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Pour toute remarque concernant cette édition Internet de
Henry Sidgwick, Bentham and Benthamism in Politics and Ethics,
contacter :
Philippe Bazard , bzd@univ-paris1.fr

[627] In the critical narrative, equally brilliant and erudite, which Mr. Leslie Stephen has given us of the course of English thought in the Eighteenth century, there is one gap which I cannot but regret, in spite of what Mr. Stephen has said in explanation of it. The work of Bentham is treated with somewhat contemptuous brevity in the chapter on Moral Philosophy; while in the following chapter on Political Theories his name is barely mentioned. The present paper is an attempt in some measure to supply this deficiency. I should not have ventured on it if Bentham's teaching had become to us a matter of merely historical interest; as I cannot flatter myself that I possess Mr. Stephen's rare gift of imparting sparkle to the dustheaps of extinct controversy. But no such extinction has yet overtaken Bentham: his system is even an important element of our current political thought; hardly a decade - though an eventful one - has elapsed since it might almost have been called a predominant element. Among the other writers to whom Mr. Stephen has devoted many entertaining pages in his tenth chapter, there is not one of whom this can be said. It would be almost ostentation, in polite society at the present day, to claim familiarity with Bolingbroke; it would be even pedantry to draw attention to Hoadly. The literary sources of the French Revolution are studied with eager and ever-increasing interest; but they are studied, even by Englishmen, almost entirely in the writings of France: the most ardent reader of revolutionary literature is reluctant to decline front Rousseau to Tom Paine. Mr. Kegan Paul's entertaining biography has temporarily revived our interest in Godwin, otherwise Political Justice would be chiefly known to this generation through the refutation of Malthus; and Malthus's own work is now but seldom taken from the shelf. There are probably many schoolboys feeding a nascent taste for rhetoric on the letters of Junius; but Mr. Stephen has felt that the inclusion of these in an account of Political Theories requires something like an apology. Burke lives, no doubt, not merely through the eloquence which immortalises even the details of party conflicts, but through a kind of wisdom, fused of intellect and emotion, which is as essentially independent of the theorising in which it is embedded as metal is of its mine. But though Burke lives, we meet with no Burkites. The star of Hume's metaphysical fame has risen steadily for a century; but his warmest admirers are rather irritated by his predominant desire for [628] literary popularity, and are perhaps too much inclined to turn aside from the philosophic material that was wasted in furnishing elegant essays on National Character and The Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth. In short, of all the writers I have mentioned, regarded as political theorists, it is only the eccentric hermit of Queen's Square Place whose name still carries with it an audible demand that we should reckon with his system, and explain to ourselves why and how far we agree or disagree with his opinions.

Mr. Stephen, it should be said, is so far from denying this exceptional vitality of Benthamism, that he even puts it forward as an explanation of his cursory treatment of this system. "The history of utilitarianism as an active force belongs," he tells us, to the new post-revolutionary era, on the threshold of which his plan compels him to stop. This argument would have been sound if Bentham had really been a man of the nineteenth century, born before his time in the eighteenth, and thus naturally not appreciated till later, when the stream of current thought had at length caught him up. Such freaks of nature do sometimes occur, to the very considerable perplexity of the philosophical historian, in his efforts to exhibit a precise and regular development of opinion. But this is so far from being the case with Bentham, that when J. S. Mill, in his most eclectic phase, undertook to balance his claims as a thinker against those of Coleridge, he described the conflict between these two modes of thought as the "revolt of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth." The appropriateness of the phrase is surely undeniable. No doubt it is also true, as Mr. Stephen says, that Benthamism as an active force-and Benthamism is nothing if it is not an active force-belongs rather to the nineteenth century. It is just because both these views are equally true that Bentham deserves the special attention of the historian of opinion. In England, at least in the department of ethics and politics, Benthamism is the one outcome of the Seculum Rationalisticum against which the philosophy of Restoration and Reaction has had to struggle continually with varying success. It is, we may say, the legacy left to the nineteenth century by the eighteenth; or rather, perhaps, by that innovating and reforming period of the eighteenth century in which Enlightenment became ardent, and strove to consume and re-create. In his most characteristic merits, as well as his most salient defects, Bentham is eminently a representative of this stirring and vehement age: in his unreserved devotion to the grandest and most comprehensive aims, his high and sustained confidence in their attainability, and the buoyant, indefatigable industry with which he sought the means for their attainment; no less than in his exaggerated reliance on his own method, his ignorant contempt for the past, and his intolerant misinterpretation of all that opposed him in the present.

[629] It must be admitted that, though distinctly a child of its age, Benthamism was not exactly a favourite child. The Fragment on Government (1776), and the Principles of Morals and Legislation (published 1789), had found comparatively few sympathising readers at the time when Political Justice and the Rights of Man were being greedily bought. At the age of forty-two (1790) Bentham speaks, in a letter to his brother, of the "slow increase of my school". Yet we observe very clearly that from the first Bentham appears as a teacher and master of political science-one who has, or ought to have, a school "-and is accepted as such by competent judges. In 1778, only two years after the publication. In 1778, only two years after the publication of the Fragment, D'Alembert writes to him in the style of the, time, as a philosopher and professional benefactor of the human race. Two years later he was taken up by Lord Lansdowne, who seems to have had the eager receptivity for abstract theory which is often found in powerful but imperfectly trained intellects, even after the fullest acquisition of all that experience can teach. The retired statesman bore with really admirable, patience the humours of the sensitive and self-conscious philosopher: and in the circle at Bowood Bentham found-besides the one romance of his life-invaluable opportunities for extending his influence as a thinker. It was there that he first met Romilly, the earliest of the baud of reformers who, in the next century, attempted the practical realisation of his principles; and there, too, he laid the foundation of his remarkable ascendency over Dumont The self-devotion with which a man of Dumont's talents and independence of thought allowed himself to be absorbed in the humble function of translating and popularising Bentham was a testimony of admiration outweighing a bushel of complimentary phrases: of which, however, Bentham had no lack, though they came from a somewhat narrow circle. "The suffrages of the few," writes Dumont in one of his earlier letters, 'I will repay you for the indifference of the many . . . . Write and bridle my wandering opinions." Through Dumont he became known to Mirabeau: and a good deal of Benthamite doctrine found its way into that hero's addresses to his constituents, which Dumont assisted in composing. Brissot again, who saw a good deal of Bentham in London, some years before 1789, always spoke and wrote of him with the utmost enthusiasm: to which it may be partly attributed that, in August 1792, a special law of the National Assembly made him (as he tells Wilberforce afterwards) "an adopted French citizen, third man in the universe after a natural one;" Priestley and Paine being the first two. As soon as Dumont published the Principes de la Code Civile et Penale [sic] (1802), expressions of even hyperbolical admiration were sent to the philosopher from different parts of Europe. A Swiss pastor subscribes himself, rather to Bentham's [630] amusement, "un homme heureux, régénéré par la lecture de vos ouvrages." A Russian general writes that his book "fills the soul with peace, the heart with virtue, and dissipates the mists of the mind; " and conjures him to dictate a code to Russia. Another Russian admirer ranks him with Bacon and Newton as the "creator of a new science," and writes that he is "laying up a sum for the purpose of spreading the light which emanates from his writings. Nor is he without similar honour even in his own country. Lord Lansdowne, answering good humouredly a reproachful epistle of sixty pages, says that it is a letter which "Bacon might have sent to Buckingham." In 1793 a gentleman whom he has asked to dinner writes expressing "a woman's eagerness to meet a gentleman of so enlightened a mind." A few years later we find that the great Dr. Parr is never tired of praising his "mighty talents, profound researches, important discoveries, and i

