Bentham will
allow. If a man were to say that five hundred thousand people die every
year in London of dram-drinking, he would not assert a proposition more
monstrously false than Mr Mill's. Would it be just to charge us with
defending intoxication because we might say that such a man was grossly
in the wrong?

We say with Mr Bentham that despotism is a bad thing. We say with Mr
Bentham that the exceptions do not destroy the authority of the rule.
But this we say--that a single exception overthrows an argument which
either does not prove the rule at all, or else proves the rule to be
TRUE WITHOUT EXCEPTIONS; and such an argument is Mr Mill's argument
against despotism. In this respect there is a great difference between
rules drawn from experience and rules deduced a priori. We might believe
that there had been a fall of snow last August, and yet not think it
likely that there would be snow next August. A single occurrence opposed
to our general experience would tell for very little in our calculation
of the chances. But, if we could once satisfy ourselves that in ANY
single right-angled triangle the square of the hypothenuse might be
less than the squares of the sides, we must reject the forty-seventh
proposition of Euclid altogether. We willingly adopt Mr Bentham's lively
illustration about the wolf; and we will say in passing that it gives
us real pleasure to see how little old age has diminished the gaiety of
this eminent man. We can assure him that his merriment gives us far more
pleasure on his account than pain on our own. We say with him, Keep the
wolf out of the nursery, in spite of the story of Romulus and Remus.
But, if the shepherd who saw the wolf licking and suckling those famous
twins were, after telling this story to his companions, to assert that
it was an infallible rule that no wolf ever had spared, or ever would
spare, any living thing which might fall in its way--that its nature was
carnivorous--and that it could not possibly disobey its nature, we think
that the hearers might have been excused for staring. It may be strange,
but is not inconsistent, that a wolf which has eaten ninety-nine
children should spare the hundredth. But the fact that a wolf has once
spared a child is sufficient to show that there must be some flaw in the
chain of reasoning purporting to prove that wolves cannot possibly spare
children.

Mr Bentham proceeds to attack another position which he conceives us to
maintain:--