ABIAN TRACT No. 221. PRICE THREEPENCE 

JEREMY .BENTHAM. 



I 

FABIAN 

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BIOGRAPHICAL SERIES 
No. 11. 



Fabian TraCt No. 221. 


JEREMY BENTHAM. 


BY 

VICTOR COHEN. 

Biographical Series No, rr. Price Threepence. 
Published and sold by the Fabian Society, 
25 Tothill St., Westminster, London, S.W.r. 
Published April, 1927. 


BENTHAM. 


lh YICTOR COHEN. 

" The way to be happy is to make others happy, the way to 
make others happy is to appear to love them, the way to appear 
to love them is to love them really.'' So wrote the chief exponent 
of the-utilitarian creed, Jeremy Bentham. 

He ""'as born in the year 1748 in Red Lion Street, Hounsditch. 
In his boyhood he displayed unusual zest for learning, and his 
precocity offered his father hope of seeing his son on the woolsack. 
Later in life he delighted to recall how before he was breeched he 
had run home from an aimless walk and installed himself in a 
huge chair to read Rapin's History of England. But he found 
that it was a history of throat cutting on the largest scale for 
the sake of plunder, the throat cutting and plundering being 
placed at the summit of virtues. He recalled his early " pain 
of sympathy." He began at the age of three to learn French 
under the tutorship of M. La Combe d'Avigon, with whom he 
read Fenelon 's Telt~maque. His father had carefully kept from 
him any diverting book. His study list was excessively dull ; 
Telemaque consequently had an early and strong influence on 
his receptive mind. 

When he was seven years old he was sent to a typical 18th 
century scholastic penitentiary, Westminster School. He found 
little happiness here. '' The instruction was wretched ; the 
fagging system was a horrid despotism ; the games he found 
beyond his strength.'' In spite of his diminutive size, his ability 
inspired respect and enabled him to escape the birch. Already 
young Jeremy was known as the "Philosopher," and his 
delighted father pompously indicated to him the path to greatness.-" 
If you mean to rise catch hold of the skirts of those 
above you and care nothing for those who are beneath you." 

At the age of 12, he left Westminster, and following the 
routine canalised by ease he entered as commoner in one of the 
most exclusive and consequently one of the idlest colleges at 
Oxford-Queens.· His strictures on Oxford but corroborate the 
accounts of Wesley, Adam Smith, and Gibbon. " The mornings, 
he noted, '\\<ere spent in useless routine, the evenings in playing 
cards.'' He found the streets of Oxford '' paved with perjury,'' 
for although he was excused the oaths to the Church of England 


4 
uth, h f lt th in in erity bitterly, 
sight of several 
· of h re y. 

entury 

J r my but refle ted the leisured 
h h wa born. The '45 was still 


5 

18th Century Policies. 

The 18th Century has a numbing sense of void after the 
vitality of the 17th, for its tolerance was the result of apathy and 
not of conviction, and even its sympathy had to seek a selfish 
veneer. It began with an assertion of the contractual nature of 
Government, and it ended with struggle to assert natural rights. 
Yet never were the logical consequences of these assumptions 
more openly violated. " Everything for the people, and nothing 
by them '' was the maxim of Frederick the Great and Bishop 
Horsley echoed : " The people have nothing to do with the laws 
but to obey them.'' The English as pioneers in tyrannicide were 
aggressively proud of their '' Matchless Constitution '' created 
by a '' Glorious Rebellion,'' and its praise by Montesquieu and 
De Lolme confirmed them in the self righteous optimism which 
made any reform hopeless. For in theory the English constitution 
was the only legitimate one in existence. It alone was based 
on a sacred contract of King and People; it made provision for 
the Separation of Powers which was the only true guarantee of 
liberty; it gave sanction to the Natural Rights of Life, Liberty 
and Property, which were the raison d'etre of every true government. 
Criticism both sound and cynical had already begun to 
undermine this elaborate structure. De Lolme had pointed out 
the ease with which interested apologists confused the actual 
with the ideal. The cynical and corrupt Fox had sneeringly 
remarked how the Right to Rebellion, the very basis of the Constitution, 
had to be presented as potentially possible to the 
Governors alone, for to the governed it had to be made impossible. 
Above all the sceptical and corrosive mind of Hume had taken an 
unnatural delight in destroying what was at once an intellectual 
error and a Whig fetish. 

But the Century of Individual Rights was also the Century of 
Enlightened Despotism. Bolingbroke's Patriot King, stripped of 
the selfish motive which inspired its author, was the pale and 
attenuated replica of the Philosophic Autocrats of the age. 

Government was for and not by the people, but Englishmen 
in no way accepted the political creed of Tyranny. If the tradition 
of Locke and its new version by Rousseau showed, in Acton 's 
words, that " not the devil but St. Thomas Aquinas was the first 
Whig " an indigenous English historical school, led by Cartwright 
and Benjamin Vaughan, Hollis and Sawbridge, opposed 
the Divine Right of Kings with the Divine Right of the Individual 
and appealed to histori;al precedent to justify the concrete liberties 
of Englishmen as opposed to the Natural Liberty of Man. But 
a long period of office had converted even the Whig Party to an 
unquestioned acceptance of the status quo, and by a swing of 
the party pendulum George Ill. had brought to power their rivals, 


6 

who, if they had given up their idol, had not abandoned their 
idolatry. 