The degree and kind of influence which Bentham exercised in the revolutionary period corresponds tolerably well to the degree of affinity between his teaching and the principles on which the revolutionary movement proceeded. In the combat against prejudices and privileges any ally was welcome; and Bentham was as anxious as any revolutionist to break with the past, and reform all the institutions of society in accordance with pure reason. It is true that, from our point of view, the reason of Bentham appears the perfect antithesis of the reason of Rousseau; but it is very doubtful whether this would have been evident to Rousseau himself. The mainspring of Bentham's life and work, as his French friends saw, was an equal regard for all mankind: whether the precise objects of this regard were conceived as men's "rights" or their "interests," was a question which they would not feel to be of primary concern. He himself, indeed, was always conscious of the gulf that separated him from his fellow-citizens by adoption. "Were they," he writes in 1796, "to see an analysis I have by me of their favourite Declaration of Rights, there is not perhaps a being upon earth that would be less welcome to them than I could ever hope to be." But the "Anarchical Fallacies," like some other fruits of Bentham's labours, remained on the philosopher's shelves till the end of his life; only a meagre fragment of them found its way into Dumont's "Principes;" and by the time that this came out, anarchical theories were somewhat obscured behind military facts. And unless the "principle of utility" explicitly announced itself as hostile to the fundamental [631] principles of the common revolutionary creed, it certainly would not be generally perceived to be so. I should almost conjecture from what Mr. Stephen says of Bentham, compared with the references to utilitarianism in his discussion of earlier writers, that he has hardly enough recognised that Bentham's originality and importance lay not in his verbal adoption of utility as an end and standard of right political action, but in his real exclusion of any other standard; in the definiteness with which he conceived the "general good;" the clearness and precision with which he analysed it into its empirically ascertainable constituents; the exhaustive and methodical consistency with which he applied this one standard to all departments of practice; and the rigour with which he kept its application free from all alien elements. Merely to state "utility" as an ultimate end was nothing; no one would have distinguished this from the "public good" at which all politicians had always professed to aim, and all revolutionary politicians with especial amplitude of phrase. The very Declaration of the National Assembly, that solemnly set forth the maintenance of the national, imprescriptible, and inalienable" rights of man, as the sole end of government, announced in its very first clause, that "civil distinctions, therefore, can be founded only on public utility." It was not then surprising that Morellet, Brissot, and others, recognising the comprehensiveness of view and clearness of grasp that were so remarkably combined in Bentham's intellect, the equal distribution of his sympathies, and the elevated ardour of his philanthropy, should have him hailed as worthy to "serve in the cause of liberty."

And yet the almost comical contrast that we find between Bentham's temper and method in treating political questions, and the habitual sentiments and ideas of his revolutionary friends, could hardly fail to make itself felt by the latter. Let us take, for example the Treatise on Parliamentary Tactics which he offered for the guidance of the new Assembly in 1789; and let us imagine a French deputy - a member of the "Tiers" that has so recently been "Rien" and is now conscious of itself as "Tout" - attempting its perusal. He finds in it no word of response to the sentiments that are filling his breast; nothing said of privileged classes whose machinations have to be defeated, in order that the people may realise his will ; instead of this, he is met at the outset with an exhaustive statement of the various ways in which he and other servants of the people are liable to shirk or scamp their work, or otherwise to miss attainment of the general good. The object of the treatise, as the author explains, is -

"To obviate the inconvenience to which a political is exposed in the exercise of its functions. Each rule of this tactics can therefore have no justifying reason, except in the prevention of an evil. It is therefore with a [632] distinct knowledge of these evils that we should proceed in search of remedies. These inconveniences may be arranged under the ten following heads:
1. Inaction.
2. Useless decision.
3. Indecision.
4. Delays.
5. Surprise or precipitation.
6. Fluctuations in measures.
7. Quarrels.
8. Falsehoods.
9. Decisions, vicious on account of form.
10. Decisions, vicious in respect of their foundation.
We shall develops these different heads in a few words."

Under the head of delays, we find-

"May be ranked all vague and useless procedures, preliminaries which do not tend to a decision, questions badly propounded, or presented in a bad order, personal quarrels, witty speeches, and amusements suited to the amphitheatre or the playhouse."

The last and most important head is thus further analysed:

"When an assembly form an improper or hurtful decision, it may be supposed that this decision incorrectly represents its wishes. If the assembly be composed as it ought to be, its wish will be conformed to the decision of public utility; and when it wanders from this it will be from one or other of the following causes:-
" 1. Absence. The general wish of the assembly is the wish of the majority of the total number of its members. But the greater the number of the members who have not been present at its formation, the more doubtful is it whether the wish which is announced as general be really so.
" 2. Want of Freedom. If any restraint have been exercised over the votes, they may not be conformable to the internal wishes of those who have given them.
" 3. Seduction. If attractive means have been employed to act upon the wills of the members, it may be that the wish announced may not be conformable to their conscientious wish.
" 4. Error. If they have not possessed the means of informing themselves, if false statements have been presented to them, their understandings may be deceived, and the wish which has been expressed may not be that which they would have formed had they been better informed."

And so on for page after page of dull and beggarly elements, methodized no doubt in a masterly manner, and calculated to have a highly salutary and sobering effect on the mind of any legislator who can be persuaded to read them. One defect which Bentham is most seriously concerned to cure is the imperfect acquaintance that legislators are liable to have with the motions on which they vote.

"Nothing is more common," he says, "than to see orators, and even practised orators, falling into involuntary errors with respect to the precise terms of a motion." This evil, he thinks, may be obviated by "a very simple mechanical apparatus for exhibiting to the eyes of the assembly the motion on which they are deliberating.

