Studies in Literature and History
reform of prisons, as undesirable but necessary instruments of
coercion to be despotically administered upon a scientific model,
after the fashion of his favourite Panopticon. He was, in short, as
Mr. Stephen points out, an unconscious follower of Hobbes, with this
difference, that in Bentham's case the omnipotent Leviathan, for
control and direction, was to be enlightened public opinion. And he
was apparently convinced, without misgivings, that a model government,
framed logically upon that common sense which is a public property,
could be introduced and enforced under popular sanction as easily as
new regulations for an ill-managed gaol. He was fully prepared to make
liberal allowance, in framing his constitution, for the different
needs, circumstances, and habits of communities; he was quite aware
that precisely the same legislation would not suit England and India;
but he believed national circumstance and character to be extensively
modifiable by manifestly useful institutions, and he was ready to
begin the operation at once, 'to legislate for Hindostan as well as
for his own parish, and to make codes not only for England, Spain, and
Russia, but also for Morocco.'
Mr. Stephen has no difficulty in exposing the shortcomings and
inadequacy of these doctrines. But he is writing the history of
certain political ideas; so his main object is to show how such ideas
are formed, the course they have followed, and their influence upon
thought and action up to the present day. To trace the links and
continuity of ideas is to analyse their elements, and to show the
impress that they received from external circumstance, permanent or
temporary; it is an important method in the science of politics. Upon
the empiricism of English philosophy in the eighteenth century Bentham
constructed a Theory of Morals that purported to rest exclusively on
facts ascertained and verifiable, with happiness as our being's end
and aim, with pain and pleasure as the ultimate principles of conduct;
and upon this foundation he proceeded to build up his system of
politics and legislation. Any attempt to derive morality from other
sources, or to measure it by other standards, he denounced as
arbitrary and misleading; he threw aside metaphysics, and therefore
theology, as illusory. The exclusive appeal to experience, to plain
reasoning from the evidence of our senses, from actual observation of
human propensities, was sufficient for his purposes, and tallied with
his designs as a practical reformer. In these views he was a disciple
of Hume, whose influence has surreptitiously percolated all modern
thought, and his unintentional allies were the teachers of Natural
religion, with Paley as its principal exponent. Having thus defined
and explained the basis of ethical philosophy, the Utilitarian has to
build up the superstructure of legal ordinance; and he is at once
confronted by the difficult problem of distinguishing the sphere of
ethics from the province of law. Upon this vital question Mr. Stephen,
as an expert in ethics, gives a dissertation that is exceedingly acute
and instructive; and we may commend, in particular, his criticism of
the doctrine that the morality of an act depends upon its
consequences, not upon its motives. As he observes, this may be true,
with certain reserves, in law, where the business of the legislature
is to prohibit and punish acts that directly endanger the order and
security of a community. But 'the exclusion of motive justifiable in
law may take all meaning out of morality'; and yet nothing is more
complicated than the question of demarcating a clear frontier between
the two provinces. Mr. Stephen's examination of this question is the
more important because it involves the problem of regulating private
morals by public enactments; and also because the confusion of motives
with intentions lies at the bottom of much mischievous sophistry, for
some of the worst crimes in history have been suggested by plausible
motives, and have been defended on that ground. He shows that
Bentham's survey of the springs of human action was incomplete, that
he overstrained his formula to make it universally applicable, and
that he nevertheless gave a far-reaching impulse to clearer notions
and an effective advance in the simplification of legal procedure and
the codification of laws. As a moral philosophy, Bentham's system
appeared so arid and materialistic that its unpopularity has obscured
his real services. For he was the engineer who first led a scientific
attack up to the ramparts of legal chicanery, and made a breach
through which all subsequent reform found its entry.
The axiom that utility is the source of justice and equity is of very
ancient date, and indeed the word is sufficiently elastic to
comprehend every conceivable human motive; but no one before Bentham
had employed it so energetically as a lever to overturn ponderous
abuses, or had pointed his theory so directly against notorious facts.
On the other hand, since he despised and rejected historical studies,
he greatly miscalculated the binding strength of long usage and
possession. He forgot, what Hume had been careful to remember, that
whether men's reasoning on these subjects be right or wrong, the
conclusions have not really been reached by logic, but have grown up
out of instincts, and correspond with certain immemorial needs and
aspirations of humanity. Hume had sketched, before Bentham, his Idea
of a Perfect Commonwealth; yet he begins by the warning that
'It is not with forms of government as with other artificial
contrivances; where an old engine may be rejected if we can
discover another more accurate and commodious ... the bulk of
mankind' (he adds) 'being governed by authority, not by reason, and
never attributing authority to anything that has not the
recommendation of antiquity.'
