re those of the middle class from which he
sprang. He was no democrat: he had no particular objection to the
nobility, though he preferred Shelburne to the king's friends or to the
Whig aristocracy. The reforms which he advocated were such as might be
adopted by any enlightened legislator, not only by Shelburne but even by
Blackstone. He had only, he thought, to convert a few members of
parliament to gain the acceptance for a rational criminal code. It had
hardly even occurred to him that there was anything wrong in the general
political order, though he was beginning to find out that it was not so
modifiable as he could have wished by the new ideas which he propounded.

Bentham's activity during the first revolutionary war corresponded to
this position. The revolution, whatever else it might do, obviously gave
a chance to amateur legislators. There was any amount of work to be done
in the way of codifying and reforming legislative systems. The deviser
of Utopias had such an opening as had never occurred in the world's
history. Lord Lansdowne, on the 3rd January 1789, expresses his pleasure
at hearing that Bentham intends to 'take up the cause of the people in
France.'[260] Bentham, as we have seen, was already known to some of the
French leaders, and he was now taking time by the forelock. He sent to
the abbe Morellet a part of his treatise on Political Tactics, hoping to
have it finished by the time of the meeting of the States General.[261]
This treatise, civilly accepted by Morellet, and approved with some
qualifications by Bentham's counsellors, Romilly, Wilson, and Trail, was
an elaborate account of the organisation and procedure of a legislative
assembly, founded chiefly on the practice of the House of Commons. It
was published in 1816 by Dumont in company with _Anarchic Fallacies_, a
vigorous exposure of the _Declaration of Rights_, which Bentham had
judiciously kept on his shelf. Had the French known of it, he remarks
afterwards, they would have been little disposed to welcome him.[262] An
elaborate scheme for the organisation of the French judiciary was
suggested by a report to the National Assembly, and published in March
1790. In 1791, Bentham offered to go to France himself in order to
establish a prison on his new scheme (to be mentioned directly), and
become 'gratuitously the gaoler thereof.'[263] The Assembly acknowledged
his 'ardent love of humanity,' and ordered an extract from his scheme to
be printed