Owen's favourite dogma is worth a moment's notice,He was never tired of repeating that 'character is formed by circumstances';from which he placidly infers that no man deserves praise or blame for his conduct.The inference,it must be admitted,is an awkward one in any ethical system.It represents,probably,Owen's most serious objection to the religions of the world.The ultimate aim of the priest is to save men's souls;and sin means conduct which leads to supernatural punishment.Owen,on the contrary,held that immorality was simply a disease to be cured,and that wrath with the sinner was as much out of place as wrath with a patient.In this sense Owen's view,as I at least should hold,defines the correct starting-point of any social reformer.He has to consider a scientific problem,not to be an agent of a supernatural legislator.He should try to alter the general conditions from which social evils spring,not to deal in pardons or punishment.Owen was acting with thoroughly good sense in his early applications of this principle.The care,for example,which he bestowed upon infant education recognised the fact that social reform implied a thorough training of the individual from his earliest years.Owen's greatest error corresponds to the transformation which this belief underwent in his mind.Since circumstances form character,he seems to have argued,it is only necessary to change the circumstances of a grown-up man to alter his whole disposition.His ambitious scheme in America seemed to suppose that it was enough to bring together a miscellaneous collection of the poor and discontented people,and to invite them all to behave with perfect unselfishness.At present I need only remark that in this respect there was a close coincidence between Owen and the Utilitarians.Both of them really aimed at an improvement of social conditions on a scientific method;and both justified their hopes by the characteristic belief in the indefinite modifiability of human nature by external circumstances.
I turn to a man who was in some ways the most complete antithesis to Owen,William Cobbett (1762-1835),unlike Owen,took a passionate and conspicuous part in the political struggles of the day.Cobbett,declares the Edinburgh Review in July 1807,has more influence than all the other journalists put together.He had won it,as the reviewer thought,by his force of character,although he had changed his politics completely 'within the last six months.'The fact was more significant than was then apparent.Cobbett,son of a labourer who had risen to be a small farmer,had in spite of all obstacles learned to read and write and become a great master of the vernacular.His earliest model had been Swift's Tale of a Tub,and in downright vigour of homely language he could scarcely be surpassed even by the author of the Drapier's Letters.He had enlisted as a soldier,and had afterwards drifted to America.
There he had become conspicuous as a typical John Bull.Sturdy and pugnacious in the highest degree,he had taken the English side in American politics when the great question was whether the new power should be bullied by France or by England.He had denounced his precursor,Paine,in language savouring too much,perhaps,of barrack-rooms,but certainly not wanting in vigour.He defied threats of tar and feathers;put a portrait of George III in his shop-window;and gloried in British victories,and,in his own opinion,kept American policy straight.He had,however,ended by making America too hot to hold him;and came back to declare that republicanism meant the vilest and most corrupt of tyrannies,and that,as an Englishman,he despised all other nations upon earth.He was welcomed on his return by Pitt's government as likely to be a useful journalist,and became the special adherent of Windham,the ideal country-gentleman and the ardent disciple of Burke's principles.He set up an independent paper and heartily supported the war.On the renewal of hostilities in 1803Cobbett wrote a manifesto 101directed by the government to be read in every parish church in the kingdom,in order to rouse popular feeling.When Windham came into office in 1806,Cobbett's friends supposed that his fortune was made,Yet at this very crisis he became a reformer.His conversion was put down,of course,to his resentment at the neglect of ministers.I do not think that Cobbett was a man to whose character one can appeal as a conclusive answer to such charges.Unfortunately he was not free from weaknesses which prevent us from denying that his political course was affected by personal motives.But,in spite of weaknesses and of countless inconsistencies,Cobbett had perfectly genuine convictions and intense sympathies which sufficiently explain his position,and make him more attractive than many less obviously imperfect characters.He tells us unconsciously what were the thoughts suggested to a man penetrated to the core by the strongest prejudices --they can hardly be called opinions --of the true country labourer.