Tritt der Geist, der Bergesalte
Und mit seinen Götterhänden
Schützt er das gequälte Thier:
“Musst du Tod und Jammer Senden”
Ruft er “bis herauf zu mir?
Raum fur alle hat die Erde
Was verfolgst du meine Heerde?”[314]
XV.
BENTHAM. 1749–1832.
THIS great legal reformer was educated at Westminster, and at the age of thirteen proceeded to Queen’s College, Oxford. At the age of sixteen he took his first degree in Arts. The mental uneasiness with which he signed the obligatory test of the “Thirty-nine Articles” he vividly recorded in after years. At the Bar, which he soon afterwards entered, his prospects were unusually promising; but unable to reconcile his standard of ethics with the recognised morality of the Profession, he soon withdrew from it. His first publication,—A Fragment on Government, 1776—which appeared without his name, was assigned to some of the most distinguished men of the day. His next, and principal work, was his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780), not published until 1789. At this period he travelled extensively in the East of Europe. Panopticon: or the Inspection-House (on prison discipline), appeared in 1791. The Book of Fallacies (reviewed by Sidney Smith, in the Edinburgh), in which the “wisdom of our ancestors” delusion was, mercilessly exposed (1824), is the best known, and is the most lively of all his writings. Rationale of Judicial Procedure, and the Constitutional Code, are those which have had most influence in effecting legislative and judicial reform.
Bentham stands in the front rank of legal reformers; and as a fearless and consistent opponent of the iniquities of the English Criminal Law, in particular, he has deserved the gratitude and respect of all thoughtful minds. Yet, during some sixty years, he was constantly held up to obloquy and ridicule by the enemies of Reform, in the Press and on the Platform; and his name was a sort of synonym for utopianism, and revolutionary doctrine. In his own country his writings were long in little esteem; but elsewhere, and in France especially, by the interpretation of Dumont, his opinions had a wider dissemination. In Morals, the foundation of his teaching is the principle of the greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number; that other things are good or evil in proportion as they advance or oppose the general Happiness, which ought to be the end of all morals and legislation.