In the background of these conflicting theories the Industrial 
and Agrarian Revolutions were changing the face of England, 
and these gave force to the mechanical and optimistic outlook 
which pervaded the Age. Man was at last controlling nature; 
he could measure its forces, and subordinate it to his purpose. 
Why should he not extend the same mental attitude to the Social 
Sciences? The legislator would then be akin to the inventor, for 
he could control the individual through his egoism, he could 
mould Society through its self seeking. Benthamism consists in 
the application of mechanical formulre to the solution of the 
problems of Ethics and Politics. 

If these were the main forces acting on Bentham, his wide 
reading supplied him with the mental equipment, which enabled 
him to translate a vague influence into a dynamic force. For he 
was above all a synchronistic thinker, a genius in method, rather 
than an innovator in ideas. From Helvetius he adopted the conception 
that Man as a moral being was the product of the social 
atmosphere of the society to which he belonged. But, insisted 
Bentham, Who created this social atmosphere? Was it not the 
Legislator? By rewards and punishments he could evoke such 
conduct as he desired. The Lawgiver moulded human behaviour 
and harmonised human passions for the public good. With Law 
so potent, Bentham early aspired to create good laws in order !o 
make g ood men. 

The growing humanity of the " Brutal Century " no less 
influenced him. The sympathy which sought expression in the 
anti-slavery agitation and in the growing care of the poor, in the 
desire to reform the prisons and to soften the rigours of !he 
criminal Jaw, he felt intensely.. But his creed opposed any 
structure based on so subjective a foundation as pity. Beccaria 
supplied him with the requisite test. The reason for the cruelty 
of criminal legislation was that it was based on the principle of 
sympathy and antipathy. Men were punished according to no 
logical scale of values, but simply because their crimes were 
hated. But each man hated different crimes with a different 
intensity. If public welfare were taken as the aim and standard 
of punishment then barbarity would disappear from law, and 
crime would be punished with mathematical accuracy according as 
it retarded much or little the social good. 

Priestly and Hume taught him that tht! aim of government was 
the greatest .good of the greatest number. This gave him the 
clue to the labyrinth of Jaw. No longer was it to be " learning " 
painfully acquired. It was to become a Science, having a few 
rigid axioms on which government could be easily con tructed. 
Thoroughly secular in outlook, he threv\· overboard every 


7 


theological assumption as to the ongm and destiny of society. 
Hating complexity as the ally of confused thinking, he at once 
discarded the English dispensations of a Mixed Constitution and 
a Division of Powers. Obsessed with the Ideal of Utility, he 
swept away the Theory of Contract, as being untenable historically 
and useless philosophically. Government ought to be built 
on one foundation, the greatest good of the ,greatest number. 

His acute mind had at once seen through Blackstone's 
penegyric, but only after a long delay did there appear in 1776 
his " Fragment on Government," a penetrating criticism of the 
'' Commentaries.'' Blackstone, he contended, had carried the 
ingenuity of the hireling advocate into the chair of a Professor. 
That his criticisms were forceful was universally recognised, and 
rumour at once ascribed the book to the greatest legal intellects 
of the time, to Camden, to Mansfield. But his father, glad 
beyond control that the erudition of his son was at last receiving 
public recognition, proclaimed his authorship. Immediately the 
author and the book sank back to obscurity, and Bentham again 
busied himself with his reading and experiments till, five years 
later, Lord Shelbourne called upon the author of the 
" Fragments " to invite him to Bowood, a great and historic 
centre of English political life. 

Patronage was dying, mortally wounded by the courageous 
letter of Dr. Johnson to Lord Chesterfield. Bentham, moreover, 
had little need of the patronage of wealth. There was, therefore, 
little of servility in the relationship between these two men. 
He was nevertheless deeply grateful. At Bowood he met the 
great political figures of t11e age-Camden, Mansfield, Dunning, 
Pitt, Price, Romilly, a powerful group whom he hoped to 
indoctrinate with the creed of utility. He was surprised, however, 
to meet with such vehement opposition. A Tory, he thought 
that he had only to tell the governors the good they could do, for 
them to carry it out. But his doctrine, in the words of Leslie 
Stephen, " seemed to some a barren truism, to others a mere 
epigram, and to some a dangerous falsehood,'' and feeling helpless 
to break the complacency of his countrymen, in 1783, he left 
for Russia, where his brother Samuel was working on the estates 
of Prince Potemkin at Critchoff. A failure as he apparently was, 
he nevertheless dreamed of himself as the founder of Scientific f 
Legislation. " What Bacon was to the physical world, Helvetius 
was to the Moral; the Moral world has therefore had its Bacon, 
but its Newton was yet to come." Bentham aspired to fill the 
gap. He spent two years in Russia elaborating his ideas. Under 
the spur of Pitt's revenue schemes, he sent home his " Defence 
of Usury," which extorted the high encomium of his master 
Adam Smith. It was only on the earnest appeal of one of his 
early disciples, George Wilson, stating that a Churchman and 


8 

Dean of Carlyle (Paley) had plagiarized his ideas tn . his 
" Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy " that Bentham 
returned, and in 1789, on the very eve of the Revolution, there 
appeared his Magnum Opus, '' An Introduction to the Principles 
of Morals and Legislation.'' 

