For that thy voice in passion's stormy day When wild I roamed the bleak heath of distress Bade the bright form of Justice meet my way, And told me that her name was Happiness.
To us who read Godwin with many a later Utopia in our memories, his most valuable chapters are those which give his penetrating criticisms of existing society. To these young men the excitement was in his picture of a free community from which laws and coercion had been eliminated, and in which property was in a continual flux actuated by the stream of universal benevolence. They resolved to found a community based on Godwinian principles, and to free themselves from the cramping and dwarfing influences of a society ruined by laws and superstitions, they lit on the simple expedient of removing themselves beyond its reach. They lacked the manhood and the simplicity which had turned more prosaic natures into agitators and reformers. It is a tale which every student of literature has delighted to read, how Coleridge and Southey, bent on founding their Pantisocracy, on the banks of the Susquehana, came to Bristol to charter a ship, and while they waited, dimly aware that they lacked funds for the adventure, anchored themselves in English homes by marrying the Fricker sisters.
As one of the comrades, Robert Lovell, quaintly puts it in a letter to Holcroft, "Principle, not plan, is our object." Lovell had visited Holcroft in gaol, and one can well understand how that near view of the fate which awaited the reformer under Pitt, confirmed them in their idea of crossing the Atlantic. "From the writings of William Godwin and yourself," Lovell went on, "our minds have been illuminated; we wish our actions to be guided by the same superior abilities." Holcroft, older and more combative than his poet-disciples, advised the founding of a model colony in this country. But the lure of a distant scene was too attractive. Cottle, the friend and publisher of the Pantisocrats, has left his account of their aims. Theirs was to be "a social colony in which there was to be a community of property and where all that was selfish was to be proscribed." It would realise "a state of society free from the evils and turmoils that then agitated the world, and present an example of the eminence to which men might arrive under the unrestrained influence of sound principles." It would "regenerate the whole complexion of society, and that not by establishing formal laws, but by excluding all the little deteriorating passions, injustice, wrath, anger, clamor, and evil speaking, and thereby setting an example of human perfectibility."