"We may suppose a gallery above the president's chair, which presents a front consisting of two frames, nine feet high by six feet wide, filled with black [633] canvas, made to open like folding doors; that this canvas is regularly pierced for the reception of letters of so large a size as to be legible in every part of the place of meeting. These letters might be attached by an iron hook, in such manner that they could not be deranged. When a motion is about to become the object of debate, it would be given to compositors, who would transcribe it upon the table, and by closing the gallery, exhibit it like a placard to the eyes of the whole assembly."
One would think that these suggestions were sufficiently particular; but Bentham feels it needful to give a page more of minute directions as to size of letters, method of fixing them, composition of the table, &c.
The salutary working of this machinery is obvious:

"When the orator forgets his subject, and begins to wander, a table of motions offers the readiest means for recalling him. Under the present régime, how is this evil remedied? It is necessary for a member to rise, to interrupt the speaker, and call him to order. This is a provocation, it is a reproach, it wounds his self-love. The orator attacked defends himself; there is no longer a debate upon the motion, but a discussion respecting the application of his arguments... . But if we suppose the table of motions placed above [the president], the case would be very different. He might, without interrupting the speaker, warn him by a simple gesture; and this quiet sign would not be accompanied by the danger of a personal appeal."

The faithful Dumont is unbounded in his eulogy of this "absolutely new and original" work, which "fills up one of the blanks of political literature," and reports that Mirabeau and the Duc de la Rochefoucauld admired this "truly philosophical conception." Still the reader will hardly be surprised to learn that Morellet thinks it not likely to be appreciated by "light-minded and unreflecting persons" in the crisis of 1789. Bentham, we feel, must often have appeared to his French friends as a perfect specimen of the cold unsentimental type of Englishman; though with an epistolary prolixity which Sir Charles Grandison could hardly surpass. On one occasion the admiring Brissot cannot repress a murmur at the "dryness and drollery" with which he responds to sentiment. "You have then never loved me! " he exclaims; "me whose sensibilities mingle with legislation itself! " And in truth, though Bentham had plenty of sensibilities beneath his eccentric exterior, he was not in the habit of letting them mingle with legislation.

The above extracts have sufficiently illustrated another marked characteristic of Bentham's work in politics, besides his severe exclusion of fine sentiments: his habit, namely, of working out his suggestions into the minutest details. This tendency he often exhibits in an exaggerated form, so that it becomes repellent or even ridiculous; especially as Bentham, with all his desire to be practical, is totally devoid of the instinctive self-adaptation which most men learn from converse with the world. Still the habit itself is an essential element of the force and originality of his intellectual [634] attitude. "A man's mind," says the representative scientific man in Middlemarch, "must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass." Bentham's mind was continually performing a similar "systole and diastole"; and thus, in spite of the unduly deductive method that he generally employs, he really resembled the modern man of science in the point in which the latter differs most strikingly from the ancient notion of a philosopher. His apprehension, whether of abstract theory or of concrete facts, has marked limitations; but as regards the portion of human life over which his intellectual vision ranges, he has eyes which can see with equal clearness in the most abstract and the most concrete region ; and he as naturally seeks completeness in working out the details of a practical scheme as in dividing the most general notions of theoretical jurisprudence. He aims at a perfectly reasoned adaptation of means to ends in constructing a "frame of motions," no less than in constructing a code of laws; and he passes from the latter to the former without any abatement of interest or any sense of incongruity. Thus, for twenty years (from 1791 to 1811), while his fame as a philosophical jurist was extending through the civilised world, he was probably better known to the Government at home as belonging to the rather despised class of beings who were then called "projectors;" from his favourite plan of a "Panopticon" Penitentiary, which was continually urged on their notice by himself and his friends.

Panopticon or Inspection House was a circular building, in which prisoner's cells were to occupy the circumference and keepers the centre, with an intermediate annular wall all the way up, to which the cells were to be laid open by an iron grating. This construction (which with the proper modifications could be adapted to a workhouse) fills a much larger space in Bentham's correspondence than all his codes put together. Indeed, among the numerous wrongs, great and small, on which the philosopher in his old age used to dilate with a kind of cheerful acrimony peculiar to himself, there was none which roused so much resentment as the suppression of Panopticon, which he always attributed to a personal grudge on the King's part. He composed a whole volume on "the war between Jeremy Bentham and George III., by one of the belligerents." "But for George III." the narrative begins, "all the prisons and all the paupers in England would long ago have been under my management." For the administration of his prisons he had devised a complete scheme, to the realisation of which he was prepared to devote himself. The expense of prisoners was to have been reduced ultimately to zero by a rigid economy, which yet, when mitigated by the indulgences that were to be earned by extra labour, would only produce about sufficient discomfort to make the punishment deterrent. Idle prisoners were to [635] be fed on potatoes and water ad lib., clothed in coats without shirts, and wooden shoes without stockings, and made to sleep in sacks in order to save the superfluous expense of sheets. Existence being thus reduced to its lowest terms, a means of ameliorating it was provided in a certain share of the profits of industry; and Bentham was sanguine enough to suppose that fifteen hours a day of sedentary labour and muscular exercise combined, could be got out of each prisoner by this stimulus. Contract-management was an essential feature of the scheme; it must be made the manager's interest to extract from his prisoners as much work as he could without injuring them ; while the prisoners would be sufficiently protected against the manager's selfishness by the terms of his contract, by the free admission of the public to inspect the prison, and by a fine to be paid for every prisoner's death above a certain average.

The amount of labour that Bentham spent in elaborating the details of this scheme, defending it against all criticisms, urging it on ministers and parliamentary friends, and vituperating all whom he believed to have conspired to prevent its execution, would have alone sufficed to fill the life of a man of more than average energy; while the total disappointment of the hopes of twenty years, after coming within sight of success - for in 1794 Parliament had authorised such a contract as Bentham proposed - would have damped any ordinary philanthropic zeal. But Panopticon and all that belongs to it, including all that he wrote on the Poor Law and Pauper Management, might be subtracted from Bentham's intellectual labours, without materially diminishing the impression produced on the mind by their amount and variety. Nay, even if the whole of his vast work on Law and its administration, including innumerable pamphlets on special points and cases, were left out of sight, if we knew nothing of Bentham the codifier, or Bentham the radical reformer, his life would still seem, fuller of interests and activities than most men's. Besides his well-known pamphlet in defence of usury, he composed a Manual of Political Economy, in which the principles of laissez faire are independently expounded and applied. The Bell and Lancaster method of instruction inspired him to enthusiastic emulation: he immediately planned an unsectarian Chrestomathic day-school to be built in his own garden in Queen's Square Place. The school itself never came into existence; for this, like some other educational schemes, was wrecked on the rock of theology. But Bentham fulfilled his part in composing a Chrestomathia; which contained, besides a full and original exposition of pedagogic principles, a sort of manual of geometry, algebra, and physics, and an encyclopædic discussion of scientific nomenclature and classification. And this is only one striking specimen of his habitual practice. Quicquid agunt homines - whatever men do for [636] men's happiness - is certainly the farrago of his inexhaustible MSS. Whatever business suggests to him an idea of amelioration he immediately studies with, minute and intense interest, until he believes himself to have perfectly penetrated it by his exhaustive method, and is ready with a completely reasoned scheme of improvement. Currency projects, Banking regulations, proposals for an "unburthensome increase of the revenue," reform of the Thames police, a new mode of taking the census, a device for preventing forgery, a prospect of abolishing the slave-trade, a plan for morally improving Irish labourers in New York - each subject in its turn is discussed with a fresh eagerness and an amplitude of explanation that seem to belong to the leisure amateur f social science. Nor is his attention confined to matters strictly social or political. He is not too much engaged in applying his method of study to expound it in an Essay on Logic, supplemented by a characteristic dissertation on Language and Universal Grammar. Chemistry and botany, from their rich promise of utility, are continually attractive to him. He is never too busy to help in experiments which may enrich mankind with a new grass or a new fruit. At one time he is anxious to learn all about laughing gas; at another he corresponds at length about a Frigidarium, in which fermentable substances may be preserved from pernicious fermentation while remaining unfrozen. Nothing seems to him too trivial an object for his restless impulse of amelioration; and he cannot understand why it should seem so to any one else. There is an amusing instance of this in one of his letters to Dumont, at the crisis of a negotiation in which the latter, having won Talleyrand's patronage for the Civil and Penal Coded, is delicately endeavouring to secure a favourable notice for Panopticon. Dumont has asked his master to send Talleyrand a set of economical and

