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Freedom in dealing with property, and especially Lecture property in land, forms an essential part of the Benthamite conception of individual liberty. To extend this freedom in .one way or another is the aim and effect of legislation such as the Prescription Act, 1832, 2 & 3 Will. IV. c. 71; the Inheritance Act, 1833, 3 & 4 Will. IV. c. 106; the Fines and Recoveries Act, 1833, 3 & 4 Will. IV. c. 74; the Wills Act, 1837, 1 Vict. c. 26; the Real Property Act, 1845, 8 & 9 Vict. c. 106; and all the statutes, none of them successful, by which it has been attempted to introduce a system of land registry 1 which should facilitate the transfer of land; the enactments for doing away with copyhold tenure or for diminishing the inconvenience arising from its peculiarities, which begin with the Copyhold Act, 1841, 4 & 5 Vict. c. 35, and have ended for the present with the Copyhold Act, 1894, 57 & 58 Vict. c. 46, and the Inclosure Acts between 1801, 41 Geo. III. c. 109, and the general Inclosure Act, 1845, 8 & 9 Vict. c. 118.2 The same end is aimed at from another side by the whole series of Settled Estates Acts from 1856, 19 & 20 Vict. c. 120, to 1876, 39 & 40 Vict. c. 30, all of which, together with other enactments, increase the power of tenants for life and others to deal with land of which they are not the absolute owners. It is here worth noting that individualism in legislation, since it has for its

1 Williams, Real Property (19th ed.), p. 616; Pollock, Land Laws (3rd ed.), pp. 171-178.

2 Compare Pollock, Land Laws, 3rd ed. pp. 180-186, and note particularly the change in policy as to the mode of dealing with commons from 1865 to 1876, which year is marked by the Commons Act, 1876, 39 & 40 Vict. c. 56.

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Lecture object to free from unnecessary trammels the action of individuals who, at any given moment, are in existence, will tend, on the one hand, to liberate each generation from the control of the past, and on the other hand to restrain the attempt of each generation to fix the devolution of property in the future, and thus diminish the individual liberty of its successors.

It may appear to be a straining of terms if we bring under the head of freedom in dealing with property the most celebrated piece of legislation which can be attributed to the philosophic Radicals. The Poor Law of 1834 does not, on the face of it, aim at securing freedom of any kind; in popular imagination its chief result was the erection of workhouses, which, as prisons for the poor, were nicknamed Bastilles. Yet the object of the statute was in reality to save the property of hardworking men from destruction by putting an end to the monstrous system under which laggards who would not toil for their own support lived at the expense of their industrious neighbours, and enjoyed sometimes as much comfort as or even more comfort than fell to the lot of hardworking labourers. Whether a poor law of any kind is consistent with the principles of thorough-going individualism is open to question. In England, however, the system of poor relief had existed for centuries. Instant abolition was an impossibility: all that reformers could do-and that at the cost of deep unpopularity-the reformers of 1834 achieved; they prevented an institution which was intended to save from starvation labourers who could not obtain work, from continuing to be a tremendous tax upon industry for the maintenance of indolence. This was the aim,

and to a great extent the effect, of the New Poor Lecture Law.

1

Freedom of discussion, popularly, though inaccurately, called freedom of opinion, and religious liberty, which means the right of every man to avow and advocate any form of religious or non-religious belief without thereby exposing himself to legal penalties or disabilities, had long before 1830 become, under the name of civil and religious liberty, articles of the Whig creed; but to these articles of faith Whig legislators had in practice given most imperfect application. The Benthamites aimed at carrying out their faith in freedom of opinion to its full logical results. Of this effort may be found ample illustrations in the extension of the Toleration Act to Unitarians (1813); in the Test and Corporation Act, 1828, 8 & 9 Geo. IV. c. 17; in the Roman Catholic Relief Act, 1829, 10 Geo. IV. c. 7; in the Nonconformists' Chapels Act, 1844, 7 & 8 Vict. c. 45; in the Marriage Acts extending from the Marriage Act, 1835, 5 & 6 Will. IV. c. 54, to the Marriage Act, 1898, 61 & 62 Vict. c. 58; and above all, in the long series of Oaths Acts, which have had the twofold effect of opening Parliament to any person otherwise eligible without any reference to his religious belief, and of enabling even avowed atheists to give evidence, and therefore enforce their rights, in a Court of justice. Parliament has not,

