, and
the infamy of figuring on the page of history
as the promoters of civil war preferable to
resigning any portion how small soever of their
usurped authority, we are to recollect that we
possess a right beyond remonstrance. It has
been acknowledged by the most approved
writers on the English constitution, which has
in this instance been merely a declaration of
the superior decisions of eternal justice, that
we possess a right of resistance. The claim
of the reigning family is founded upon a
memorable exertion of this solemnly recorded
right.
Insurrec- The last resort of resistance is undoubtedly
tion. insurrection. The right of insurrection is

derived from the employment of armed force
to counteract the will of the nation. Let the
government disband the standing army, and
the purpose of resistance would be sufficiently
fulfilled by the incessant agitation of the

t*f Philosophical View of Inform 89

points of dispute before the courts of common
law, and by an unwarlike display of the irresis-
tible number and union of the people.

Before we enter into a consideration of the
measures which might terminate in civil war,
let us for a moment consider the nature and
the consequences of war. This is the alterna-
tive which the unprincipled cunning of the
tyrants has presented to us, and which we
must not shun. There is secret sympathy
between Destruction and Power, between
Monarchy and War ; and the long experience
of all the history of all recorded time teaches
us with what success they have played into
each other's hands. War is a kind of super-
stition ; the pageantry of arms and badges
corrupts the imagination of men. How far
more appropriate would be the symbols of
an inconsolable grief — muffled drums, and
melancholy music, and arms reversed, and
the livery of sorrow rather than of blood.
When men mourn at funerals for what do
they mourn in comparison with the calamities
which they hasten with every circumstance of
festivity to suffer and to inflict ! Visit in
imagination the scene of a field of battle or a
city taken by assault, collect into one group the
groans and the distortions of the innumerable
dying, the inconsolable grief and horror of
their surviving friends, the hellish exultation
and unnatural drunkenness of destruction of

90 d4 ^Philosophical View of Reform

the conquerors, the burning of the harvests
and the obliteration of the traces of cultiva-
tion— to this, in a civil war, is to be added
the sudden disruption of the bonds of social
life, and € father against son \

If there had never been war, there could
never have been tyranny in the world ; tyrants
take advantage of the mechanical organization
of armies to establish and defend their en-
croachments. It is thus that the mighty
advantages of the French Revolution have
been almost compensated by a succession of
tyrants (for demagogues, oligarchies, usurpers
and legitimate kings are merely varieties of the
same class) from Robespierre to Louis XVIII.
War, waged from whatever motive, extin-
guishes the sentiment of reason and jus-
tice in the mind. The motive is forgotten,
or only adverted to in a mechanical and
habitual manner. A sentiment of confidence
in brute force and in a contempt of death and
danger is considered the highest virtue, when
in truth, and however indispensable, they are
merely the means and the instrument, highly
capable of being perverted to destroy the
cause they were assumed to promote. It is
a foppery the most intolerable to an amiable
and philosophical mind. It is like what some
reasoners have observed of religious faith ; no
fallacious and indirect motive to action can
subsist in the mind without weakening the

zA ^Philosophical View of cReform 9 1

effect of those which are genuine and true.
The person who thinks it virtuous to believe,
will think a less degree of virtue attaches to
good actions than if he had considered it as
indifferent. The person who has been ac-
customed to subdue men by force will be less
inclined to the trouble of convincing or per-
suading them.

These brief considerations suffice to show
that the true friend of mankind and of his
country would hesitate before he recom-
mended measures which tend to bring down
so heavy a calamity as war.

I imagine however that before the English
Nation shall arrive at that point of moral and
political degradation now occupied by the
Chinese, it will be necessary to appeal to an
exertion of physical strength. If the madness
of parties admits no other mode of deter-
mining the question at issue,1 . . .

When the people shall have obtained, by After the
whatever means, the victory over their op- Victory,
pressors and when persons appointed by them
shall have taken their seats in the Represen-
tative Assembly of the nation, and assumed
the control of public afrairs according to con-
stitutional rules, there will remain the great
task of accommodating all that can be preserved

1 Two blank pages follow this unfinished sentence.
-(Ed.)

92 ad 'Philosophical View of Reform

of antient forms with the improvements of
the knowledge of a more enlightened age, in
legislation, jurisprudence, government and
religious and academical institutions. The
settlement of the national debt is on the prin-
ciples before elucidated merely an arrangement
of form, and however necessary and important
is an afrair of mere arithmetical proportions
readily determined ; nor can I see how those
who, being deprived of their unjust advantages,
will probably inwardly murmur, can oppose
one word of open expostulation to a measure
of such irrefragable justice.
Revenge There is one thing which certain vulgar
demned agitators endeavour to flatter the most unedu-
cated part of the people by assiduously pro-
posing, which they ought not to do nor to
require ; and that is Retribution. Men having
been injured, desire to injure in return. This
is falsely called an universal law of human
nature ; it is a law from which many are
exempt, and all in proportion to their virtue
and cultivation. The savage is more revenge-
ful than the civilized man, the ignorant and
uneducated than the person of a refined and
cultivated intellect ; the generous and . . .

END OF MS.

APPENDIX

Besides the ' Philosophical View of Reform ' this MS.
contains some other matter of interest to students of Shelley.
On one page, otherwise blank, appear the words

On the punishment of Death

showing that Shelley contemplated an essay on that subject.

There are also three scraps of poetry, which are
identifiable as jottings for passages in ' Prometheus
Unbound ', Act iv, viz.

0 6° 6"

The joy, the triumph, the delight and madness
Boundless and gladness,

Glory and transport not to be contained.
Ha! ha! 'tis life,' Us

[The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness !
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined !
Ha ! ha ! the animation of delight. . . ,

P. U.]

And like a wind bursting its rocky prison

With earthquake and with lightning it has risen.

[And like a storm bursting its cloudy prison
With thunder and with whirlwind has arisen
Out of the lampless caves. . . .

P. U.]

The unquiet Republic of the spheres

Of ever wandering planets, whom

The great Sun rules as with a tyrant gaze

94 Appendix

[As the sun rules, even with a tyrant's gaze,
The unquiet republic of the maze
Of planets struggling fierce towards heaven's free
wilderness.

P.U.]

Another page contains the interesting Note on the
composition of the Ode to the West Wind which is attached
to that poem in Mrs. Shelley's edition. The text is the
same as the printed version, except that the MS. reads
1 attended with that magnificent thunder . . . ' instead of
1 attended by . . . '

There are also a few rough sketches, including several
of boats, and one of a group of buildings of oriental
character embowered in foliage.

On pp. 60-65 °f tne s Philosophical View* Shelley
strongly urges a measure which has also been strongly
urged, though not yet found practicable, in the present day —
the confiscation for the needs of the State of fortunes
acquired by unworthy or extortionate methods. It is
interesting to note that he treated the same subject in
a fragment gleaned by Mrs. Shelley from his relics of
unpublished verse :

What men gain fairly — that they should possess,

And children may inherit idleness,

From him who earns it — This is understood ;

Private injustice may be general good.

But he who gains by base and armed wrong,

Or guilty fraud, or base compliances,

May be despoiled ; even as a stolen dress

Is stript from a convicted thief, and he

Left in the nakedness of infamy.

Frag. xvih.