BENTHAM AND THE FI~ENCH REVOLUTION. 

The French Revolution has been treated either as a hysterical 
outburst of passion or as an organised conspiracy against Society. 
Yet the passion and faith of France in travail sent sympathetic 
thrills through Europe and traditional English party life was 
submerged in the emotions it raised. The Whigs, now a party 
without a creed, joined the Tories in defence of the past, and 
when an infectious logic reared in Britain an Edinburgh and a 
London Convention, Whigs and Tories became allies in defence 
of present wrongs. Burke became the prophet of reaction, and 
England the prop of monarchy and obscurantism. Pitt and Panic 
governed the realm. Bentham had no love for the past. With 
Voltaire he agreed that history was but a record of human folly 
and human wrong; with Raynal that no people can be free, if it 
respected the memory of its chains. He believed intensely in new 
beginnings. He saw in Revolution no sin against organic continuity. 
Tory although he was, he sympathised with the French. 
But to the calm calculator of human weakness, the impassioned 
oratory of the New Assembly was itself offensive. In vain he 
pointed out the difficulty of building a social structure on Natural 
Rights; the example of America and the teaching of Rousseau 
had made this the political orthodoxy of the period, and 
Bentham was disregarded. Above all, his legal training, his 
Tory sympathies and the teaching of Hume, had instilled into him 
a reverent respect for Security. Bentham saw the distinctive 
index of civilisation in order. The French found the cry of order 
and security, the swan song of threatened privilege and wrong. 
Bentham turned away in despair from his new hope, and opened 
his house as a hospice for French refugees. But in spite of his 
passive hostility he yet saw in France the most opportune field 
for his social experiments. England had been an encouraging 
culture for mechanical invention in search of wealth, but the 
" deep slumber of a decided opinion " had rendered social invention 
impossible. Politics have even ceased to be, in the words of 
Maine, " an eternal cricket match between blue and yellow," for 
the frenzy of Burke had infected both party teams, and coercive 
acts made slumber a patriotic duty.

To France, Bentham turned in hope. To La Rochefaucauld, 
to Mirabeau, to Brissot, he sent tract after tract. His " Essay 
on I? ~presentation " was followed by one on " Political Tactics." 


9 

This was succeeded by a '' Project of a Code for the organisation 
of the Judidal System of France." This again by a " Project 
on the Panopticon," and lastly an appeal, " Emancipate your 
Colonies.'' The young Benthamite circle und.er Romilly drew 
up an " Essay on Procedure for the use of the National 
Assembly." But the reply of awakened Nationalism was 
decisive. " Nous ne sommes pas des Anglais, et nous n'avons 
besoin des Anglais." With the amiable simplicity of the recluse 
he offered to become the unpaid gaoler of France during the 
Reign of Terror if only he could experiment with his new pet 
prison, the Panopticon; but Madam La Guillotine beat him in 
open competition. The star of Rousseau outshone that of 
Bentham. Natural Rights still overshadowed utility. But the 
French were not ungrateful. Having thrown the head of a 
King as a challenge to European kingship, they were thankful 
for any helpful gesture, and in 1792 they accorded to Bentham, 
'' the benefactor of the human race,'' the title of French Citizen. 

He had now reached middle age, and except to a small legal 
circle he was almost unknown. The wave of Revolution had 
engulfed his doctrine. Chief Justices Braxfield and Eyre had 
declared it treasonable to question the divine perfection of the 
English Constitution; the French had responded to the warm 
rays of justice and equity, and had been unmoved by the cold 
although luminous appeal of egoism and utility. Most men 
would have been content to enjoy passively the mundane delights 
of good health and financial ease. But Bentham's inventive 
factulty gave him no peace. He turned again to the English 
Government with wonderful schemes of domestic utility and legal 
simplification. In 1795 he sent to the Ministry his '' Protest 
against the Law Taxes." To the boast that the English Law 
Courts were open to all, Horne Tooke had retorted that like the 
tavern they were open to all who could pay. Bentham desired to 
remove this stain from English justice and to prevent lawyers 
becoming merely fee gatherers. In the same year he propounded 
a scheme of Death Duties in his pamphlet, " Escheat versus 
Taxation.'' In 1797 he sent to Arthur Young's Annals of Agriculture 
a solution of the Poor Law Problem which later found 
expression in the Poor Law of 1834. In 1798 he was busy with 
Colquhoun drafting a scheme for the reform of the London Police. 
In 1799 he came out with a scheme, which he submitted to 
Cobbett's Peter Porcupine, on the Population Bill, the suggestions 
of which were adopted in the following year in taking the first 
Census. An astonishing fertility in mechanical and social invention 
on the basis of the " greatest happiness principle " was his 
inexhaustible gift and peculiar contribution to society. In 1830, 
two years before his death, Talleyrand paid the compliment to 
his intellectual resources, " Though all the world has stolen from 
him he remains still rich.'' 


