Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/277

This page has been validated.

263

WORDSWORTH'S YOUTH

begun to feel that Godwin's anti-social logic had an embodiment in facts. What he now saw behind it was not Rousseau's sentimentalism, but the harsh doctrinaire system of the economists. The theorists who professed to start from the rights of man were really attacking the essential social duties. Godwinism meant the 'individualism' of the later economists. Individualism meant the reckless competition and race for wealth which were destroying the very framework of peaceful society. The English Radical represented Adam Smith; and Wordsworth now perceived

How dire a thing, Is worshipped in that idol, proudly named The 'Wealth of Nations.'

The evils which now impressed him were the absorption of small freeholds by large estates, and the growth of the factory system in the place of domestic manufacture. He dwells upon these evils in the Excursion in language which gives a foretaste of much modern Socialism. Wordsworth had plenty of allies in this view of the case. While he was renouncing the principle of Individualism, Owen was beginning to put in practice the