It cannot be denied without injustice and ingratitude, that Mr. Bentham has done more than any other writer to rouse the spirit of juridical reformation which is now gradually examining every part of law; and when further progress is facilitated by digesting the present laws, will doubtless proceed to the improvement of all. Greater praise it is given to few to earn. -MACKINTOSH, SIR JAMES, 1830, Second Preliminary Dissertation, Encyclopædia Britannica.

That Jeremy Bentham is a most vigorous and original thinker cannot be denied. We do not pretend to be familiar with all, or even the greater part of his works, but we have seen enough of what he has done, to be satisfied, that, like Hobbes, he may justly boast of being very little indebted to his predecessors, either for the conclusions he comes to, or for his manner of deducing and illustrating them. Whether these conclusions be discoveries or not for other people, they are so for himself. Whether it be difficult or not to establish them, in the usual way of treating such subjects, it always costs him great pains to arrive at them. He has no idea of any intellectual labor-saving contrivance-he carefully eschews the shortest distance between any two points -he hates simplicity, as if it were not the great end of all philosophers to simplify. We have seen what a jargon is used at his fireside-he adopts a similar one in his ethical and juridical speculations. His nomenclature or terminology is a study of itself-as complicated, if not quite so systematic, as that of the chemists. This wrapping up of plain matters in the mysteries of artificial language, which Hobbes detested so much, is Jeremy's great title to the admiration of the world. He is the Heracleitus of the age.-LEGARÉ, HUGH SWINTON, 183145, Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians, Writings, ed. his Sister, vol. II, p. 464.

Posterity will pronounce its calm and impartial decision, and that decision will, we firmly believe, place in the same rank with Galileo and with Locke the man who found jurisprudence a gibberish and left it a science. . . . He was, assuredly, at once a great logician and a great rhetorician. But the effect of his logic was injured by a vicious arrangement, and the effect of his rhetoric by a vicious style. His mind was. vigorous, comprehensive, subtle, fertile of

arguments, fertile of illustrations. But he spoke in an unknown tongue; and, that the congregation might be edified, it was necessary that some brother having the gift of interpretation should expound the invaluable jargon. His oracles were of high import, but they were traced on leaves and flung loose to the wind. So negligent was he of the arts of selection, distribution, and compression, that to persons who formed their judgment of him from his works in their undigested state, he seemed to be the least systematic of all philosophers. The truth is, that his opinions formed a system which, whether sound or unsound, is more exact, more entire, and more consistent with itself than any other.-MACAULAY, THOMAS BABINGTON, 1832, Dumont's Recollections of Mirabeau, Edinburgh Review; Critical and Miscellaneous Essays.

The age of law reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and the same. He is the father of the most important of all the branches of Reform, the leading and ruling department of human improvement. In thus assigning to Mr. Bentham, not merely the first place among Legal Philosophers, but the glory of having founded the Sect, and been the first who deserved the name, it cannot be intended to deny that other writers preceded him, who wisely and fearlessly exposed the defects of existing systems.

But

he also excelled in the light works of fancy. An habitual despiser of eloquence, he was one of the most eloquent of men when it pleased him to write naturally, and before he had adopted that harsh style, full of involved periods and new-made words, which how accurately soever it conveyed his ideas, was almost as hard to learn as a foreign language.-BROUGHAM, HENRY LORD, 1838, Speeches upon Questions relating to Public Rights, Duties and Interests, with Historical Introductions, and a Critical Dissertation upon the Eloquence of the Ancients.

Bentham has been in this age and country the great questioner of things established. It is by the influence of the modes. of thought with which his writings inoculated a considerable number of thinking men, that the yoke of authority has been broken, and innumerable opinions, formerly received on tradition as incontestable, are put upon their defence, and required to

The father of English innovation, both in doctrines and in institutions, is Bentham: he is the great subversive, or, in the language of continental philosophers, the great critical, thinker of his age and country.

. His was an essentially practical mind. It was by practical abuses that his mind was first turned to speculation by the abuses of the profession which was chosen for him, that of the law. .. A place, therefore, must be assigned to Bentham among the masters of wisdom, the great teachers and permanent intellectual ornaments of the human race. He was not a great philosopher, but he was a great reformer in philosophy. Bentham failed in deriving light from other minds. His writings contain few traces of the accurate knowledge of any school of thinking but his own; and many proofs of his entire conviction that they could teach him nothing worth knowing. For some of the most illustrous of previous thinkers, his contempt was unmeasured. MILL, JOHN STUART, 1838, Bentham, Early Essays, ed. Gibbs, pp. 329, 330, 333, 335, 345.

