Autobiography
merit, an argument against primogeniture, in reply to an article then
lately published in the _Edinburgh Review_ by McCulloch. Grote also
was a contributor only once; all the time he could spare being already
taken up with his _History of Greece_. The article he wrote was on his
own subject, and was a very complete exposure and castigation of
Mitford. Bingham and Charles Austin continued to write for some time;
Fonblanque was a frequent contributor from the third number. Of my
particular associates, Ellis was a regular writer up to the ninth
number; and about the time when he left off, others of the set began;
Eyton Tooke, Graham, and Roebuck. I was myself the most frequent writer
of all, having contributed, from the second number to the eighteenth,
thirteen articles; reviews of books on history and political economy, or
discussions on special political topics, as corn laws, game laws, law of
libel. Occasional articles of merit came in from other acquaintances of
my father's, and, in time, of mine; and some of Mr. Bowring's writers
turned out well. On the whole, however, the conduct of the Review was
never satisfactory to any of the persons strongly interested in its
principles, with whom I came in contact. Hardly ever did a number come
out without containing several things extremely offensive to us, either
in point of opinion, of taste, or by mere want of ability. The
unfavourable judgments passed by my father, Grote, the two Austins, and
others, were re-echoed with exaggeration by us younger people; and as
our youthful zeal rendered us by no means backward in making complaints,
we led the two editors a sad life. From my knowledge of what I then was,
I have no doubt that we were at least as often wrong as right; and I am
very certain that if the _Review_ had been carried on according to our
notions (I mean those of the juniors), it would have been no better,
perhaps not even so good as it was. But it is worth noting as a fact in
the history of Benthamism, that the periodical organ, by which it was
best known, was from the first extremely unsatisfactory to those whose
opinions on all subjects it was supposed specially to represent.
Meanwhile, however, the _Review_ made considerable noise in the world,
and gave a recognised _status_, in the arena of opinion and discussion,
to the Benthamic type of Radicalism, out of all proportion to the number
of its adherents, and to the personal merits and abilities, at that
time, of most of those who could be reckoned among them. It was a time,
as is known, of rapidly rising Liberalism. When the fears and
animosities accompanying the war with France had been brought to an end,
and people had once more a place in their thoughts for home politics,
the tide began to set towards reform. The renewed oppression of the
Continent by the old reigning families, the countenance apparently given
by the English Government to the conspiracy against liberty called the
Holy Alliance, and the enormous weight of the national debt and taxation
occasioned by so long and costly a war, rendered the government and
parliament very unpopular. Radicalism, under the leadership of the
Burdetts and Cobbetts, had assumed a character and importance which
seriously alarmed the Administration: and their alarm had scarcely been
temporarily assuaged by the celebrated Six Acts, when the trial of Queen
Caroline roused a still wider and deeper feeling of hatred. Though the
outward signs of this hatred passed away with its exciting cause, there
arose on all sides a spirit which had never shown itself before, of
opposition to abuses in detail. Mr. Hume's persevering scrutiny of the
public expenditure, forcing the House of Commons to a division on every
objectionable item in the estimates, had begun to tell with great force
on public opinion, and had extorted many minor retrenchments from an
unwilling administration. Political economy had asserted itself with
great vigour in public affairs, by the petition of the merchants of
London for free trade, drawn up in 1820 by Mr. Tooke and presented by
Mr. Alexander Baring; and by the noble exertions of Ricardo during the
few years of his parliamentary life. His writings, following up the
impulse given by the Bullion controversy, and followed up in their turn
by the expositions and comments of my father and McCulloch (whose
writings in the _Edinburgh Review_ during those years were most
valuable), had drawn general attention to the subject, making at least
partial converts in the Cabinet itself; and Huskisson, supported by
Canning, had commenced that gradual demolition of the protective system,
which one of their colleagues virtually completed in 1846, though the
last vestiges were only swept away by Mr. Gladstone in 1860. Mr. Peel,
then Home Secretary, was entering cautiously into the untrodden and
peculiarly Benthamic path of Law Reform. At this period, when Liberalism
seemed to be becoming the tone of the time, when improvement of
institutions was preached from the highest places, and a complete change
of the constitution of Parliament was loudly demanded in the lowest, it
is not strange that attention should have been roused by the regular
appearance in controversy of what seemed a new school of writers,
claiming to be the legislators and theorists of this new tendency. The
air of strong conviction with which they wrote, when scarcely anyone
else seemed to have an equally strong faith in as definite a creed; the
boldness with which they tilted against the very front of both the
existing political parties; their uncompromising profession of
opposition to many of the generally received opinions, and the suspicion
they lay under of holding others still more heterodox than they
professed; the talent and verve of at least my father's articles, and
the appearance of a corps behind him sufficient to carry on a Review;
and finally, the fact that the _Review_ was bought and read, made the
so-called Bentham school in philosophy and politics fill a greater place
in the public mind than it had held before, or has ever again held since
other equally earnest schools of thought have arisen in England. As I
was in the headquarters of it, knew of what it was composed, and as one
of the most active of its very small number, might say without undue
assumption, _quorum pars magna fui_, it belongs to me more than to most
others, to give some account of it.