I have dwelt at some length on this side of Bentham's character, because it seems to me that we get the right point of view for understanding his work in politics and ethics, if we conceive it as the central and most important realisation of a dominant and all-comprehensive desire for the amelioration of human life, or rather of sentient existence generally. A treatise on Deontology, a code, an inspection-house, a set of fire-irons, may all be regarded as instruments more or less rationally contrived for the promotion of happiness; and it is exclusively in this light that Bentham regards them. Thus, perhaps, we may partly account for the extreme unreadableness of his later writings, which are certainly "biblia abiblia." The best defence for them is that they are hardly meant to be criticized as books; they were written not so much to be read as to be used. Hence if, after they were written, he saw no prospect of their producing a practical effect, he kept them contentedly on his shelves for a more seasonable opportunity. In his earlier compositions he shows considerable literary faculty: his argument is keen and lucid, and his satirical humour often excellent, though liable to be too prolix. But the fashion in which he really liked to express his thoughts was the proper style of legal documents - a style, that is, in which there are no logically superfluous words, but in which everything that is intended is fully expressed, and the most tedious iteration is not shunned if it is logically needed for completeness and precision. And as years went on, and Dumont saved him the necessity of making himself popular, he gave fall scope to his peculiar taste. Such a manner of expression has indeed a natural affinity to the fullness of detail with which his subjects are treated. But the tedium caused by the latter is necessarily aggravated by the former; and therefore the "general reader" has to be warned of from most of Bentham's volumes ; or perhaps such warning is hardly needed. Those, however, who study him as he would have wished to be studied, not for literary gratification, but for practical guidance, will fool that his fatiguing exhaustiveness of style and treatment has great advantages. It to some extent supplies the place of empirical [638] tests to his system; at least, whatever dangers lurk in his abstract deductive method of dealing with human beings, we certainly cannot include among them the "dolus" which "latet in generalibus." If in establishing his practical principles he has neglected any important element of human nature, we are almost certain to feel the deficiency in the concrete result which his indefatigable imagination works out for us. Often, indeed, the danger rather is that we shall be unduly repelled by the mere strangeness of the habits and customs of the new social organization into which he transports us.

Thus from different points of view one might truly describe Bentham as one of the most or the least idealistic of practical philosophers. What is, immediately suggests to him what ought to be; his interest in the former is never that of pure curiosity, but always subordinated to his purpose of producing the latter ; there is no department of the actual that he is not anxious to reconstruct systematically on rational principles, and so in a certain sense to inform and penetrate with ideas. While again his ideal is, to borrow a phrase of John Grote's, as much as possible de-idealized, positivized, some might say Philistinized, his good is purged of all mystical elements and reduced to the positive, palpable, empirical, definitely quantitative notion of "maximum balance of pleasure over pain;" and his conception of human nature and its motives - the material which he has to adapt to the attainment of this good-is not only unideal, but even anti-ideal, or idealized in the wrong direction. While he is as confident in his power of constructing a happy society as the most ardent believer in the moral perfectibility of mankind, he is as convinced of the unqualified selfishness of the vast majority of human beings as the bitterest cynic. Hence the double aspect of his utilitarianism, which has caused so much perplexity both to disciples and to opponents. It is as if Hobbes or Mandeville were suddenly inspired with the social enthusiasm of Godwin. Something of the same blending of contraries is found in Helvetius; and he perhaps, rather than Hume, should be taken as the intellectual progenitor of Bentham. In Helvetius, however, though utilitarianism is passing out of the critical and explanatory phase in which we find it in Hume, into the practical and reforming phase the transition is not yet complete. Still the premises of Bentham are all clearly given by Helvetius; and the task which the former took up is that which the latter clearly marks out for the moralist. Indeed, if we imagine the effect of L'Esprit on the mind of an eager young law-student, we seem to have the whole intellectual career of Bentham implicitly contained in a "pensée de jeunesse."

Helvetius puts with a highly effective simplicity, from which Hume was precluded by his more subtle and complex psychological analysis, these two doctrines: first, that every human being "en [639] tout temps, on tout lieu" seeks his own interest, and judges of things and persons according as they promote it ; and secondly, that, as the public is made up of individuals, the qualities that naturally and normally gain public esteem and are called virtues are those useful to the public. Observation, he says, shows us that there are a few men who are, inspired by "un heureux naturel, un désir vif de la gloire et de l'estime," with the same passion for justice and virtue which men generally feel for wealth and greatness. The actions which promote the private interest of these virtuous men are actions that are just, and conducive or not contrary to the general interest. But these men are so few that Helvetius only mentions them "pour l'honneur de l'humanité". The human race is almost entirely composed of men whose care is concentrated on their private interests. How, under these circumstances, are we to promote virtue? for which Helvetius really seems to be genuinely concerned, though he is too well bred to claim for himself expressly so exceptional a distinction. It is clear, he thinks, that the work will not be done by moralists, unless they completely change their methods. "Qu'ont produit jusqu'aujourd'hui les plus belles maximes de la morale?" Our moralists do not perceive that it is a futile endeavour, and would be dangerous if it were not futile, to try to alter the tendency of men to seek their private happiness. They might perhaps gain some influence if they would substitute the "langage d'intérêt" for the "ton d'injure" in which they now utter their maxims; for a man might then be led to abstain at least from such vices as 'are prejudicial to himself. But for the achievement of really important results the moralist must have recourse to legislation. This is a conclusion which Helvetius is never tired of enforcing. "One ought not to complain of the wickedness of man, but of the ignorance of legislators who have always set private interest in opposition to public." "The hidden source of a people's vices is always in its legislation; it is there that we must search if we would discover and extirpate their roots." "Moralists ought to know that as the sculptor fashions the trunk of a tree into a god or a stool, so the legislator makes heroes, geniuses, virtuous men, as he wills: . . . reward, punishment, fame, disgrace, are four kinds of divinities with which he can always effect the public good." In short, Helvetius conceives that universal self-preference might by legislative machinery be so perfectly harmonized with public utility that "none but madmen would be vicious:" it only wants a man of insight and courage, "échauffé de la passion du bien général," to effect this happy consummation.

