The English Utilitarians Volume I Part 10

[217] _Ibid._ i. 268 _n._

[218] _Works_, x. 121.

[219] _Ibid._ i. 227.

[220] _Ibid._ x. 79, 142. See also _Deontology_, i. 298-302, where Bentham speaks of discovering the phrase in Priestley's _Essay on Government_ in 1768. Priestley says (p. 17) that 'the good and happiness of the members, that is of the majority of the members, of any state is the great standard by which everything relating to that state must be finally determined.' So Le Mercier de la Riviere says, in 1767, that the ultimate end of society is _a.s.surer le plus grand bonheur possible a la plus grande population possible_ (Daire's _economistes_, p. 470).

Hutcheson's _Enquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil_, 1725, see iii. -- 8, says 'that action is best which secures the greatest happiness of the greatest number.' Beccaria, in the preface to his essay, speaks of _la ma.s.sima felicita divisa nel maggior numero_. J. S. Mill says that he found the word 'Utilitarian' in Galt's _Annals of the Parish_, and gave the name to the society founded by him in 1822-1823 (_Autobiography_, p.

79). The word had been used by Bentham himself in 1781, and he suggested it to Dumont in 1802 as the proper name of the party, instead of 'Benthamite' (_Works_, x. 92, 390). He afterwards thought it a bad name, because it gave a 'vague idea' (_Works_, x. 582), and subst.i.tuted 'greatest happiness principle' for 'principle of utility' (_Works_, i.

'Morals and Legislation').

[221] A letter in the Additional MSS. 33, 537, shows that Bentham sent his 'Fragment' and his 'Hard Labour' pamphlet to d'Alembert in 1778, apparently introducing himself for the first time. Cf. _Works_, x.

87-88, 193-94.

[222] The translation of 1774. See Lowndes' _Manual_ under Voltaire, _Works_, x. 83 _n._

[223] _Review of the Acts of the Thirteenth Parliament, etc._ (1775).

[224] _Works_, x. 57, 63.

[225] _Works_, x. 133-35.

[226] _Ibid._ x. 84.

[227] _Ibid._ x. 77.

[228] _Works_, x. 82.

[229] _Works_, x. 77-82. Blackstone took no notice of the work, except by some allusions in the preface to his next edition. Bentham criticised Blackstone respectfully in the pamphlet upon the Hard Labour Bill (1778). Blackstone sent a courteous but 'frigidly cautious' reply to the author.--_Works_, i. 255.

[230] _Works_, x. 115-17, 186

[231] _Ibid._ x. 100.

[232] _Ibid._ x. 122.

[233] _Ibid._ x. 118; i. 253.

[234] _Works_, x. 97; i. 252.

[235] _Ibid._ x. 219, 265.

[236] _Works_, x. 118, 419, 558.

[237] _Ibid._ i. 253.

[238] _Ibid._ x. 116, 182.

[239] _Ibid._ x. 228-42.

[240] _Ibid._ x. 186.

[241] _Works_, v. 370.

[242] _Souvenirs sur Mirabeau_ (preface).

[243] _Works_, x. 185.

[244] _Works_, x. 185. Colls (p. 41) tells the same story.

[245] _Works_ ('Fragment, etc.'), i. 245, and _Ibid._ ii. 463 _n._

[246] _Ibid._ i. 246, 250, 251.

[247] _Ibid._ i. 252.

[248] _Ibid._ x. 185.

[249] Bentham says (_Works_, i. 240) that he was a member of a club of which Johnson was the despot. The only club possible seems to be the Ess.e.x Street Club, of which Daines Barrington was a member. If so, it was in 1783, though Bentham seems to imply an earlier date.

[250] _Works_, x. 77.

[251] _Ibid._ x. 147.

[252] _Works_, x. 176.

[253] Reid's _Works_ (Hamilton), p. 73.

[254] _Works_, x. 171.

[255] _Works_, x. 163-64. Cf. _Ibid._ x. 195, where Wilson is often 'tempted to think'--erroneously, of course--that Paley must have known something of Bentham's work. Paley's chief source was Abraham Tucker.

[256] See J. H. Burton in _Works_, i. 11.

[257] Given in _Works_, x. 201-12.

[258] See Lecky's _Eighteenth Century_, x. 210-97, for an account of these transactions.

[259] Bowring tells this gravely, and declares that George III. also wrote letters to the _Gazette de Leyde_. George III. certainly contributed some letters to Arthur Young's _Annals of Agriculture_, and is one of the suggested authors of Junius.

III. THE PANOPTICON

The crash of the French revolution was now to change the whole course of European politics, and to bring philosophical jurists face to face with a long series of profoundly important problems. Bentham's att.i.tude during the early stages of the revolution and the first war period is significant, and may help to elucidate some characteristics of the Utilitarian movement. Revolutions are the work of pa.s.sion: the product of a social and political condition in which the ma.s.ses are permeated with discontent, because the social organs have ceased to discharge their functions. They are not ascribable to the purely intellectual movement alone, though it is no doubt an essential factor. The revolution came in any case because the social order was out of joint, not simply because Voltaire or Rousseau or Diderot had preached destructive doctrines. The doctrines of the 'rights of man' are obvious enough to have presented themselves to many minds at many periods. The doctrines became destructive because the old traditions were shaken, and the traditions were shaken because the state of things to which they corresponded had become intolerable. The French revolution meant (among other things) that in the mind of the French peasant there had acc.u.mulated a vast deposit of bitter enmity against the n.o.ble who had become a mere parasite upon the labouring population, retaining, as Arthur Young said, privileges for himself, and leaving poverty to the lower cla.s.ses. The peasant had not read Rousseau; he had read nothing.