1 See Paley, Moral Philosophy, ii. Bk. vi. c. x., with which contrast, on the one hand, Blackstone, Comm., iv. p. 440, and on the other hand, the general tone of Macaulay's Essays and Sydney Smith's Works passim. The older Whigs justified the imposition of political disabilities upon Roman Catholics on the ground that in the case of Roman Catholics religious tenets were, for a time at least, the sign of political disloyalty.

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Lecture indeed, as yet established religious equality, but modern liberalism, which has in this matter inherited the ideas of the school of Bentham, had by the middle of the last century removed nearly all effective legal restraints on free discussion, and has since that date practically established a liberty of opinion almost as wide as that demanded in 1859 by Mill in his treatise On Liberty.

The Adequate Protection of Rights.—The labours of Bentham and of the lawyers who have followed in his steps, have been incessantly directed towards securing for every person the power to enforce his rights that is, towards the amendment of everything which can be brought under the head of legal procedure, if that term be used in its very widest sense, so as to cover everything connected with the actual enforcement of a citizen's substantive rights, and thus to include the regulation of judicial evidence, the constitution and the jurisdiction of the courts, and all the steps in an action which English lawyers call practice, the reduction of the cost of legal proceedings, and a lot of other topics as dull and technical as any part of the law. Procedure, dreary though the matter seems, was the favourite object of Bentham's intense attention and prolonged study. Why, a student asks himself, was a legal philosopher so deeply concerned with a matter which seems to possess little speculative interest? The answer is, that in nothing did Bentham more markedly display his logical consistency and his sagacity as a reformer, than in the supreme importance which he attached to providing the means for the easy enforcement of every man's rights. A right which

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an individual cannot enforce is to him no right at Lecture all; the dilatoriness of legal proceedings, and their exorbitant cost, or the want of an easily accessible Court, work greater and far more frequent injustice than the formal denial of a man's due rights. The passion for amending procedure was only one side of Bentham's desire to protect individual freedom, and this passion, stirred up by Bentham, has now for more than seventy years led to constant attempts at improving the machinery of the law which have on the whole been crowned with marked success.1

Let us take a few typical examples of the scores of enactments which during the nineteenth century have reformed that system of legal procedure which, when Bentham made himself its critic, was full of patent faults. The Evidence Acts, beginning in 1833 with Denman's Act, 6 & 7 Vict. c. 85, and ending with the Act of 1898, which allows persons accused of crime to give evidence on their own behalf, have rationalised the whole of our law with regard to the competence of witnesses. The County Courts Acts

The ardent wish to amend legal procedure connects Bentham more closely than he perceived with the greatest English judges. Our lawyers in and out of Parliament have instinctively felt that a right which cannot be enforced is no right at all. It is unfortunate for Bentham's reputation that the writers who in England have been the chief representatives of utilitarianism have either possessed little knowledge of law or else have lacked sympathy with Bentham's enthusiasm for law reform. Neither James nor John Mill were either lawyers or jurists. Austin had a firm grasp of a few most important legal conceptions, but nothing in his writings betrays anything like systematic study of the laws of England. Sir J. F. Stephen was a considerable criminalist, but he hardly claimed to be, in the Benthamite sense of the term, a reformer of the law. Sir Leslie Stephen, who is by far the ablest of Bentham's critics, was not a lawyer, and did not pay as much attention as the matter deserved to Bentham's claim to be a legal philosopher.