'Men,' wrote Locke, 'being all the workmanship of one omnipotent and infinitely wise maker, all the servants of one sovereign master, sent into the world by his order and about his business; they are his property whose workmanship they are, made to last during his, not one another's, pleasure: and being furnished with like faculties, sharing all in one community of nature, there cannot be supposed any such subordination among us that may authorise us to destroy another as if we were made for one another's uses as the inferior ranks of creatures are for ours.'[[26]]
When the leaders of the American revolution sought for certainty in their argument against George the Third they too found it in the fact that men 'are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.'
Rousseau and his French followers rested these rights on a presumed social contract. Human rights stood upon that contract as the elephant upon the tortoise, though the contract itself, like the tortoise, was apt to stand upon nothing at all.
At this point Bentham, backed by the sense of humour of mankind, swept aside the whole conception of a science of politics deduced from natural right. 'What sort of a thing,' he asked, 'is a natural right, and where does the maker live, particularly in Atheist's Town, where they are most rife?'[[27]]
Bentham himself believed that he had found the standard in the fact that all men seek pleasure and avoid pain. In that respect men were measurable and comparable. Politics and jurisprudence could therefore be made experimental sciences in exactly the same sense as physics or chemistry. 'The present work,' wrote Bentham, 'as well as any other work of mine that has been or will be published on the subject of legislation or any other branch of moral science, is an attempt to extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral.'[[28]]
Bentham's standard of 'pleasure and pain' constituted in many ways an important advance upon 'natural right.' It was in the first place founded upon a universally accepted fact; all men obviously do feel both pleasure and pain. That fact was to a certain extent measurable. One could, for instance, count the number of persons who suffered this year from an Indian famine, and compare it with the number of those who suffered last year. It was clear also that some pains and pleasures were more intense than others, and that therefore the same man could in a given number of seconds experience varying amounts of pleasure or pain. Above all, the standard of pleasure and pain was one external to the political thinker himself. John Stuart Mill quotes Bentham as saying of all philosophies which competed with his Utilitarianism: 'They consist, all of them, in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept the author's sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself.'[[29]]
A 'Benthamite,' therefore, whether he was a member of Parliament like Grote or Molesworth, or an official like Chadwick, or an organising politician like Francis Place, could always check his own feelings about 'rights of property,' 'mischievous agitators,' 'spirit of the Constitution,' 'insults to the flag,' and so on, by examining statistical facts as to the numerical proportion, the income, the hours of work, and the death rate from disease, of the various classes and races who inhabited the British Empire.
But as a complete science of politics Benthamism is no longer possible. Pleasure and pain are indeed facts about human nature, but they are not the only facts which are important to the politician. The Benthamites, by straining the meaning of words, tried to classify such motives as instinctive impulse, ancient tradition, habit, or personal and racial idiosyncrasy as being forms of pleasure and pain. But they failed; and the search for a basis of valid political reasoning has to begin again, among a generation more conscious than were Bentham and his disciples of the complexity of the problem, and less confident of absolute success.
In that search one thing at least is becoming clear. We must aim at finding as many relevant and measurable facts about human nature as possible, and we must attempt to make all of them serviceable in political reasoning. In collecting, that is to say, the material for a political science, we must adopt the method of the biologist, who tries to discover how many common qualities can be observed and measured in a group of related beings, rather than that of the physicist, who constructs, or used to construct, a science out of a single quality common to the whole material world.