While he recognised that man had progressed in the past, he considered history mainly a sequence of horrors, and he was incapable of a calm survey of the course of civilisation.

In English institutions he saw nothing that did not outrage the principles of justice and benevolence.

The present state of humanity is about as bad as it could be.
It is easy to see the deep influence which the teaching of Rousseau exercised on Godwin.

Without accepting the theory of Arcadia Godwin followed him in unsparing condemnation of existing conditions.

Rousseau and Godwin are the two great champions in the eighteenth century of the toiling and suffering masses.