Such, then, was the task that Bentham, at the age of twenty-five, undertook; and perhaps his bitterest opponent, surveying his sixty years of strenuous performance, will hardly blame him severely for [640] presumption in deeming himself to possess the requisite qualifications. The young Englishman, indeed, with his faith in our "matchless constitution" as yet unshaken, conceives himself to be in an exceptionally favourable position for realising this union of morals and legislation. "France," he writes in his commonplace-book for 1774-5, "may have philosophers. The world is witness if she have not philosophers. But it is England only that can have patriots, for a patriot is a philosopher in action". Such a "philosopher in action" might hope not merely to delineate, but actually to set on foot that reformation in the moral world which could only come from improvement in the machine of law. But in the moral no less than in the physical world one cannot improve a machine without understanding it; the study of it as it exists must be separated from the investigation of what it ought to be, and the former must be thoroughly performed before the latter can be successfully attempted. This is to us so obvious a truism that it seems pedantic to state it expressly; but it is a truism which Bentham found as much as possible obscured in Blackstone's famous Commentaries. The first thing then which he had to do was to dispel that confusion between the expository and the censorial functions of the jurist, which seemed to be inherent in the official account of the laws and constitution of England. The clearness and completeness with which this is done are the chief merits of the Fragment on Government. In this elaborate attack on Blackstone's view of municipal law Bentham does not as yet criticize the particulars either of the British constitution or of British administration of justice: his object is merely to supply the right set of notions for apprehending what either actually is, together with the right general principles for judging of its goodness or badness. His fundamental idea is taken, as he says, from Hume; but the methodical precision with which it is worked out is admirable ; in fact, the Fragment contains the whole outline of that system of formal constitutional jurisprudence which the present generation has mostly learnt from his disciple John Austin. Among other things we may notice as characteristic the manner in which he throws aside the official nonsense about the "democratic element" in the unreformed British Parliament, which half imposed even on the clear intellect of Paley. "A duke's son," he says, "it gets a seat in the House of Commons; it needs no more to make him the very model of an Athenian cobbler." In a similar spirit he banters Blackstone's account of the "wisdom and valour" for which our lords temporal are selected. He remarks that in Queen Anne's reign, in the year 1711, "not long after the time of the hard frost," there seems to have been such an exuberance of these virtues as to "furnish merit enough to stock no fewer than a dozen respectable persons, who upon the strength of it were all made barons in a [641] day;" a phenomenon, he adds, which a contemporary historian has strangely attributed to the necessity of making a majority. It is evident that whatever constitution Bentham may prefer, he will not be put off by any conventional fictions as to the relations of its parts; his preference will depend entirely on what he believes to be their actual working.

More than thirty years, however, were to elapse before Bentham seriously turned his attention to constitutional construction. Indeed nothing is more characteristic of the Benthamite manner of thought, in its application to politics, than the secondary and subordinate position to which it relegates the constitutional questions that absorbed the entire attention of most English politicians of the eighteenth century. Such politicians, even when most theoretical, seem to have had no notion that the political art properly includes a systematic survey of the whole operation of government, and a thorough grasp of the principles by which that operation should be judged and rectified. Their philosophy was made up of metaphysico-jural dissertations on the grounds and limits of civil obedience, and loose historical generalisations as to the effects of the, "three simple forms of government", conceived as chemical elements out of which the British constitution was compounded. What they habitually discussed was not how laws should be made or executed, but what the terms of the social compact were, and whether the balance between Crown and Commons could be maintained without corruption. It is perhaps some survival in Mr. Stephen's mind of this now antiquated way of viewing politics which has led him, while speaking respectfully of Bentham's labours in the sphere of jurisprudence, to refer so slightly to him in describing the course of political thought. And no doubt Bentham's determination to maintain a purely and exhaustively practical treatment in all his writings on law and its administration, render it almost necessary to leave the greater part of his work to the criticism of professional experts. But the general principles by which the whole course of his industry was guided; that government is merely an organization for accomplishing a very complicated and delicate work, of which the chief part consists in preventing, by the threatened infliction of pain or damage for certain kinds of conduct, some more than equivalent pain or loss of happiness resulting from that conduct to some of the governed ; that the primary end of the political art is to secure that this work shall be done in the best possible way with the utmost possible precision and the least possible waste of means ; and that the rules controlling the appointment and mutual relations of different members of the government should be considered and determined solely with a view to this end - these were surely worth mentioning among political theories. For it is this fundamental creed, that has given Benthamism [642] its vitality; when once these principles were clearly and firmly apprehended by a man with the "infinite capacity for taking trouble" which has been said to constitute genius, though the eighteenth century, ideally speaking, was not yet over, the nineteenth had certainly begun. A theory that is exclusively positive and unmetaphysical, at the same time that it is still confidently deductive and unhistorical, forms the natural transition from the "Age of Reason" to the period of political thought in which we are now living.