Seldom has a man exercised a more permanent influence on his race than Jeremy Bentham. His mind lead the leading minds of his age. Of him, Madame de Staël said -“He will give his name to the era." Happy, indeed, will it be for the world when his era is arrived-the era in which the greatest happiness principle shall be the ground-work of the laws, and the guide of the morals of mankind. Once conversing with Talleyrand, he thus expressed himself to me:-"I have known many great warriors-many great statesmenmany great authors-but only one great genius, and that genius is Jeremy Bentham." Talleyrand induced Napoleon to read Bentham's "Theory of Morals and Legislation." The Emperor's remark upon it was "That is a book which will enlighten many libraries." It was saying more than if he had said-It will instruct many Philosophers. BOWRING, JOHN, 1840, Memoirs of Jeremy Bentham, Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 7, p. 21.

Those who are acquainted with the chronology of Bentham's works will find in their uniformity of opinion an external argument for their truth. As he wrote a large As he wrote a large quantity of matter almost every day, and

never recurred in any shape to anything that he had previously written, it often happened that he went twice or thrice over the same ground at distant intervals; yet when these MSS.—often with an interval of twenty or thirty years between them in. the dates of their composition—are confronted together, they are generally found to be so much alike, not only in the conclusions arrived at, but in the steps by which they are reached, and the very nature of the phraseology employed, that the author might be justly compared to an inductive philosopher repeating the same experiments in natural history, and obtaining, as a matter of physical certainty, the same results.-BURTON, JOHN HILL, 1842, Memoirs of Jeremy Bentham, Westminster Review, vol. 37, p. 287.

From 1820-1830 I believe the most wonderful period in our history, if we look merely at the importance of the people's opinions. The writings of Bentham produced a silent revolution in the mode of treating all political and moral subjects. The habits of thought were entirely new, and the whole body of political writers, without (for the most part) knowing whence the inspiration came, were full of a new spirit, and submitted all acts to a new test.-ROEBUCK, JOHN ARTHUR, 1849, To Francis Place, March 26; Life and Letters, Autobiography, ed. Leader, p. 217.

That was

We cannot think that Bentham would have been more useful if, like Paley, he had adopted a notion about the will of God to help out the weakness of his Utilitarian motives. We rather consider it one of his chief merits that he utterly dispensed with any such aid; that he rejected a divine basis altogether for human society, or for the life of the individual man. the fair way of bringing the principle which he defended to a test; the only mode of ascertaining whether any society or any man has existed, does exist, or ever will exist without the confession of a Being who does not merely decree what men shall do under the terrors of punishment here or hereafter, but who is Righteous, who purposes to set Righteousness on the earth. The acknowledgment of such a Being lay, we believe, deep in the heart of Bentham as in the heart of Paley.MAURICE, FREDERICK DENISON, 1862, Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, vol. II, p. 605.

In genius was certainly superior to Beccaria, and whose influence, though perhaps not so great, was also European. -LECKY, WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE, 1865, History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe, vol. 1, ch. iii.

The relation, indeed, of Bentham's ethical doctrines to Paley's may be expressed by saying that Bentham is Paley minus a belief in hell-fire. But Bentham, in another sense, is Paley plus a profound faith in himself, and an equally profound respect for realities.-STEPHEN, LESLIE, 1876, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, vol. II, p. 125.

His system is even an important element of our current political thought; hardly a decade-though an eventful one-has elapsed since it might almost have been called a predominent element.- SIDGWICK, HENRY, 1877, Bentham and Benthamism in Politics and Ethics.

Bentham, at the close of the eighteenth century, was doing for jurisprudence what Adam Smith had already done for commerce. Bentham's works, however, never enjoyed the popularity of Adam Smith's, because the majority of them were not written in the clear style of the great Scotch philosopher. Bentham's earlier essays, indeed, are models of exactness of language and purity of style; but, in his later works, in his efforts to be exact he is occasionally obscure. . The obscurity of some of Bentham's later works probably accounts for the circumstance that, while the majority of mankind have long ago accepted most of his opinions, they have not given their originator the credit of them. Every one associates free trade with Adam Smith; but few people attribute the reform of the criminal code or the alteration of the Poor Laws to Bentham.-WALPOLE, SPENCER, 1878, A History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815, vol. 1, pp. 334, 335.

The peculiarity of Bentham's genius lies in the fact that he perceived that legislation was an art, and brought to the art of legislation that kind of inventive talent and resource which is generally applied to the prosecution of scientific discovery, or to the improvement of mechanical inventions.

If he is regarded as an inventor laboring in the field of legislation for the benefit of mankind, just as a man of science

seeks after discoveries which may extend the field of human knowledge, Bentham will, we are convinced, be seen in his true light, and will be acknowledged as the teacher who, beyond all others since the time of Socrates, has conceived of life as an art, and has at least pointed to the way by which the principles of legislation ought to be investigated, and to the mode in which, by the scientific amelioration of law, the amount of human happiness may be increased.-DICEY, A. V., 1878, Bentham, The Nation, vol. 27, p. 352.

Bentham's system has had the greatest influence upon the world since his time. It is sufficiently important to be considered a new departure in the world of thought; and, as such, it has received the allegiance of as devoted a band of disciples as ever surrounded any master in science or morals.―OLIPHANT, MARGARET O. W., 1882, Literary History of England XVIIIXIX Century, vol. III, p. 253.

