am nothing more than names in a careful
classification. Any shrewd attorney or Bow Street runner would have been
a better judge of the management of convicts; and here were dozens of
party politicians, such as Rigby and Barre, who could have explained to
him beforehand those mysteries in the working of the political
machinery, which it took him half a lifetime to discover. In this sense
Bentham was unpractical in the highest degree, for at eighty he had not
found out of what men are really made. And yet by his extraordinary
intellectual activity and the concentration of all his faculties upon
certain problems, he succeeded in preserving an example, and though not
a unique yet an almost unsurpassable example, of the power which belongs
to the man of one idea.

NOTES:

[325] See correspondence upon his codification plans in Russia, America,
and Geneva in _Works_, iv. 451-594.

[326] Borrow's _Bible in Spain_, ch. xxx.

[327] _Works_, viii. 555-600.

[328] _Ibid._ x. 534. See Blaquiere's enthusiastic letter to
Bentham.--_Works_, x. 475.

[329] See, however, Bentham's reference to this story.--_Works_, xi. 66.

[330] _Works_, x. 539.

[331] _Ibid._ x. 522.

[332] _Works_, x. 516.

[333] _Ibid._ x. 591.

[334] A letter from Mill in the University College MSS. describes a
misunderstanding about borrowed books, a fertile, but hardly adequate,
cause of quarrel.

[335] Bowring's religious principles prevented him from admitting some
of Bentham's works to the collective edition.

[336] _Works_, x. 471-72.

[337] _Ibid._ x. 576.

[338] _Ibid._ x. 588.

[339] _Works_, xi. 37. Papers preserved at University College show that
during Peel's law reforms at this time Bentham frequently communicated
with him.

[340] _Ibid._ xi. 50.

[341] _Ibid._ v. 549.

[342] _Ibid._ v. 609.

[343] _Works_, x. 594.

[344] _Ibid._ xi. 26.

[345] _Ibid._ xi. 13, 28.

[346] _Works_, x. 468.

[347] _Ibid._ x. 551.

[348] _Ibid._ xi. 75.

[349] _Ibid._ xi. 33.

[350] Mill's _Dissertations_, i. 354 and 392 _n._

[351] _Works_, x. 442.

[352] _Works_, x. 467; xi. 79.

[353] _Ibid._ xi. 23-24.

[354] _Ibid._ x. 450.

CHAPTER VI

BENTHAM'S DOCTRINE

I. FIRST PRINCIPLES

Bentham's position is in one respect unique. There have been many
greater thinkers; but there has been hardly any one whose abstract
theory has become in the same degree the platform of an active political
party. To accept the philoso