When we consider that Bentham's early manhood coincided with the intensest period of revolutionary fervour, and that he was in close personal relations with some influential Frenchmen of this age, it seems a remarkable evidence of his intellectual independence that he should have so long kept his attention turned away from constitutional reform. Probably the aversion he felt for the metaphysics in which the conception of rational and beneficent government seemed to be commonly entangled, co-operated to concentrate his attention on that department of reform in which alone he felt himself in full sympathy with the party of movement. At the outset of the American war he was altogether hostile to the colonists, owing to the "hodge-podge of confusion and absurdity" which he found in their Declaration of Rights. Six years later he was content to regard the English constitution as "resting at no very great distance, perhaps, from the summit of perfection." In 1789 he went so far with his French friends as to offer the cause of liberty his treatise on Parliamentary Tactics. Still, as we have seen, the dry practicality of this dissertation could hardly be surpassed; it does not touch on a single "burning question" except Division of Chambers, which it treats very abstractly and neutrally. In 1793 whatever sympathy he may have felt for the revolutionists had quite vanished. "Could the extermination of Jacobinism be effected," he writes to his cousin Metcalf, " I should think no price that we could pay for such a security too dear;" and about the same time he tells Dundas that though some of the MSS. he sends him might "lead to his being taken for a republican," he is "now writing against even Parliamentary Reform, and that without any change of sentiment." It is evident - that he is thoroughly absorbed in schemes of legislative and administrative improvement: his interest in the French Revolution was due to the unexampled opportunity it seemed to offer for new codes, new judicial establishments, Panopticons, &c.; he has no desire to quarrel with the English Tory Government if it will find employment for his inventions in this line. Until 1791 he seems to have hoped that Lord Lansdowne would place him in Parliament; he even obtained a vague promise to that effect, though for some reason or other the [643] idea was afterwards dropped. Then during the twenty years (from 1791 to 1811) in which Panopticon was in suspense, he would naturally shrink from risking its prospects by any open breach with the Government. Still it is pretty clear that his opinion of the practical efficiency of the Matchless Constitution was growing rapidly worse during the latter part of this period, until in 1809 he wrote his first plan of Parliamentary Reform. This, however, remained unpublished till 1817; and in a letter to President Madison in 1811, in which he proposes to codify for the United States, he takes care to say that "his attention has not turned and is not disposed to turn itself" to changes in the form of their government. Indeed, since the enthusiastic reception which his Civil and Penal Codes, in Dumont's rendering, had met with throughout Europe, his hopes of benefiting the human race by codification had taken so wide a range as almost necessarily to keep him neutral even towards the most despotic kind of rule. In no country was this reception more enthusiastic than in Russia. Accordingly in 1814, Panopticon being finally suppressed, and code-making being in hand in Russia, Bentham considers that the time has come to offer his services for this purpose. The Emperor, with every expression of courtesy and respect, requests him to communicate with the Commission that is sitting on legislation. But this seems to him useless. Alone he must do it; and he somewhat sourly rejects all compliments not accompanied with legislative carte blanche. When he is convinced that he cannot be employed on these conditions, his last

It is not often that an energetic practical philanthropist throws himself into constitutional reform at the age of sixty-eight. When he does so, it is likely to be with the accumulated bitterness resulting from a lifetime of baffled attempts to benefit his fellow-men under their existing constitution. And all that Bentham writes after 1817 is full of the heated and violent democratic fanaticism which is incident to the youth of many Liberals who in later years become "tempered by renouncement," but which, as we have seen, was conspicuously absent from the earlier stages of Bentham's political activity. No doubt this may be partly attributed to the spirit of the time. From 1817 to 1830 the tide of Liberalism was rapidly rising, and the flavour, of the rising Liberalism was peculiarly bitter. Still a man of sixty-eight is not usually carried away by an upsurging wave of opinion; and we can hardly explain Bentham's mood without taking into account the acrimony of the disappointed projector. It is the persistent rejection of Panopticon and many [644] other fair schemes which has inspired him with so intense a conviction that governments of One or Few invariably aim at the depredation and oppression of the Many. He tells us himself, in the "historical preface" to the Fragment on Government (republished 1828), that it is only after the experience and observation of fifty years that he has learnt to see in the imperfections of the British constitution "the elaborately organized and anxiously cherished and guarded products of sinister interest and artifice." Had George III., any time between 1793 and 1811, made peace with Panopticon, had Alexander in 1814 allowed free play to the great codifier's energies, the Constitutional Code, we may well believe, would have remained unwritten, and the philosophy of modern English Radicalism would have acknowledged a different founder.

And yet, when we examine the rational basis of his constitutional construction, whether as given in the introduction to his Plan of Parliamentary Reform (1817), or more fully and characteristically developed in the elaborate work just mentioned, we find that it consists in a few very natural inferences from the ethical and psychological premises on which his whole social activity proceeded; inferences, indeed, so simple and obvious, that we can hardly suppose him not to have tacitly drawn them, even in the earliest stage of his career. If once we regard the administration of law as a machinery indispensable for identifying the interest of individuals with the conduct by which they will most promote the general happiness, so that through a skilful adjustment of rewards and punishments the universally active force of self-preference is made to produce the results at which universal benevolence would aim, it is plain that our arrangements are incomplete, unless they include means for similarly regulating the self-preferences of those who are to work and repair the machine. And this, of course, must be done by a combination of rewards and punishments; the problem is, how to apply these so as to produce an adequate effect. It is obviously a far more difficult problem than that with which Bentham had to deal in regulating private relations. For what the private man, in his view, has for the most put to do, in order to promote the general happiness, is to consult the interests of himself and his family; whatever private services it is desirable he should render to others should rarely be made legally obligatory, except when he has freely bound himself by special and definite contracts. But from governors, if government is to be well performed, we require the energetic and sustained exercise of all their faculties in the service of their fellow-citizens generally - even more sustained energy than most men spend on their own affairs, in proportion as government is a more difficult business; while at the same time this business is of such a nature that it is necessary to give the [645] managers of it an indefinite power of interfering with the liberty, property, and even life of their fellow-citizens generally. For to set definite limits to this power in the prescriptions of a constitutional code is, from a utilitarian point of view, manifestly irrational. The only rational limits, those which utility would prescribe in any case, cannot be foreseen and fixed once for all; hence any such constitutional restrictions, if observed, are likely to prevent salutary laws and ordinances as well as mischievous ones ; while, if they are to be overruled by the "salus populi," their announcement was worse than useless - it was an express incitement to groundless rebellion. The only plan that remains, and the only one that can possibly secure the requisite junction of interests, is to provide that government, while supreme over individuals, shall be under the continual vigilant control of the citizens acting collectively. Every citizen who is not childish, insane, &c., should prima facie have a share in this control, otherwise his interests will presumably be neglected; and every one an equal share, in so far as we have no ground for considering one man's happiness of more importance than any other man's.

We are thus led to the familiar system of Representative Democracy, with universality and equality of suffrage; but, be it observed, without any of the metaphysical fictions which had commonly been involved, in the construction of this system. Bentham's system is not a contrivance for enabling every one to "obey himself alone:" such an end would have seemed to him chimerical and absurd: it is merely an arrangement for securing that every one's interests shall be as well as possible looked after. To this difference of rationale corresponds naturally a difference of constitutional sentiment. Bentham's supreme legislative assembly is not a majestic incarnation of the sovereignty of the people; it is merely a collection of agents, appointed by the people to manage a certain part of their concerns, liable, like other agents to legal punishment if they can be proved to have violated their trust, and to instant dismissal if it seem probable that they have done so.

Another important difference appears at once in comparing the rationale of utilitarian democracy with that based on natural rights. The former, however dogmatically it may be announced, depends necessarily upon certain psychological generalisations, the truth of which may be continually brought to the test of experience. Between traditional legitimacy and natural freedom there was no common ground, and therefore really no argument possible. If I maintain that I and my fellow-citizens have an imprescriptible right to be governed only by laws to which we have consented, I can find no relevancy in the answer that certain persons have inherited a prescriptive right to govern me. But if I maintain that our common interests are most likely to be well looked after by managers whom [646] we can dismiss, however confident I may be in my deduction of this probability from the "universality of self-preference," I must admit arguments from experience tending to prove the opposite. And when these are once admitted, the descent from the position of Bentham and James Mill, that democracy is absolutely desirable, to John Stuart Mill's relative and qualified assertion of its desirability, is logically inevitable; though, like many other logically inevitable steps, it took a generation to make it.

