d compare it with the number of those who
suffered last year. It was clear also that some pains and pleasures were
more intense than others, and that therefore the same man could in a
given number of seconds experience varying amounts of pleasure or pain.
Above all, the standard of pleasure and pain was one external to the
political thinker himself. John Stuart Mill quotes Bentham as saying of
all philosophies which competed with his Utilitarianism: 'They consist,
all of them, in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of
appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader
to accept the author's sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself.'[29]

[29] Bentham's _Works_, vol. i. p. 8, quoted in Lytton's _England and
the English_ (1833), p. 469. This passage was written by Mill, cf.
preface.

A 'Benthamite,' therefore, whether he was a member of Parliament like
Grote or Molesworth, or an official like Chadwick, or an organising
politician like Francis Place, could always check his own feelings about
'rights of property,' 'mischievous agitators,' 'spirit of the
Constitution,' 'insults to the flag,' and so on, by examining
statistical facts as to the numerical proportion, the income, the hours
of work, and the death rate from disease, of the various classes and
races who inhabited the British Empire.

But as a complete science of politics Benthamism is no longer possible.
Pleasure and pain are indeed facts about human nature, but they are not
the only facts which are important to the politician. The Benthamites,
by straining the meaning of words, tried to classify such motives as
instinctive impulse, ancient tradition, habit, or personal and racial
idiosyncrasy as being forms of pleasure and pain. But they failed; and
the search for a basis of valid political reasoning has to begin again,
among a generation more conscious than were Bentham and his disciples of
the complexity of the problem, and less confident of absolute success.

In that search one thing at least is becoming clear. We must aim at
finding as many relevant and measurable facts about human nature as
possible, and we must attempt to make all of them serviceable in
political reasoning. In collecting, that is to say, the material for a
political science, we must adopt the method of the biologist, who tries
to discover how many common qualities can be observed and measured in a
group of related beings, rather than that of the physici