trenuous exertions, but he changed his tactics; he turned from his
mechanical workshop to the study of political dynamics, and he found
what he wanted in the rising radicalism--'his principal occupation, in
a word, was to provide political philosophy for radical reformers.'

Of the philosophic creed which Bentham undertook to proclaim from his
hermitage at Ford Abbey, with James Mill as his leading apostle, Mr.
Stephen gives us a very shrewd and incisively critical examination.
The founder of a new faith has usually begun by the earnest and
authoritative declaration of a few simple truths and positive
doctrines, for which his disciples provide, in course of time, the
necessary philosophical basis. Bentham's voice had been crying
ineffectually in the wilderness; and he now set about laying with his
own hands the foundations of his beliefs upon primary scientific
principles, always with unswerving aim and application to concrete
facts. He was a thorough-going iconoclast, wielding, like Mohammed, a
single formula, to the destruction of idols of the market or tribe,
and to the confusion of those who fattened upon antique superstitions.
'All government is one vast evil,' and can only be kept from mischief
by minute regulations and constant vigilance. Whatever is plainly
illogical must be radically wrong--'to make a barrister a judge is as
sensible as it would be to select a procuress for mistress of a girls'
school;' and a parish boy, if he could read properly, might go through
the Church services with the Prayer Book and the Homilies, so that an
established Church is a costly and indefensible luxury. Taking
Utility, founded on observation of actual facts, as his guide and his
measure of existing institutions, he treated them as colossal
iniquities, as frauds upon the people, as dead and ineffectual for the
purposes of moral and political life. Nevertheless, although he
condemned the whole fabric as it stood, Bentham was an absolute
believer in the unlimited power of laws and institutions; nor was he
far from wishing to deal with them on the principles applicable to the
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