10 

His Philosophy. 
Bentham's philosophy possesses the symmetry and narrowness 
of simplicity. In the common man he found the ource of 
all social action, and for the common man he erected the social 
tructure of the State. He dismissed as mysticism the idea that 
society was anything but a collection of individuals. It possessed 
no entity of its own, no purpo e of its own, no idea of its own, 
apart from the individuals who compos d it. The ultimate unit 
wa alway the individual, to whom tradition or social purpo e 
was remot in compari on with hi d ire for pleasure and his 
avoidan e of pain. Seeing in the individual the source of all 
endeavour and th hope of all improvement, Bentham ~as led 
to an analysis of his mentality. Upon this psychological assumption 
he erect d his ethical and legal edifice. He begins, in his 
" Introduction to Morals and Legi lation," " Nature has pia ed 
mankind und r the governance of two sovereign masters, pain 
and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought 
to do as well as to determine what we shall do. . . . '' Consequently 
he deduced, " Those acts are good which cause pleasure, 
those acts are bad which cause pain.... No motive is in it elf 
either moral or immoral; all human instin ts are equally natu ral. " 
The different valuations placed on loyalty and treachery, greed 
and charity, love and hate, are ba ed on no common objective 
tandard. M n ar by natur egoist , therefore on egoism is 
society to be built. There i a po itiv and objective science of 
mind, and on this government i -to b er cted. There was 
equally a S ien of Law, the aim of whi h was the greatest 
happine s of the gr at st number. The raison d'etre of every 
1 g i Iative a t is its utility. By ·areful mathematical calculation 
th ov reign ould, by the u e of an lions (phy ical, political, 
moral, religion. ), harmoni e the clashing pas ions of his subjects. 
The ov reign therefor created th Moral Order of the State; it 

•.va h • who mad~ po ~ible the Equilibrium of Interests demanded 
by human a ociation. oriety was the artificial creation of his 
labour. The 18th century enlightened De pot is still visible in 
the S hool of Utility. Bentham, a true de cendant of Hobbe , 
still saw in the overeign '' The common p w r to keep them in 
aw .'' 
Th rea oned cal ulu of the Law :Vlaker could best be 
secured by follo~ing, during thi voyag of discovery in search 
of th great t happiness of hi ubjects, four brilliant stars of 
d cending magnitude. ecurity, ' ub i t n' , Abundance, 
Equality. That B ntham' Tory philo ophy aw in security the 
chief road to happin s is no matt r for urpri e. Subsistence 
and Abundan e wer Bentham's tribut to the population di cus


ion th n raging. Equality was not th lea t worth triving for; 
it was the least attainable; all that could be done was to diminish 


II 

inequality. The Sovereign might secure fraternity but not 
equality. The doctrine of utility was as yet no egalitarian creed. 

The full revolutionary implication of Bentham 's creed became 
apparent, only when new social conditions synchronized with a 
demand for a new theory. Bentham and his disciples did no more 
than direct the diffused contemporary thought along well defined 
logical lines. They worked out a small stock of leading ideas in 
their minutest applications. 

The year 1808 saw the rise of a new dawn. Reaction itself 
was wearying. The famous Westminster Election of 1807-in 
Bentham's constituency-returned to Parliament Burdett and 
Cochrane. The Cevallos article having made the Edinburgh 
Review Whig, the Tories started in opposition the Quarterly 
Review,. Byron, Shelley, and Keats took up freedom's lyre which 
had fallen from the hands of Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge. 
Above all, by a turn of the war tide, England became the ally 
both of the cherished Nationalism and of the threatened liberty 
<Jf Europe against the Napoleonic despotism. In the same year 
Bentham met James Mill, and Utilitarianism passed from a 
legal aspiration to a political dogma. For " if Bentham gave to 
Mill a doctrine, Mill gave to Bentham a school.'' 

Utility and Democracy. 
An old man of 60 now became the Patriarch of English 
Radicalism. As a Tory, Bentham had failed to convince the 
Tory rulers. Applying his philosophy to the political situation, 
he was amazed at the simple solution he found. The governmental 
clique simply sought its own happiness and not that of the community. 
In the very nature of things every group, like every 
individual, sought its own pleasure. Consequently the legal corporation, 
the clerical corporation, the aristocratic corporation were 
" sinister interests " with selfish desires which were inimical to 
Society. In law, in politics, in religion, the final test of goodness 
was the promotion of the greatest happiness of the greatest 
number, the final court of appeal was the public good. How then 
was it possible to reconcile the apparently conflicting interests of 
Government and Society? 
The utilitarian answer to this vital question is hazy. It was 
useless to reply with Bentham that " in me somehow selfishness 
has taken the form of benevolence,'' for no Benthamite could 
logically accept a subjective solution. Here Benthamism remains 
inherently a self contradictory creed. It postulated an individual 
with appetites and aversions; the problem remained how to 
organise him in Society. Two solutions presented themselves. 
Mandeville in his " Fable of the Bees," with his brilliant paradox 
that '' Private vices are public virtues,' ' has suggested one. Each 


