“Dear Sir,—I thank you most sincerely for the kindness of your letter. Human creatures, living in the circle of their intimates and friends, are too apt to remain in ignorance of the comments and instructions which may be made of what they say and do in the world at large. I entertain a great horror of this ignorance. I do not love to be deceived, and to spend my days in a scene of delusions and chimera. I feel it is an act of unequivocal friendship that you have thus communicated to me a fact in which I must hold myself interested, though you deemed the communication to be ungracious.
“Good God! and so you heard me gravely represented in
a large company yesterday as an advocate of infanticide. I have been so much
accustomed to be the object of misrepresentation
| REFUTATION OF CALUMNIES. | 73 |
“They build the accusation, it seems, upon a few pages in my ‘Reply to Dr Parr,’ where I am considering the hypothesis of the author of the Essay on Population. They eagerly confound two things so utterly dissimilar as hypothetical reasoning upon a state of society never yet realized, and the sentiments and feelings which I, and every one whom it is possible for me to love or respect, must carry with us into the society and the transactions in which we are personally engaged. Because I have spoken of a certain practice, prevailing in distant ages and countries, which I deprecate, and respecting which I aver my entire persuasion, that in no improved state of society will it ever be necessary to have recourse to it, they represent me as the recommender and admirer of this practice: as a man who is eager to persuade every woman who, under unfortunate and opprobrious circumstances, becomes a mother, to be the murderer of her own child.
“Really, my friend, I am somewhat at a loss whether to laugh at the impudence of this accusation, or to be indignant at the brutal atrocity and the eager sentiment of persecution it argues in the man who uttered it. I see that there is a settled and systematical plan in certain persons to render me an object of horror and aversion to my fellow-men: they think that when they have done this they will have sufficiently overthrown my arguments. Their project excites in me no horror. As the attack is a personal one, it is only by a retrospect to my individual self it can be answered.
“I say then to my own heart, and I will resolve to
say to you, that in spite of the machinations of these persons, there will
always remain some man in the world who will read my writings, as long as my
writings shall be thought worthy of curiosity or dis-
| 74 | WILLIAM GODWIN |
“This, I think, is all the answer to which such an accusation as the one you mention is entitled. It is too monstrous to suppose that a man of my turn of mind can be the advocate of an unnatural disposition, the inciter and persuader of acts of horrible enormity. I would cherish and encourage in the minds of every father and every mother the sentiment of that relation, as the most sacred band of human society. I would not willingly disturb or diminish, by one single atom, those impulses which so irresistibly and imperiously guide every well constituted mind under the circumstance of this relation. My literary labours for ten years have been solely directed to the melioration of human society, and prompted by an anxiety for human happiness. Let, then, these men go on in their despicable task of misrepresentation and calumny. Let them endeavour to represent me as the advocate of everything cruel, assassinating, and inhuman. You and I, my friend, I firmly persuade myself, shall yet live to see whether their malignant artifice, or the simple and unalterable truth, shall prove triumphant.
