“Dear Patrickson,—I take the earliest opportunity to answer your letter, because it requires an answer. I am shocked with the passage in it, where you say you will write to your mother, and tell her you do not wish to hear from her any more.
“Surely a mother is a thing of more worth than this.
The being that watched over you indefatigably in infancy, that had a thousand
anxieties for you, and that reared you with care, and perhaps with difficulty,
is not to be so treated. Your mother is a wrong-headed, not an abandoned woman.
This is the great difference, at least with few exceptions, between one human
creature and another. We all of us endeavour to square our actions by our
conscience, or our conscience by our actions: we examine what we do by the
rule, and pronounce sentence of acquittal or approbation on ourselves: but some
of us are in error, and some enlightened. You and I, who are of course among
the enlightened, should pity those
| 196 | WILLIAM GODWIN |
“I think that you should write to your mother as little as possible, and perhaps for the present ask no favours of her. . . . But to go out of your way to insult her is horrible. . . .
“The ties between one human creature and another are so few in number, and so scanty, as society is at present constituted, that I would not wantonly break any of those that nature has made, and least of all that to a mother. Human creatures are left so much alone, hardly sufficiently aided in the giddiness of youth, and the infirmities of age, that I am sure it is not the part of a wise or a good man to increase this crying evil under the sun. I still hope the time will come when you shall relieve the sorrows of a mother, and when she shall look up to her son with pride and with pleasure. . . .—Your sincere friend,