12 

man by following his own selfish desires, somehow without any 
external co-ordinating body, contributed to the well being of the 
Commonweal. This solution was carried to its logical conclusion 
by the economists and applied ruthlessly to an Industrial Society. 
Adam Smith had shown how each person by close specialisation 
and constant search for private gain contributed to and created 
thereby an industrial harmony. Laissez Faire became the cry 
of the economists, and relying on the self-acting automaton of 
greed, they excluded government from their society. Ricardo, 
Mill, McCulloch, all good Benthamites, could so draw a distinction 
between Government and People and agree with the 
medirevalism of Paine that Society exists for our needs, Government 
because of our vices. Shelbourne with the curious English 
trait of finding a religious basis for commercial motive saw this 
period as the " Era of Protestantism " in the realm of commerce. 
As late as the sixties, Cobden could therefore interpret Free Trade 
as the " International Law of the Almighty," and " Government 
as a standing conspiracy to rob and bamboozle.'' 

But another solution presented itself, that of the Tory Bentham. 
He, too, saw in the individual the font of all fruitful progress, his 
egoism the source of all hope; but if egoisms clashed, chaos not 
harmony, would result. He therefore sought to create a despotic 
sovereign power, who by sanctions would harmonise opposing 
egoisms in the interests of the greatest happiness of the greatest 
number. But now the law maker himself was a sinister interest, 
intent on his own pleasure. Somehow Government was e!5sential 
to Society, and yet it was its danger. In the sphere of law and 
politics, Bentham found the ultimate solution in Representative 
Democracy; in the sphere of Economics no solution presented 
itself to him. Maine's criticism ·of his master is fundamentally 
just, he injured his creed in proportion as he went beyond legal 
reform. 

Bentham had also suffered personally from the Tory Government. 
Howard, " who lived as an apostle and died a martyr," 
had in vain urged the reform of our prisons. The afpeal found a 
sympathetic response in Bentham, and sympathy .:Lility and 
mechanical genius combined to produce the Panopticon. This 
prison was to be a miniature society, with the gaoler as lawgiver, 
and the prisoners his subjects. With complete detail he 
presented his scheme to Pitt and Dundas. But in England, as 
in France, Bentham was cruelly disappointed. The Ministry was 
too busy with the war; difficulties arose over the site. At length, 
when he had spent his fortune, the whole scheme was cancelled. 
Public opinion rightly objected to the enormous power given to 
the gaoler, even if it was to his self interest to use it beneficently. 
Bentham was brokenhearted. 


13 

The Prophet of Democracy. 
Chiefly as the " Panopticon man " was he known to the public 
till 1808. Like so many Englishmen of the period, he appeared to 
his contemporaries obsessed with one idea, as Spence was with 
his Agrarian Communism, as Owen was with his scheme of 
Moral Regeneration in Square Villages. Now he accepted the 
logical conclusions of his creed, and became the Prophet of 
Democratic Citizenship, attacking privileged incapacity in every 
quarter, claiming that Institutions exist for man, not man for 
Institutions. In 1809 there appeared his " Catechism of Parliamentary 
Reform." Representative Democracy was to be the 
bridge between the Sovereign and the People; it was the link 
between the interests of the Governor and the governed; it was 
the machinery whereby Government, in the interest of the greatest 
number, could be applied to modern states. Bentham thus joined 
hands with Cartwright, his old opponent and a relic of 18th 
century radicalism, in the demand for universal suffrage. Through 
Mill he made the acquaintance of Francis Place, and the ex-tailor 
became the political agent of the new sect. There gravitated to 
his school all the bolder spirits of the age, Hume, Brougham, 
Ricardo, O'Connell; Bickersteth brought together Bentham and 
Burdett, and the latter's demand for Reform in the House from 
1818 onward was the political expression of Bentham's creed. 
The doctrine spread, sown broadcast through Wooler's " Black 
Dwarf,'' 'and Hone's '' Reformer's Register,'' and the old man 
of 70 watched with glee his life work at last bearing fruit. 
For not only was Bentham becoming a force at home, but 
abroad his fame had spread far. He had early sought a translator 
of his works. At Bowood he had found Dumont, a man of 
wide experience, as Protestant Pastor at Geneva and St. Petersburg, 
and he had secured his services. Their joint success was 
beyond all expectation. In 1802 there had appeared " Traite's 
de Legislation Civile et Penale," and the reputation of Bentham 
spread from Moscow to Madrid. The Czar, Alexander I., 
solicited his help to codify Russian Law. The liberators of South 
America, Miranda, Jose del Valle, Bolivar, Santadar, all courted 
the world's law-maker for utilitarian constitutions. His house 
became the rendezvous of the world's freedom seekers, and 
Bentham toiled all day creatjng utilitarian codes for peoples 
struggling to be free. 

Bentham as Education and Poor Law Reformer. 

British problems again claimed his attention. Pious and 
saintly souls had attributed the world upheaval to the ungodly 
teaching of Voltaire and Paine, and there grew up a pietistic 
movement to defend the status quo in the name of the church. 


