emancipation from immediately
practical work, was apparently his return to his more legitimate
employment of speculative labour. He sent to Dumont at St.
Petersburg[297] part of the treatise upon Political Economy, which had
been naturally suggested by his later work: and he applied himself to
the Scottish judiciary question, to which many of his speculations had a
close application. He published a work upon this subject in 1808. To the
period between 1802 and 1812 belongs also the book, or rather the
collection of papers, afterwards transformed into the book, upon
Evidence, which is one of his most valuable performances.

A letter, dated 1st November 1810, gives a characteristic account of his
position. He refers to hopes of the acceptance of some of his principles
in South America. In Spain Spaniards are prepared to receive his laws
'as oracles.' 'Now at length, when I am just ready to drop into the
grave' (he had still twenty years of energetic work before him), 'my
fame has spread itself all over the civilised world.' Dumont's
publication of 1802 is considered to have superseded all previous
writings on legislation. In Germany and France codes have been prepared
by authorised lawyers, who have 'sought to do themselves credit by
references to that work.'[298] It has been translated into Russian. Even
in England he is often mentioned in books and in parliament. 'Meantime I
am here scribbling on in my hermitage, never seeing anybody but for some
special reason, always bearing relation to the service of mankind.'[299]
Making all due allowance for the deceptive views of the outer world
which haunt every 'hermitage,' it remains true that Bentham's fame was
emerging from obscurity.

The end of this period, moreover, was bringing him into closer contact
with English political life. Bentham, as we have seen, rejected the
whole Jacobin doctrine of abstract rights. So long as English politics
meant either the acceptance of a theory which, for whatever reason,
gathered round it no solid body of support, or, on the other hand, the
acceptance of an obstructive and purely conservative principle, to which
all reform was radically opposed, Bentham was necessarily in an isolated
position. He had 'nothing particular to say' to Fox. He was neither a
Tory nor a Jacobin, and cared little for the paralysed Whigs. He allied
himself therefore, so far as he was allied with any one, with the
philanthropic agitators who stood, like him, outs