h had made confusion doubly confounded. English law had become a
mere jungle of unintelligible distinctions, contradictions, and cumbrous
methods through which no man could find his way without the guidance of
the initiated, and in which a long purse and unscrupulous trickery gave
the advantage over the poor to the rich, and to the knave over the
honest man. One fruitful source of all these evils was the 'judge-made'
law, which Bentham henceforth never ceased to denounce. His ideal was a
distinct code which, when change was required, should be changed by an
avowed and intelligible process. The chaos which had grown up was the
natural result of the gradual development of a traditional body of law,
in which new cases were met under cover of applying precedents from
previous decisions, with the help of reference to the vague body of
unwritten or 'common law,' and of legal fictions permitting some
non-natural interpretation of the old formulae. It is the judges, he had
already said in 1792,[422] 'that make the common law. Do you know how
they make it? Just as a man makes laws for his dog. When your dog does
anything you want to break him of, you wait till he does it and then
beat him. This is the way you make laws for your dog, and this is the
way the judges make laws for you and me.' The 'tyranny of judge-made
law' is 'the most all-comprehensive, most grinding, and most crying of
all grievances,'[423] and is scarcely less bad than 'priest-made
religion.'[424] Legal fictions, according to him, are simply lies. The
permission to use them is a 'mendacity licence.' In 'Rome-bred law ...
fiction' is a 'wart which here and there disfigures the face of justice.
In English law fiction is a syphilis which runs into every vein and
carries into every part of the system the principle of rottenness.'[425]

The evils denounced by Bentham were monstrous. The completeness of the
exposure was his great merit; and his reputation has suffered, as we are
told on competent authority, by the very efficiency of his attack. The
worst evils are so much things of the past, that we forget the extent
of the evil and the merits of its assailant. Bentham's diagnosis of the
evil explains his later attitude. He attributes all the abuses to
consciously corrupt motives even where a sufficient explanation can be
found in the human stupidity and honest incapacity to look outside of
traditional ways of thought. He admits, indeed, the personal purity of
English