The clergy bartered their souls in becoming the moral police 
force of the State; having a vested interest in the Establishment 
they now became a sinister interest to an aggressive party. The 
struggle focussed itself round education, and in Bell's National 
Schools the faithful were to be taught Christian resignation as 
the subjects of a secular state. But English nonconformity was 
too deeply rooted to be thus ignored, and the Lancastrian Schools 
opposed the orthodox teaching in the name of Christian truth. 
The Benthamites entered into the fray. They recognised the 
potency of education in the formation of character; in their hands 
it was to be an instrument to drill the nation in utilitarian politics 
and economics. Mill, Place, Wakefield, Brougham joined iu 
founding the British and Foreign School Society, while Mill had 
launched the attack in his " Schools for all, not for Churchmen 
only." Bentham heartily co-operated, and he elaborated a new 
educational programme in his '' Chrestomathia. '' The curriculum 
embraced all " useful " subjects. The classics could not 
be included, and thus there began the controversy as to the 
merits of a Classical as compared with a Modern education. 
Bentham helped to frame Broughton 's resolutions for Universal 
Secular State Education in the House in 1820, and he inspired 
his disciple Roebuck, so effectively that during the clash of 
measures in 1833 the Benthamite appeal for instruction in 
citizenship was still heard. 

The utilitarian interest in education was however not anticlerical 
in origin. It sprang from a deeper and older source. 
The roots of English state education are embedded in the Poor 
Law, and the State care of the poor had then become the object 
of grave enquiry. All hope of improvement, every vista of escape 
for the labouring poor, had been choked up by the Malthusian 
Law of Population. Competition appeared as much a law of 
biological necessity as of industrial well-being. If vice and misery 
were the consequence of the Biblical ordinance to replenish the 
earth, humanity demanded that the labourers should be taught 
dignity and continence. The School of Bentham incorporated the 
teaching of Malthus, and demanded State education as part of 
the machinery of utility in order to teach the workers of England 
sobriety and self help. Moreover, a philosophy based on a 
calculus of pleasure and pain assumed that each man knew his 
own interests. The social fabric was only possible on this 
assumption. The Benthamites aimed by state education at teaching 
citizens what their true interests were. 

Bentham and Post War Britain. 

In 1815 the war passed away, but prosperity did not arrive. 
Thwarted hopes and appalling social distress found vent in riots 


IS 


which threat~ned the foundation of the State. A stringent coercive 
policy appeared to be the only bulwark of society. Bentham, a 
landed proprietor and an ex-Tory, appealed to the Tory 
governors to mitigate their ferocity. " Radicalism not 
Dangerous," in 1820 completed his political apostacy and captured 
the country. For the former opponent of Natural Rights 
had by a circuitous route alighted in their camp, and was now 
advocating their own conclusions. 

Bentham, however, demanded universal suffrage and representative 
democracy, not as the superstructure to a society based 
in the Rights of Man, but as the machinery by which to identify 
the interests of people and government. He saw the close relation 
that existed between Law and the interests of a dominant 
class; ,by majority rule he sought to harmonise the conflicting 
interests in the body politic in the interests of all. Utility 
demanded that every human being should be considered as of 
equal legal value, that legislative power should depend not on 
prop\!rty but on humanity, that a public office was _a public trust. 
Rousseau and Bentham, so antagonistic in basic ideas, joined 
hands in their conclusions. 

For the next 12 years Bentham was the outstanding International 
figure in the realm of law and politics. Every 
struggling Liberal cause found in him a sympathetic guide. 
Spanish nationalists and Portuguese constitutionalists appealed 
to him for advice. He became one of the foremost members of 
the Greek Committee. He made codes for Morocco and Egypt. 
To President Maddison he sent his Panomion a Code of universal 
validity. In 1823 he made a world-wide appeal to any nation 
desiring a Code, and he proclaimed his own credentials as a 
law-maker, for publicity was the soul of utility. 

In England, if he was more than ever a recluse, he was 
becoming more than ever a force. He began what was to be his 
chef d'reuvre, his Constitutional Code, and his vision of a future 
~ociety is portrayed in this uncompleted work. His conclusions 
\vere startling. For the representation of interests or property 
he substituted representation of Man.... He abolished 
Monarchy as being incompatible with the identity of interests 
between governor and g overned. He abolished the House of 
Lords, because it was an aristocratic corporation. He appealed 
for a uni-cameral legislature 'based on universal suffrage, on 
equality of voting power, on the secret ballot, and on annual 
elections. He organised responsibility by the publication of 
debates and division lists, and by a constant appeal to the tribunal 
of public opinion. He created new government departments of 
Internal Communication, Indig-ence and Relief, Education and 
Health. He demanded a Public Defender. He instituted corn



J6 

petitive examinations for the recruitment of the civil servtce. He 
proposed centralised control over local administration. Above 
all, he insisted that law should be made only by the recognised 
public organs and not by Judge & Co. in their own interests, for 
Law was made for society, not for lawyers. His code was thus 
a charter of emancipation from lawyercraft and kingcraft, and 
his unfailing optimism saw it as the force to heal the world of 
the future. 

