V.

Lecture George IV. and his Queen were present realities. The horrors of a Regicide Peace1 Peace1 were ancient history. Sensible men perceived that the state of England would soon necessitate a choice between revolution and reform.

(4) As to the existence of Benthamism.—The work of Bentham and his school forms the subject of the next lecture; thus much may here be said: reformers who had escaped from the panic caused by revolutionary excesses, and prolonged by Napoleonic aggression, had inherited the distrust of Jacobinical principles. The need of the day was, they felt, thorough-going but temperate reform, thought out by teachers who, without being revolutionists, had studied the faults of English law, and elaborated schemes for its practical amendment. Such teachers were found in Bentham and his disciples; they provided for reformers an acceptable programme. Utilitarian individualism, which for many years under the name of liberalism, determined the trend of English legislation, was nothing but Benthamism modified by the experience, the prudence, or the timidity of practical politicians. The creation of this liberalism was the death-blow to old toryism, and closed the era of legislative stagnation.

1 The very title of Burke's celebrated Three Letters on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France, 1796, is a curious example of the difference between the feelings of his times and of our own. Would suggestions of peace with France (or for that matter with any other civilised country) now excite horror simply on the ground that the French Government had put their king to death? The Directory, by the way, had not as a government executed Louis XVI. Would Burke, one wonders, have blamed Louis XIV. for recognising Cromwell, who was in the strictest sense a regicide?

LECTURE VI

THE PERIOD OF BENTHAMISM OR INDIVIDUALISM

1

VI.

INDIVIDUALISM as regards legislation is popularly, Lecture and not without reason, connected with the name and the principles of Bentham. The name of one man, it is true, can never adequately summarise a whole school of thought, but from 1825 onwards the teaching of Bentham exercised so potent an influence that to him is fairly ascribed that thorough-going though gradual amendment of the law of England which was one of the main results of the Reform Act.2

Bentham's genius and position were fully understood by his contemporaries.

"The age of law reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and the same. He is the father of the most important of all the branches of reform, "the leading and ruling department of human im

1 See Bentham, "Memoirs and Correspondence," Works, x. xi.; Montague, Bentham's Fragment on Government; L. Stephen, English Utilitarians, i., especially chaps. i.-iii.; Elie Helévy, La formation du radicalisme philosophique; G. Wallas, Life of Francis Place, ch. iii. ; Bowen on "Administration of the Law, from 1837-1887," Reign of Queen Victoria, i. 281.

2 The influence even on law reform of Adam Smith and his disciples ought, of course, not to be forgotten, but in 1830 the economists and the Benthamites formed one school.

Lecture
VI.

66

provement. No one before him had ever seriously thought of exposing the defects in our English system of jurisprudence. All former students had "confined themselves to learn its principles-to make "themselves masters of its eminently technical and artificial rules; and all former writers had but expounded the doctrines handed down from age to 66 age. . . He it was who first made the mighty step "of trying the whole provisions of our jurisprudence by the test of expediency, fearlessly examining how "far each part was connected with the rest; and with a yet more undaunted courage, inquiring how far even its most consistent and symmetrical arrangements were framed according to the principle which "should pervade a code of laws-their adaptation to "the circumstances of society, to the wants of men, "and to the promotion of human happiness.

66

66

"Not only was he thus eminently original among "the lawyers and the legal philosophers of his own country; he might be said to be the first legal philosopher that had appeared in the world." 1

66

These are the words of Brougham, published in 1838; they strike the right note. Bentham was primarily neither a utilitarian moralist nor a philanthropist he was a legal philosopher and a reformer of the law. The object of his lifelong labours was to remodel the law of England in accordance with utilitarian principles. These labours were crowned by extraordinary success, though the success was most manifest after the end of Bentham's life. This is Bentham's title to fame. His life cannot here be told, but it is well to insist upon the circumstances 1 Brougham's Speeches, ii. pp. 287, 288.

or conditions which favoured his success as a law Lecture reformer.

Both the date and the length of Bentham's life are important.

He was born in 1748, two years after the failure of the last attempt to restore the Stuarts; he died immediately before the passing of the Reform Act, 1832. The eighty-four years of his life thus span over the period which divides the last endeavour to establish in England the real supremacy of the Crown from the commencement in England of modern democratic government. This era stretched indeed beyond the limits of the eighteenth century, but though Bentham lived till the first third of the nineteenth century had nearly come to an end, he was in spirit entirely a child of the eighteenth century, and in England was the best representative of the humanitarianism and enlightenment of that age. Length of days was no small aid in the performance of his life's work. Bentham, like Voltaire,1 ultimately owed much of his authority to the many years for which he was able to press his doctrines upon the world. Iteration and reiteration are a great force; when employed by a teacher of genius they may become an irresistible power. For well nigh sixty years, that is to say to two generations, Bentham preached the necessity, and explained the principles, of law reform. He began his career as an unknown youth whose ideas were scouted by men of the world as dangerous paradoxes: he ended it as a revered teacher who numbered among his disciples

1 Voltaire, born 1694, died 1778. Each lived to the age of eighty-four.

VI.

VI.

Lecture lawyers and statesmen of eminence, and had won over to his leading ideas the most sensible and influential of English reformers.

Bentham was the son of a wealthy London attorney.

He thus formed one of that body of tradesmen, merchants, and professional men who, as the "middle class," had at the beginning of the nineteenth century long exercised great influence in public life, and at the moment of his death were about to become the true sovereign of England. And Bentham, though distinguished among his fellows by his genius, his enlightenment, and his zeal for the public good, belonged, to a far greater extent than he or his opponents perceived, in spirit no less than in position, to the middle classes. He shared their best ideals. When he taught that the aim of law as of life was to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number, he meant by happiness no far-fetched conception of well-being, but that combination of an honest and industrious life with the enjoyment of modest wealth and material comfort, which is felt to be an object of desire by an ordinary Englishman. He spoke the language of his countrymen, and the men of the middle class whom he addressed understood his meaning. The character and the wealth of Bentham's father are circumstances not to be overlooked. The elder Bentham recognised his son's extraordinary gifts and set his heart on seeing him rise to the position of Mansfield or of Eldon. This commonplace ambition was the torment of Jeremy's youth, but it had one good effect. It induced or compelled Bentham to study with care the actual law