The chief peculiarities, however, in the main outline of Bentham's constitution, are due not to his conception of the political end, but to his intense sense of the need of guarding his government against the danger of perversion: a danger which democrats of the older type, from their confidence in ordinary human nature, had commonly overlooked. If the oppressions of kings and aristocrats are connected with the prevalence of prejudice and superstition, it is natural to suppose that when these are removed the business of government is as likely to go on well as any other business. But in Bentham's view governors, under however enlightened a constitution, will be ordinary human beings exposed to extraordinary temptations, to which, therefore, we must presume that they will certainly yield unless very exceptional securities am provided. All the members of government will have natural appetites for power, wealth, dignity, ease at the expense of duty, vengeance at the expense of justice, which are obviously all forces acting in the direction opposed to the general happiness. And since for the exercise of their normal functions governors, or at least the chief among them, must have power not definitely limited, and must have at their disposal a similarly indefinite amount of wealth, it cannot but be profoundly difficult to prevent them from satiating - if it be possible to satiate - all their mischievous appetites. To act one part of government to watch another will avail little: corrupt mutual connivance is too obviously their common interest. The utmost frequency in the elections of the members of the legislative assembly is a desirable, but not an adequate security: it will be the interest of each legislator to corrupt his leading constituents by patronage, and it win be their interest to be corrupted ; and the claim of experience which the sitting member can put forward will be so plausible that it will he easy for the leading constituents to hoodwink the rest. How then shall we prevent legislators, administrators, and leading constituents from being thus driven by the combined force of their self-preferences into a conspiracy against the general happiness? We must do what we can by "minimising confidence and maximising control," through the concentration of responsibility, together with arrangements for securing to the public ease and complete cognisance of all official acts. We must "minimise [647] the matter of corruption" by continually keeping down the amount of wealth and power disposable by each official: in order to reduce salaries, Bentham proposes to institute a pecuniary competition among the properly qualified candidates for any office, on the principle of choosing the man who will take least, or perhaps will even pay, to perform its functions. We must render bargains with electors difficult by secret voting. But, above all, we must be in a position to stamp out the virus of corruption as soon as it appears by immediately dismissing - or, as he prefers to say, "dislocating" - the peccant official. He considers that direct "location" by the people is incompatible with good government, except in the case of members of the legislature; even the appointment of the head of the executive, who has to make or sanction other administrative appointments, he would give to the supreme assembly ; but "universal dislocability" by a vote of the majority of citizens seems to him absolutely indispensable : all other securities will be inadequate without this.

After all is done, the readers of the Constitutional Code will probably feel that, when Helvetius proposed to ardent philanthropy he noble task of moralising selfish humanity by legislation, he had not sufficiently considered the difficulty of moralising the moralisers, and that even the indefatigable patience and inexhaustible ingenuity of Bentham will hardly succeed in defeating the sinister conspiracy of self-preferences. In fact, unless a little more sociality is allowed to an average human being, the problem of combining these egoists into an organization for promoting their common happiness is like the old task of making ropes of sand. The difficulty that Hobbes vainly tried to settle summarily by absolute despotism is hardly to be overcome by the democratic artifices of his more inventive successor.

Bentham's final treatise on politics was never absolutely completed. Only about one-half had been printed or revised for the press when his long career of intellectual toil was terminated. On the 6th of June, 1832, there remained for the indefatigable old man but one last contribution to the balance of human happiness, which was faithfully rendered: to "minimise the pain" of the watchers round his dying bed. His treatise on private ethics, or, as he calls it, Deontology (the place of which in his system had been indicated fifty years before in his Treatise on Morals and Legislation), was left a mere mass of undigested fragments. The task of preparing it for publication was, however, at once undertaken by Bowring, the favourite disciple of the master's later years; and so much of Bentham's work had been given to the world through the medium of a disciple, that there seemed no reason why the Deontology should not take rank with The Civil and Penal Codes as a generally trustworthy exposition of Benthamite doctrine. But the [648] book had no sooner appeared than it was formally repudiated by that section of the school whose opinions were likely to have most weight with the public. J. S. Mill, writing August, 1838, in the London and Westminster Review, urged that considering its dubious origin and intrinsic demerits together, it should be omitted from any collected edition of Bentham's works; its demerits being that, instead of "plunging boldly into the greater moral questions," it treated almost solely of "the petite morale, and that with pedantic minuteness, and on the quid pro quo principles which regulate trade."" That the Deontology corresponds to this description is undeniable; the only question is whether a disciple of Bentham's ought to have been surprised at it. The surprise, at any rate, is a phenomenon demanding explanation; for Bentham is not a Hegel, to be understood by one disciple only, and misunderstood by him ; he is commonly liable to be wearisome from obtrusive consistency, and unreadable from an excessive desire to be unmistakable.

The truth is that an ethical system constructed on Bentham's principles is an instrument that may be put to several different uses; so that it is not unnatural that his disciples, employing and developing it each in his own way, should insensibly be led to widely divergent views as to the really essential characteristics of the master's doctrine. The theory of virtue which he received from Helvetius has two aspects, psychological and ethical. Psychologically analysed, common morality appears as a simple result of common selfishness. "Each man likes and approves what he think useful to him; the public (which is merely an aggregate of individuals) likes and praises what it thinks useful to the public ; that is the whole account of virtue." How, on this theory, men's moral judgments [sic] come to agree as much as they actually do is not sufficiently explained; and in any case there is no rational transition possible from this psychological theory to the ethical principle that "the standard of rectitude for all actions" is "public utility." Nor does Bentham really maintain that there is: when he is pressed, he explains frankly that his first principle is really his individual sentiment ; that, in fact, he aims at the general happiness because he happens to prefer it. Still, for all practical purposes, he does accept "greatest happiness" (1) as (to use his own words), "a plain as well as true standard for whatever is right or wrong, useful, useless, or mischievous in human conduct, whether in the field of morals or of politics." The primary function, then, of the utilitarian (2) moralist is [649] to apply this standard to the particulars of human life, so as to determine by it the different special virtues or rules of duty, so far as such determination is possible in general terms; and, in fact, several of the fragments put together in the Deontology were written with this aim.