Bentham had been gifted from youth with a capacity for intellectual 
domination. He now achieved the intellectual conquest 
of England. But as in all faiths, each priest soon interpreted the 
Master's teaching in a different light. The economists emphasised 
the harmony arrived at through self-seeking without any 
social control; the early English socialists insisted on Government 
carrying out its function of securing the greatest happiness 
of the greatest number. The rift within the creed was, 
however, not at once apparent. The orthodox Benthamitcs saw 
in Government only a sinister interest, interpreted freedom only 
as removal of legal restraint. It was against the advocacy of a 
barren freedom and an unequal individualism that the finer 
mmds of the 19th century railed. In Carlyle's scathing words: 
' ' it was a scavenger age, appealing for Horse Hood and Dog 
Hood Suffrage," while " Sir Jabesh Windbags was being elected 
to power by the -temporary hallelujahs of flunkeys." To Ruskin 
the ennobling of greed as an essential element in the state made 
for lllth, not Wealth. 

But in Bentham's lifetime, the divergence was neither so 
apparent nor so wide, and a growing apostolate spread his doctrine. 
In 1821, James Mill founded the Political Economy Club. 
In 1823, the Younger Mill, in nurture the finest offspring of the 
new creed, founded the Utilitarian Society for the junior disciples. 
It included amongst it numbers, Prescott, Wm. Eyton Tooke, 
Wm. Ellis, Graham, Roebuck, Grote, Austin. They met in the 
Master's house, they studied his works and confronted the 
I )wenitcs and Spenceans with ruthless logic, and achieved their 
own political education and graduated as the future leaders of 
public opinion, under the guidance of Bentham himself. In 
1823 Bentham appealed to a wider circle by starting the Westminster 
Review. His disciples enthusiastically answered the call 
of Campbell and became the founders of the new secular Univer· 
!>ity of London. They supported the struggling Mechanics Institutes. 
Of disciples there was now no end-Chadwick, Soutbwood 
Smith, Charles Hay Cameron, James Deacon Hume, Wakefield, 
Buller, Hodgskin, and even O'Connell. In vain the Tories, now 
by the swing of events transformed into a doctrinaire party, 
inveighed against the Professors of the Arts Babbletive and 
Scribbletive. Bentham effectively replied in his Book of Fallacie . 


17 

Thi effected by sarcasm what reason could not accomplish, and 
he followed-up his attack by a trenchant onslaught on the ally 
of Toryism, the Established Church. " Not Paul but Jesus" 
was a counterblast to the whole clerical hierarchy, and, working 
with George Grote, they together produced under the pseudonym 
of Philip Beauchamp the " Analysis of the influence of Natural 
Religion on the temporal happiness of mankind." Using 
Benthamite language they attacked God as a sinister interest, 
His Power as an unconstitutional despolism, and the whole 
clerical hierarchy as a corporation opposed by interest to truth. 
The Tory mind saw the Church as the spiritual facet of Society 
slowly adapting itself to human needs, the Bent!Jamitcs s<~w it 
as only a creation of Priestcraft, and they demanded the complete 
disestablishment and disendowment of the Church. But 
in his ,attack on this tradition, Bentham did not carry all his 
school with him. Wm. Alien, the whole Clapham sect, even 
his own secretary Bowring, held aloof, while by the irony of 
history the Neo-Catholic movement was just then being founded 
in Bentham's old university as a protest against the mechanical 
and rational outlook of the age. His prestige nevertheless 
coloured the whole of the democratic movement, and it gave force 
to the tradition, long maintained, and hardly yet eradicated, of 
the necessary alliance between irreligion and democracy, anti-
clericalism and Radical thought. 

More effective was his influence on the new Colonial life of 
Greater Britain, and the former author of " Emancipate your 
Colonies " made public recantation as the need for social control 
and scientific law-making became urgent in England's dependtncies. 
In India his influence was exceptionally profound. 
James Mill was at the India Office. SilK Buckingham and Col. 
Young, two ardent disciples, were in India. Macaulay, a 
Utilitarian malgre lui, and Charles Hay Cameron, his colleague, 
a militant Benthamite, were soon to apply his legal and education 
principles on an alien soil. Bentinck on his appointment 
as Governor-General wrote with due humility, " I am going to 
British India, but I shall not be Governor-General. It is you 
will be Governor-General." Bentham with less modesty agreed. 
" One day I shall be the legislative power in India, 20 years 
after my death I shall reign there as despot." It was to Bentham 
that Edward Gibbon Wakefield came for aid to draw up his 
scheme for scientific colonisatiocy, and the former author of " The 
Panopticon versus New South Wales" wrote as he saw the 
success of his plans, '' I am reconciled to the loss of the Panopticon 
when I think of the mass of happiness that is being created 
there.'' The Magna Charta of Colonial Self-Government, the 

Durham Report, had for its chief author two Benthamites, Wake


field and Buller. 