Hume's mission was to undermine settled fallacies, and to scatter
doubt among conventional certitudes; and this loosening of foundations
prepared the way for a bolder political projector, who delivered his
frontal attack in disdain of the philosopher's warnings. Political
projectors, says the cautious Hume, are pernicious if they have power,
and ridiculous if they want it. Bentham was quite confident that if he
could only get the power he could radically change for the better the
circumstances of a people in any part of the world, by legislation on
the principles of Utility; and he was sure that character is
indefinitely modifiable by circumstances. That human nature is
constantly altering with, and adapting itself to, the environment, is
an undeniable truth; but in the moral as in the physical world the
natural changes occupy long periods, and to stir the soil hastily may
produce a catastrophe. The latter result actually followed in France;
while in England the doctrine of the unlimited power of legislation,
to be used for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and
wielded by a sovereign State according to the dictates of public
opinion, was met by alarm, suspicion, and protracted opposition. It
is the habit of Englishmen to admit no proposition, however clear and
convincing, until they discover what the propounder intends to do with
it. Yet it will be seen that Bentham's plans of reform, if not his
principles, did suggest, and to some extent shape, the main direction
of judicial and administrative changes during the nineteenth century,
though with some consequences that he neither anticipated nor desired.
He thought that the State might be invested with power to modify
society, and yet might be strictly controlled in the exercise of that
power. He might have foreseen, what has actually happened, that the
State, once established on a democratic basis, would exercise the
power and disregard his carefully drawn limitations. A tendency toward
State Socialism he would have detested above all things; and yet that
is the direction inevitably taken by supreme authority when the
responsibility for the greatest happiness of the greatest number is
imposed upon it by popular demand.
Mr. Stephen's second volume describes the later phase of the
Utilitarian creed, when it passed from its founder into the hands of
ardent disciples. The transition necessarily involves some divergence
of views and methods. In religious movements it usually begins after
the founder's death; but as Bentham lived to superintend his apostolic
successors, his relations with them were not invariably harmonious.
The leadership fell upon James Mill, whose early life and general
character, the development of his opinions, and the bearing of his
philosophy upon his politics, are the subjects of one of those
condensed biographical sketches in which Mr. Stephen excels. In the
_History of India_, which brought to James Mill reputation and
pecuniary independence, he could apply his deductive theories to a
remote and little known country without much risk of contradiction
from actual circumstances or of checks from the misapprehension of
facts. In England the Utilitarian doctrines, as propounded in Mill's
writings, raised up opposition and hostile criticism from various
quarters. The general current of ideas and feelings had now set
decidedly toward the suppression of inveterate abuses, and toward
constitutional reform. Radicalism was gaining ground rapidly, and even
Socialism had come to the surface, while Political Economy was in the
ascendant. But the old Tories closed their ranks for a fierce
resistance against theories that menaced, as it seemed to them,
nothing less than destruction to time-honoured institutions; and the
Whigs had no taste for doctrines that pretended to be reasonable, but
appeared to them in effect revolutionary. The different positions of
contending parties were illustrated, as Mr. Stephen shows, by their
respective attitudes towards Church Reform. The Tories defended
ecclesiastical establishment as one of the main bastions of the
citadel; the Whigs would preserve the Church in subjection to the
State; while James Mill, in the _Westminster Review_, declared the
Church of England to be a mere State machine, worked in subservience
to the sinister interest of the governing classes. He desired 'to
abolish all dogmas and ceremonies, and to employ the clergy to give
lectures on ethics, botany, and political economy, with decent dances
and social meals for the celebration of Sunday.' Mr. Stephen, after
observing that this plan exemplifies 'the incapacity of an isolated
clique to understand the real tone of public opinion,' adds that 'it
seems to have some sense, but one would like to know whether Newman
read his article.' Our own notion would be that it is a signal
instance of shortsightedness and of insensibility, on the part of a
psychologist, to the strength and persistence of one of the most
powerful among the emotions that dominate mankind. Mill's article
proclaiming these views appeared in 1835, just at the time when the
Oxford Movement was stirring up a wave of enthusiasm for the dogmas
and ritual which he treated as obsolete and nonsensical; nor is there
anything more remarkable or unexpected in the political changes of the
last sixty years, than the discomfiture of those prophets who have
foretold the decay of all liturgies and the speedy dissolution of
ecclesiastical establishments. This phenomenon is by no means confined
to England, or even to Europe; and at the present day, when the power
of religious idealism is better understood upon wider experience, no
practical politician attempts to disregard sentiments that defy logic
and pass the understanding.
Nevertheless Utilitarianism, as represented by James Mill's 'Essay on
Government,' was attracting increased attention, and was provoking