uces a maximum of happiness.
Omit all reference to Happiness, and Justice becomes a meaningless word
prescribing equality, but not telling us equality of what. Happiness, on
the other hand, has a substantial and independent meaning from which the
meaning of justice can be deduced. It has therefore a logical priority:
and to attempt to ignore this is the way to all the labyrinths of
hopeless confusion by which legislation has been made a chaos. Bentham's
position is indicated by his early conflict with Blackstone, not a very
powerful representative of the opposite principle. Blackstone, in fact,
had tried to base his defence of that eminently empirical product, the
British Constitution, upon some show of a philosophical groundwork. He
had used the vague conception of a 'social contract,' frequently invoked
for the same purpose at the revolution of 1688, and to eke out his
arguments applied the ancient commonplaces about monarchy, aristocracy,
and democracy. He thus tried to invest the constitution with the
sanctity derived from this mysterious 'contract,' while appealing also
to tradition or the incarnate 'wisdom of our ancestors,' as shown by
their judicious mixture of the three forms. Bentham had an easy task,
though he performed it with remarkable vigour, in exposing the weakness
of this heterogeneous aggregate. Look closely, and this fictitious
contract can impose no new obligation: for the obligation itself rests
upon Utility. Why not appeal to Utility at once? I am bound to obey, not
because my great-grandfather may be regarded as having made a bargain,
which he did not really make, with the great-grandfather of George III.;
but simply because rebellion does more harm than good. The forms of
government are abstractions, not names of realities, and their 'mixture'
is a pure figment. King, Lords, and Commons are not really incarnations
of power, wisdom, and goodness. Their combination forms a system the
merits of which must in the last resort be judged by its working. 'It is
the principle of utility, accurately apprehended and steadily applied,
that affords the only clew to guide a man through these streights.'[362]
So much in fact Bentham might learn from Hume; and to defend upon any
other ground the congeries of traditional arrangements which passed for
the British Constitution was obviously absurd. It was in this warfare
against the shifting and ambiguous doctrines of Blackstone that Bentham
first showed the superio