Bentham's emergence was, meanwhile, very slow. The great men whom he met at Lord Lansdowne's were not specially impressed by the shy philosopher. Wedderburn, so he heard, pronounced the fatal word 'dangerous' in regard to the Fragment.[245] How, thought Bentham, can utility be dangerous? Is this not self-contradictory? Later reflection explained the puzzle. What is useful to the governed need not be therefore useful to the governors. Mansfield, who was known to Lind, said that in some parts the author of the Fragment was awake and in others was asleep. In what parts? Bentham wondered. Awake, he afterwards considered, in the parts where Blackstone, the object of Mansfield's personal 'heart-burning,' was attacked; asleep where Mansfield's own despotism was threatened. Camden was contemptuous; Dunning only 'scowled' at him; and Barré, after taking in his book, gave it back with the mysterious information that he had 'got into a scrape.'[246] The great book, therefore, though printed in 1781,[247] 'stuck for eight years,'[248] and the writer continued his obscure existence in Lincoln's Inn.[249] An opinion which he gave in some question as to the evidence in Warren Hastings's trial made, he says, an impression in his favour. Before publication was achieved, however, a curious episode altered Bentham's whole outlook. His brother Samuel (1757-1831), whose education he had partly superintended,[250] had been apprenticed to a shipwright at Woolwich, and in 1780 had gone to Russia in search of employment. Three years later he was sent by Prince Potemkin to superintend a great industrial establishment at Kritchev on a tributary of the Dnieper. There he was to be 'Jack-of-all-trades—building ships, like Harlequin, of odds and ends—a rope-maker, a sail-maker, a distiller, brewer, malster, tanner, glass-man, glass-grinder, potter, hemp-spinner, smith, and coppersmith.'[251] He was, that is, to transplant a fragment of ready-made Western civilisation into Russia. Bentham resolved to pay a visit to his brother, to whom he was strongly attached. He left England in August 1785, and stayed some time at Constantinople, where he met Maria James (1770-1836), the wife successively of W. Reveley and of John Gisborne, and the friend of Shelley. Thence he travelled by land to Kritchev, and settled with his brother at the neighbouring estate of Zadobras. Bentham here passed a secluded life, interested in his brother's occupations and mechanical inventions, and at the same time keeping up his own intellectual labours. The most remarkable result was the Defence of Usury, written in the beginning of 1787. Bentham appends to it a respectful letter to Adam Smith, who had supported the laws against usury inconsistently with his own general principles. The disciple was simply carrying out those principles to the logical application from which the master had shrunk. The manuscript was sent to Wilson, who wished to suppress it.[252] The elder Bentham obtained it, and sent it to the press. The book met Bentham as he was returning. It was highly praised by Thomas Reid,[253] and by the Monthly Review; it was translated into various languages, and became one of the sacred books of the Economists. Wilson is described as 'cold and cautious,' and he suppressed another pamphlet upon prison discipline.[254] In a letter to Bentham, dated 26th February 1787, however, Wilson disavows any responsibility for the delay in the publication of the great book. 'The cause,' he says, 'lies in your constitution. With one-tenth part of your genius, and a common degree of steadiness, both Sam and you would long since have risen to great eminence. But your history, since I have known you, has been to be always running from a good scheme to a better. In the meantime life passes away and nothing is completed.' He entreated Bentham to return, and his entreaties were seconded by Trail, who pointed out various schemes of reform, especially of the poor-laws, in which Bentham might be useful. Wilson had mentioned already another inducement to publication. 'There is,' he says, on 24th September 1786, 'a Mr. Paley, a parson and archdeacon of Carlisle, who has written a book called Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, in quarto, and it has gone through two editions with prodigious applause.' He fears that Bentham will be charged with stealing from Paley, and exhorts him to come home and 'establish a great literary reputation in your own language, and in this country which you despise.'[255] Bentham at last started homewards. He travelled through Poland, Germany, and Holland, and reached London at the beginning of February 1788. He settled at a little farmhouse at Hendon, bought a 'superb harpsichord,' resumed his occupations, and saw a small circle of friends. Wilson urged him to publish his Introduction without waiting to complete the vast scheme to which it was to be a prologue. Copies of the printed book were already abroad, and there was a danger of plagiarism. Thus urged, Bentham at last yielded, and the Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation appeared in 1789. The preface apologised for imperfections due to the plan of his work. The book, he explained, laid down the principles of all his future labours, and was to stand to him in the relation of a treatise upon pure mathematics to a treatise upon the applied sciences. He indicated ten separate departments of legislation, each of which would require a treatise in order to the complete execution of his scheme.
The book gives the essence of Bentham's theories, and is the one large treatise published by himself. The other works were only brought to birth by the help of disciples. Dumont, in the discourse prefixed to the Traités, explains the reason. Bentham, he says, would suspend a whole work and begin a new one because a single proposition struck him as doubtful. A problem of finance would send him to a study of Political Economy in general. A question of procedure would make him pause until he had investigated the whole subject of judicial organisation. While at work, he felt only the pleasure of composition. When his materials required form and finish, he felt only the fatigue. Disgust succeeded to charm; and he could scarcely be induced to interrupt his labours upon fresh matter in order to give to his interpreter the explanations necessary for the elucidation of his previous writings. He was without the literary vanity or the desire for completion which may prompt to premature publication, but may at least prevent the absolute waste of what has been already achieved. His method of writing was characteristic. He began by forming a complete logical scheme for the treatment of any subject, dividing and subdividing so as to secure an exhaustive classification of the whole matter of discussion. Then taking up any subdivision, he wrote his remarks upon sheets, which were put aside after being marked with references indicating their place in the final treatise. He never turned to these again. In time he would exhaust the whole subject, and it would then be the duty of his disciples simply to put together the bricks according to the indications placed upon each in order to construct the whole edifice.[256] As, however, the plan would frequently undergo a change, and as each fragment had been written without reference to the others, the task of ultimate combination and adaptation of the ultimate atoms was often very perplexing. Bentham, as we shall see, formed disciples ardent enough to put together these scattered documents as the disciples of Mahomet put together the Koran. Bentham's revelation was possibly less influential than Mahomet's; but the logical framework was far more coherent.
Bentham's mind was for the present distracted. He had naturally returned full of information about Russia. The English ministry were involved in various negotiations with Russia, Sweden, and Denmark, the purpose of which was to thwart the designs of Russia in the East. Bentham wrote three letters to the Public Advertiser, signed Anti-Machiavel,[257] protesting against the warlike policy. Bentham himself believed that the effect was decisive, and that the 'war was given up' in consequence of his arguments. Historians[258] scarcely sanction this belief, which is only worth notice because it led to another belief, oddly characteristic of Bentham. A letter signed 'Partizan' in the Public Advertiser replied to his first two letters. Who was 'Partizan'? Lord Lansdowne amused himself by informing Bentham that he was no less a personage than George III. Bentham, with even more than his usual simplicity, accepted this hoax as a serious statement. He derived no little comfort from the thought; for to the antipathy thus engendered in the 'best of kings' he attributed the subsequent failure of his Panopticon scheme.[259]
NOTES:
[214] Works, x. 66.
[215] Ibid. xi. 95.
[216] Works, x. 54.
[217] Ibid. i. 268 n.
[218] Works, x. 121.
[219] Ibid. i. 227.