This supposed school, then, had no other existence than what was
constituted by the fact, that my father's writings and conversation drew
round him a certain number of young men who had already imbibed, or who
imbibed from him, a greater or smaller portion of his very decided
political and philosophical opinions. The notion that Bentham was
surrounded by a band of disciples who received their opinions from his
lips, is a fable to which my father did justice in his "Fragment on
Mackintosh," and which, to all who knew Mr. Bentham's habits of life and
manner of conversation, is simply ridiculous. The influence which
Bentham exercised was by his writings. Through them he has produced, and
is producing, effects on the condition of mankind, wider and deeper, no
doubt, than any which can be attributed to my father. He is a much
greater name in history. But my father exercised a far greater personal
ascendency. He _was_ sought for the vigour and instructiveness of his
conversation, and did use it largely as an instrument for the diffusion
of his opinions. I have never known any man who could do such ample
justice to his best thoughts in colloquial discussion. His perfect
command over his great mental resources, the terseness and
expressiveness of his language and the moral earnestness as well as
intellectual force of his delivery, made him one of the most striking of
all argumentative conversers: and he was full of anecdote, a hearty
laugher, and, when with people whom he liked, a most lively and amusing
companion. It was not solely, or even chiefly, in diffusing his merely
intellectual convictions that his power showed itself: it was still more
through the influence of a quality, of which I have only since learnt to
appreciate the extreme rarity: that exalted public spirit, and regard
above all things to the good of the whole, which warmed into life and
activity every germ of similar virtue that existed in the minds he came
in contact with: the desire he made them feel for his approbation, the
shame at his disapproval; the moral support which his conversation and
his very existence gave to those who were aiming at the same objects, and
the encouragement he afforded to the fainthearted or desponding among
them, by the firm confidence which (though the reverse of sanguine as to
the results to be expected in any one particular case) he always felt in
the power of reason, the general progress of improvement, and the good
which individuals could do by judicious effort.
If was my father's opinions which gave the distinguishing character to
the Benthamic or utilitarian propagandism of that time. They fell
singly, scattered from him, in many directions, but they flowed from him
in a continued stream principally in three channels. One was through me,
the only mind directly formed by his instructions, and through whom
considerable influence was exercised over various young men, who became,
in their turn, propagandists. A second was through some of the Cambridge
contemporaries of Charles Austin, who, either initiated by him or under
the general mental impulse which he gave, had adopted many opinions
allied to those of my father, and some of the more considerable of whom
afterwards sought my father's acquaintance and frequented his house.
Among these may be mentioned Strutt, afterwards Lord Belper, and the
present Lord Romilly, with whose eminent father, Sir Samuel, my father
had of old been on terms of friendship. The third channel was that of a
younger generation of Cambridge undergraduates, contemporary, not with
Austin, but with Eyton Tooke, who were drawn to that estimable person by
affinity of opinions, and introduced by him to my father: the most
notable of these was Charles Buller. Various other persons individually
received and transmitted a considerable amount of my father's influence:
for example, Black (as before mentioned) and Fonblanque: most of these,
however, we accounted only partial allies; Fonblanque, for instance, was
always divergent from us on many important points. But indeed there was
by no means complete unanimity among any portion of us, nor had any of
us adopted implicitly all my father's opinions. For example, although
his _Essay on Government_ was regarded probably by all of us as a
masterpiece of political wisdom, our adhesion by no means extended to
the paragraph of it in which he maintains that women may, consistently
with good government, be excluded from the suffrage, because their
interest is the same with that of men. From this doctrine, I, and all
those who formed my chosen associates, most positively dissented. It is
due to my father to say that he denied having intended to affirm that
women _should_ be excluded, any more than men under the age of forty,
concerning whom he maintained in the very next paragraph an exactly
similar thesis. He was, as he truly said, not discussing whether the
suffrage had better be restricted, but only (assuming that it is to be
restricted) what is the utmost limit of restriction which does not
necessarily involve a sacrifice of the securities for good government.
But I thought then, as I have always thought since that the opinion
which he acknowledged, no less than that which he disclaimed, is as
great an error as any of those against which the _Essay_ was directed;
that the interest of women is included in that of men exactly as much as