The most hardy imagination could hardly connect Bentham, or any of his speculations, with religious thought. Great as he may have been in his own line as a legislative and legal reformer, Bentham cannot be called anything more than a sciolist in religion. He had but a feeble grasp of the subject either speculatively or historically. historically. TULLOCH, JOHN, 1885, Movements of Religious Thought in Britain During the Nineteenth Century, p. 108. The subjects treated by Bentham are very varied. varied. He sought to compass the whole field of ethics, jurisprudence, logic, and political economy, and to deal with points. of detail as well as principles. To the last science his contributions are of small account. He did little more than apply, in his strictures on the usury laws, with courage and with happy illustrations, the principles of free trade which had been expounded by Adam Smith. His speculations on banking and currency illustrate the power these subjects have to lead astray even a singularly acute mind. To logic, though the subject of his inquiry for many years, he made no very valuable contributions; his ideas on that subject, which relate chiefly to exposition and method, will be found in his nephew's work on logic, "Outlines of a New System of Logic. of Logic." His "Book on Fallacies" is a clever and brilliant refutation of popular political errors. His great work was in the

field of jurisprudence and ethics, and his influence on these sciences can scarcely be overestimated. His most original and most durable works relate to law.-MACDONELL, JOHN, 1885, Dictionary of National Biography, vol. IV, p. 277.

In Bentham we reach, perhaps, the ideal -not certainly a very inviting one-of prosaic, and even acrid logic. Narrow in his conceptions, but inflexibly bold in their enunciation, with the force and vigour that come from absolute convictions, with the warmth and that alone-which comes from hostility to what he believes to be erroneous or unsound, softened by no shadow of doubt, and illumined by no ray of imagination, Bentham yet commands respect even from those to whom his writings seem most barren of human interest. To him literary style was, so far as conscious effort went, a meaningless phrase; he is correct and lucid only from the clearness of his own views, and because he found the instrument of expression wrought to perfection by the habit of his age. CRAIK, HENRY, 1895, ed., English Prose, Introduction, vol. IV, p. 4.

Even in handling themes of general interest Bentham, it must be owned, is literary only by accident. He cannot pretend to the sparkling elegance of Montesquieu, the careless graces of Hume, or the rhetorical pomp of Burke. His highest merit is that he is simple and vigorous. He writes like a man who has fully considered his subject and who knows exactly what he wants to say. He writes without the least endeavour to be fine. He is too much en

grossed with the task of communicating his thoughts to be desirous of calling attention to his eloquence. Thus, if he had no literary graces, he had no literary affectation. By dint of devotion to his subject he comes to have a style, not a great or a beautiful style, but a style eminently characteristic of the man, adequate to his ideas and stimulating to the earnest reader.-MONTAGUE, F. Č., 1895, English Prose, ed. Craik, vol. IV, p. 526.

Reminds one of a Hobbes without the literary genius.-SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 1896, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature, p. 343.

To Bentham's political influence, which dates from the early years of the present century, full justice has probably never

yet been done.-WHITTAKER, T., 1896, Social England, ed. Traill, vol. v, p. 415.

A clear-sighted and scrupulously veracious philosopher, abettor of the age of reason, apostle of utility, god-father of the panopticon, and donor to the English dictionary of such unimpassioned vocables as "codification" and "international." Bentham would have been glad to purify the language by purging it of those "affections of the soul" wherein Burke had found its highest glory. Yet in censuring the ordinary political usage of such a word as "innovation," it was hardly prejudice in general that he attacked, but the particular and deep-seated prejudice against novelty. The surprising vivacity of many of his own figures, although he had the courage of his convictions, and laboured, throughout the course of a long life, to desiccate his style,-bears witness to a natural skill in the use of loaded weapons. He will pack his text with grave argument on matters ecclesiastical, and indulge himself and literature, in the notes with a pleasant description of the flesh and the spirit playing leap-frog, now one up, now the other, around the holy precincts of the Church. Lapses like these show him far enough from his own ideal of a geometric fixity in the use of words.-RALEIGH, WALTER, 1897, Style, p. 42.

His whole system of ethics and politics was severely utilitarian. It may indeed be compared to an arch, which has as its key-stone this principle, serving to unite his theoretical and political speculations, and to interlock them in a dogmatic whole. The new creed was soon to prove itself subversive of modes of thought and of institutions which rested only on prescription and tradition. Utility was a crucial test when rigorously applied to the Gothic irregularities of the British constitution; and Bentham was nothing if not rigorous. Exact methods of thought and reasoning were to be the sole guide of the philosophic and political inquirer. Sentiment, devotion, chivalry, appeals to the continuity of national life, all were excluded from the argument; and man was treated solely intent on manufacturing enjoyment as if he were merely a reasoning machine, by logical processes. The archaic dogmatism of the divine right of kings, the newer but equally severe dogmatism of Rousseau and the framers of the rights of man, were