But when his discontent began to affect the educated cla.s.ses, men who had read Rousseau found in his works the dialect most fitted to express the growing indignation. Rousseau's genius had devised the appropriate formula; for Rousseau's sensibility had made him prescient of the rising storm. What might be a mere commonplace for speculative students suddenly became the warcry in a social upheaval. In England, as I have tried to show, there was no such popular sentiment behind the political theories: and reformers were content with measures which required no appeal to absolute rights and general principles. Bentham was no Rousseau; and the last of men to raise a warcry. Pa.s.sion and sentimentalism were to him a nuisance. His theories were neither suggested nor modified by the revolution. He looked on with curious calmness, as though the revolutionary disturbances were rather a transitory interruption to the progress of reform than indicative of a general convulsion. His own position was isolated. He had no strong reforming party behind him. The Whigs, his main friends, were powerless, discredited, and themselves really afraid to support any vigorous policy. They had in the main to content themselves with criticising the warlike policy which, for the time, represented the main current of national sentiment. Bentham shared many of their sympathies. He hated the abstract 'rights of man' theory as heartily as Burke. It was to him a 'hodge-podge' of fallacies. On the other hand, he was absolutely indifferent to the apotheosis of the British Const.i.tution constructed by Burke's imagination. He cared nothing for history in general, or regarded it, from a Voltairean point of view, as a record of the follies and crimes of mankind. He wished to deal with political, and especially with legal, questions in a scientific spirit--but 'scientific' would mean not pure mathematics but pure empiricism. He was quite as far from Paine's abstract methods as from Burke's romantic methods. Both of them, according to him, were sophists: though one might prefer logical and the other sentimental sophistries. Dumont, when he published (1802) his versions of Bentham, insisted upon this point. Nothing, he says, was more opposed to the trenchant dogmatism of the abstract theorists about 'rights of man' and 'equality' than Bentham's thoroughly scientific procedure (_Discours Preliminaire_). Bentham's intellectual position in this respect will require further consideration hereafter. All his prejudices and sympathies were those of the middle cla.s.s from which he sprang. He was no democrat: he had no particular objection to the n.o.bility, though he preferred Shelburne to the king's friends or to the Whig aristocracy. The reforms which he advocated were such as might be adopted by any enlightened legislator, not only by Shelburne but even by Blackstone. He had only, he thought, to convert a few members of parliament to gain the acceptance for a rational criminal code. It had hardly even occurred to him that there was anything wrong in the general political order, though he was beginning to find out that it was not so modifiable as he could have wished by the new ideas which he propounded.

Bentham's activity during the first revolutionary war corresponded to this position. The revolution, whatever else it might do, obviously gave a chance to amateur legislators. There was any amount of work to be done in the way of codifying and reforming legislative systems. The deviser of Utopias had such an opening as had never occurred in the world's history. Lord Lansdowne, on the 3rd January 1789, expresses his pleasure at hearing that Bentham intends to 'take up the cause of the people in France.'[260] Bentham, as we have seen, was already known to some of the French leaders, and he was now taking time by the forelock. He sent to the abbe Morellet a part of his treatise on Political Tactics, hoping to have it finished by the time of the meeting of the States General.[261]

This treatise, civilly accepted by Morellet, and approved with some qualifications by Bentham's counsellors, Romilly, Wilson, and Trail, was an elaborate account of the organisation and procedure of a legislative a.s.sembly, founded chiefly on the practice of the House of Commons. It was published in 1816 by Dumont in company with _Anarchic Fallacies_, a vigorous exposure of the _Declaration of Rights_, which Bentham had judiciously kept on his shelf. Had the French known of it, he remarks afterwards, they would have been little disposed to welcome him.[262] An elaborate scheme for the organisation of the French judiciary was suggested by a report to the National a.s.sembly, and published in March 1790. In 1791, Bentham offered to go to France himself in order to establish a prison on his new scheme (to be mentioned directly), and become 'gratuitously the gaoler thereof.'[263] The a.s.sembly acknowledged his 'ardent love of humanity,' and ordered an extract from his scheme to be printed for their instruction. The tactics actually adopted by the French revolutionists for managing a.s.semblies and their methods of executing justice form a queer commentary on the philosopher who, like Voltaire's Mamres in the _White Bull_, continued to 'meditate profoundly' in placid disregard of facts. He was in fact proposing that the lava boiling up in a volcanic eruption should arrange itself entirely according to his architectural designs. But his proposal to become a gaoler during the revolution reaches the pathetic by its amiable innocence. On 26th August 1792, Bentham was one of the men upon whom the expiring a.s.sembly, anxious to show its desire of universal fraternity, conferred the t.i.tle of citizen. With Bentham were joined Priestley, Paine, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Was.h.i.+ngton, and others. The September ma.s.sacres followed. On 18th October the honour was communicated to Bentham. He replied in a polite letter, pointing out that he was a royalist in London for the same reason which would make him a republican in France. He ended by a calm argument against the proscription of refugees.[264] The Convention, if it read the letter, and had any sense of humour, must have been amused. The war and the Reign of Terror followed. Bentham turned the occasion to account by writing a pamphlet (not then published) exhorting the French to 'emanc.i.p.ate their colonies.' Colonies were an aimless burthen, and to get rid of them would do more than conquest to relieve their finances.

British fleets and the insurrection of St. Domingo were emanc.i.p.ating by very different methods.