18 

English Socialism also owes an inestimable debt of gratitude 
to the almost mythical exponent of stern individualism. With 
Owen, he possessed the bond of a common philanthropy, but 
Hodgskin was his secretary, and in his " Labour Defended,'' 
Hodgskin attacked, not Bentham, but Mill and Ricardo, with 
Utilitarian arguments based on the assumption that the very 
goal of government was the greatest happiness of its citizens. 
The political and economic strands began to diverge, but although 
patent enough in John Stuart Mill, the divergence was as yet 
dimly perceived. Wm. Thompson, his disciple, condemned the 
existing system of distribution on Utilitarian ethics, and claimed 
the teaching of Bentham as its effective reproof. Charles Hall 
advocated Progressive Taxation from Benthamite axioms. In 

J. S. Mill the struggle between traditional individualism and 
logical state action became painfully apparent, and he ended by 
advocating compulsory state education, and the social control 
over socially created values from Benthamite premises. The 
curious paradox that individual freedom, in the realm of labour 
as in the realm of law, could only be obtained by increased social 
control, ultimately made Mill declare himself a Socialist. 
In his extreme old age, Bentham was the venerated head of 
a brilliant body of disciples; he slill lived in his " hermitage" 
<1t Queen Square Place; he still toiled away at his Constitutional 

ode. His life had been singularly happy; he had never endured 
pain he had never suffered want. In his veneration of precision 
he had invented a new jargon, but he has been as felicitous in 
some of his verbal inventions as in his social inventions; and the 
terms maximiz , minimize, codification, international, have been 
of inestimable value to clear political thinking. 

In 1832, two days before the passing of the Reform Bill, to 
which he had contributed so much, he died in his " Hermitage." 
To avoid giving them grief, he sent his younger disciples away; 
he only asked to minimize pain. He bequeathed his body to 
science. Dr. Southwood Smith pronounced the funeral oration. 

Of Bentroam, it can faithfully be said, that his best monument 
is the record of social effort in the 19th Century. His ministry 
of love embraced every sentient creature. He had opposed all 
brutal sports, cockfighting, bull baiting, fox hunting. " The 
question is not," said he, " can they talk, can they reason, but 
can they suffer?" He had espoused the cause of every suffering 
class; he had advocated freedom for every struggling people, 
he had fought for every persecuted sect. But his scientific mind 
saw in pity a force which did not lend itself to calculation and 
legislation; he attempted therefore to cement a psychologicalhedonism with utilitarian altruism. If his psychology was premature, 
he nevertheless made potent a method of submitting everyinstitution and very belief to the pitile archlight of utility. 


Before the_question, "Vvhat was the good of it?" incapacity, 

jobbery, nepotism slunk away. 

If he was irreverent, it was because holy things had become 

corrupt, if he became a rebel, it was because authority had become 

irresponsible. His vision of society as a group of rational 

political equals cut athwart every conception of a social hierarchy. 

He shattered the theory that Kingcraft was government, that 

Priestcraft was the church. By substituting a teleological for a 

merely analytical conception of political obligation, he created 

a basis for judging the value of any government in its effects 

on the happiness of the ordinary man. 

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. 

Bentham's Works were edited by Sir John Bowring, in eleven 
thick volumes, 1843, which may be found in various public 
libraries. " A fragment on Government " was re-edited by 


F. C. Montague, 1891, Oxford University Press, 7s. 6d.; and 1, 
the " Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation " r"' 
was republished in 1879, Clarendon Press, 7s. 6d. For description 
and criticisms of Bentham's work, see " The English Utilitarians," 
by Sir Leslie Stephen, 1900 ; and report of the lecture 
by Professor Graham Wallas on Jeremy Bentham in the "Political 
Science Outlook," March, 1923. 
·ATKINSON, C. M.-" Jeremy Bentham, His Life." Methuen. 

1905. 5s. 

DAVIDSON, W. L.-" Political Thought in England from Bentham 

to Mill." Williams & Norgate. (Home University Library.) 

2s. 

HALEVY, EuE.-" La Formation du Radicalisme Philosophique." 

McCuNN, J.-" Jeremy Bentham m Six Radical Thinkers." 
Arnold. 3s. 6d. 


PHILLIPSON, C.-" Jeremy Bentham m Three Criminal Law 
Reformers.'' Dent. 18s. 


STEPHEN, LESLIE.-" The Utilitarians," Vol I. Duckworth. 
7s. 6d. 


See also the Benthamite Documents in University College, 

London. 


THE FABIAN SOCIETY 

25 TOTHILL STREET, WESTMINSTER, LONDON, S.W I. 

Those wi lling to join the Labour Party, or desirous of obtaining information about its 
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The Fabian Society has been, from the outset, a constituent body of the Labour Party; 
and membership of the S ciet~ carries with it full membership of the Labour Party;
eligibility for nomination to all Conferences and Oflices, and qualification for Labour Pany,
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BASI OF THE FABIAN SOCIETY. 
(TO BE SIGNED BY ALL MEMBEHS.) 
(Adopted Mav 23rd, 1919.) 

The Fabian Society consists of Socialists. 

it therefore aims at the reorganisation of Society by the emancipation of Land and 
Industrial Capital from individual ownership, and the vesting of them in the community (orthe general benefit. In this way on ly can the natural and acquired advantages o( the 
cou~try be equitably shared by the whole people. 

The So iety accordingly works for the extinction of private property in land, with equitable 
considemtion of established expectations, and due provision as to the tenure of the home 
and the h rnestead; for tne tran,fer to the community, by constitutional methods, of all such 
industries as can be ondurted socially; and for the ~stabli>hment, as the governing considera· 
tion in the regulation o( production, distribution and service, of the common good instead o( 
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The Society is a constituent of the Labour Party and of the International Socialist 
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