But suppose this has been accomplished, and the code of duty clearly made out; we have still to ask what the exact use of it will be. It will, of course, give a complete practical guidance to persons whose ruling passion is a desire to promote universal happiness; but Bentham, no less than Helvetius, regards such persons as so exceptional, that it would be hardly worth while to print a book for them. What, then, is the relation of the utilitarian moralist to the great mass of mankind, in whose breasts universal benevolence holds no such irresistible sway? This is the practically important question. One answer to it is that given by Paley (and afterwards by John Austin), which treats the rules of utilitarian duty as a code of Divine Laws adequately supported by religious sanctions. Such an answer avoids some of the objections to utilitarianism, at the cost, perhaps, of introducing greater ones; but in any case it is not Bentham's, though it is not expressly excluded by him. If we put this aside, there remain two entirely different ways of dealing with the question, each of which, from a utilitarian point of view, is perfectly appropriate. In the first place the code as above deduced, may be offered to mankind as a standard for rectifying their ordinary judgments of approbation and disapprobation, clearing them from a certain amount of confusion and conflict which now perplexes them, and so increasing their beneficent effect. Even if few persons are sufficiently benevolent to take the general happiness as the one ultimate end of their own conduct, it may still be generally accepted as a standard for apportioning praise and blame to others; and much would be gained for the general happiness if the whole force of these powerful motives could be turned in the direction of promoting it. In all Bentham says of the "moral sanction" in his Morals and Legislation, this conception of morality as a system of distributing praise and blame is implied; and such, I gather, was the view taken by James Mill of the practical function of the utilitarian moralist (except in so far as his associational psychology led him to recognise the love of virtue as a distinct though derivative impulse). But this view, though not absent from Deontology, in certainly not prominent there; and it is plain from Bentham's earlier treatise (1) that he conceived "private ethics" not merely as an art of praising and blaming, but rather as an art of conduct generally, from the individuals point of view — art of self [650] government" he calls it. But in counselling individuals Bentham thought, like Helvetius, that it was useless to "clamour about duty;" the only effective way of persuading a man to its performance was to show him its coincidence with interest. In such a demonstration the pleasures of pure benevolence are, of course, not neglected; but he obviously cannot lay much stress on them. Hence the necessity for the "quid pro quo" treatment of which Mill complains. The erroneousness of the estimate which the vicious man makes of pains and pleasures has to be shown in every possible way; honesty has to be exhibited as the best policy, extra-regarding beneficence as an investment in a sort of bank of general good-will, &c. We can see at the same time why, from this point of view, the petite morale is so prominent. For the more important part of the coincidence between interest and duty it belongs to the legislator to effect and enforce; and his share of the code ought to be written, to use a Platonic image, in large print, needing no comment; the moralist's task is to decipher and exhibit the minor supplementary prescriptions of duty. And that Bentham, when he had once undertaken this task, should have performed it with a "minuteness" which a hostile critic might call "pedantic," can hardly have surprised any one so familiar with his works as Mill was.

So far, I think, there can be no doubt that Bowring has given us the genuine Bentham, and that the faithful historian must refuse to follow Mill in rejecting the Deontology. But it is one thing to hold that the moralist ought chiefly to occupy himself in showing men how much of their happiness is bound up with their duty; it is quite another thing to maintain that the two notions are universally coincident in experience, and that (from a purely mundane point of view) "vice may be defined to be a miscalculation of chances." This latter is the ground implicitly taken throughout the greater part of the Deontology, and expressly in one or two passages. No doubt the step to this from the former position is a very natural one for an enthusiastic and not very clear-headed disciple; for if it is tenable, the moralist's task can be much more triumphantly achieved. But that Bentham himself would ever have deliberately maintained this position is very difficult to believe. Certainly in the passage of his earlier treatise above referred to, where he defines the relation of "private ethics" to legislation, he distinctly avoids taking it. "It cannot but be admitted," he says, "that the only interests which a man at all times and on all occasions is sure to find adequate motives for consulting are his own." All he can maintain is that "there are no occasions on which he has not some motives for consulting the happiness of other men." And with his purely practical view of the moralist's function, he would naturally, in writing his notes for the Deontology, exhibit these motives [651] without dwelling on their occasional inadequacy, and would thus encourage his editor to take the critical step from the actual to the ideal, and assert that they are always adequate. But if, as we have seen, the author of the Principles of Morals and Legislation shrank from asserting this, we can hardly suppose that the author of the Constitutional Code had seen reason to change his mind. For if it is always every man's interest, on a rational computation of chances, to promote the general happiness, what becomes of his anti-monarchical and anti-oligarchical deductions from the principle of self-preference? It may of course be said that monarchs and oligarchs may and do mistake their true interests. But Bentham's argument goes far beyond this. He repeatedly states it as certain and inevitable that, without such artificial junction of interests as is provided by the Constitutional Code, governors will sacrifice the happiness of the governed to their own appetites for power, wealth, ease, and revenge. There are some inconsistencies so flagrant that even a philosopher should be held innocent of them till he is proved guilty; and to hold the serene optimism of the Deontology as to human relations generally, together with the bitter pessimism of the Constitutional Code as to the relation of rulers and subjects, would surely be an inconsistency of this class.

At the same time I must admit that there were other utilitarians, besides Bowring who did not perceive the incongruity, and that even after it had been explained to them by a writer who generally succeeded in making his explanations pretty clear. In the famous passage of arms between the Edinburgh and the Westminster in 1829-30, Macaulay no doubt ventured into a region where he was not altogether at home; still his clear common sense, wide knowledge of historical facts, and a dialectical vigour and readiness which few philosophers could afford to despise, rendered him by no means ill matched even against James Mill ; in fact, both combatants, on the ground on which they met, were better equipped for offensive than for defensive warfare ; and if the author of the essay on Government had himself replied to his assailant, the conflict would probably have been bloody, but indecisive. But when Macaulay's article came out, the split between Bowring and the Mills had taken place, and the management of the Westminster had passed into the hands of Colonel Perronet Thompson, who accepted to the full Bowring's view of utilitarian ethics, and in fact regarded the coincidence of utilitarian duty with self-interest properly understood as Bentham's cardinal doctrine. Colonel Thompson was a writer of no mean talents, and if he had only had to defend his own view of the "greatest happiness principle" he might have come off with tolerable success. Unfortunately the conditions of the controversy rendered it incumbent on him to defend James Mill's at the same time; and [652] against the compound doctrine that it is demonstrably the interest of kings and aristocracies to govern well, and yet demonstrably certain that they will never think so, Macaulay's rejoinder was delivered with irresistible force.

Macaulay's articles had other consequences, more important than that of exhibiting the ambiguities of the greatest happiness principle. His spirited criticism of the deductive politics of James Mill, though it was treated with contempt by its object, had a powerful effect on the more impartial and impressible mind of the younger Mill; and the new views of utilitarian method which were afterwards propounded in the latter's Logic of the Moral Sciences (1) owe their origin in some measure to the diatribes of the Edinburgh. If space allowed, it would be interesting to trace the changes that Bentham's system underwent in the teaching of his most distinguished successor under the combined influences of Comtian sociology, Associational psychology, and Neo-Baconian logic. But such an undertaking would carry us far beyond the limits of the present historical sketch, and right into the midmost heats of contemporary controversy.

H. SIDGWICK.