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 gove