law of necessity, which is no other
than a name, a breath, loses its force; he is no longer sustained by
the good opinion of others, and he drops out of his place in society,
a useless clog! Mr. Bentham takes a culprit, and puts him into what he
calls a _Panopticon_, that is, a sort of circular prison, with open
cells, like a glass bee-hive. He sits in the middle, and sees all the
other does. He gives him work to do, and lectures him if he does not do
it. He takes liquor from him, and society, and liberty; but he feeds and
clothes him, and keeps him out of mischief; and when he has convinced
him, by force and reason together, that this life is for his good, he
turns him out upon the world a reformed man, and as confident of the
success of his handy-work, as the shoemaker of that which he has just
taken off the last, or the Parisian barber in Sterne, of the buckle
of his wig. "Dip it in the ocean," said the perruquier, "and it will
stand!" But we doubt the durability of our projector's patchwork. Will
our convert to the great principle of Utility work when he is from under
Mr. Bentham's eye, because he was forced to work when under it? Will he
keep sober, because he has been kept from liquor so long? Will he not
return to loose company, because he has had the pleasure of sitting
vis-a-vis with a philosopher of late? Will he not steal, now that his hands
are untied? Will he not take the road, now that it is free to him? Will
he not call his benefactor all the names he can set his tongue to, the
moment his back is turned? All this is more than to be feared. The charm
of criminal life, like that of savage life, consists in liberty, in
hardship, in danger, and in the contempt of death, in one word, in
extraordinary excitement; and he who has tasted of it, will no more
return to regular habits of life, than a man will take to water after
drinking brandy, or than a wild beast will give over hunting its prey.
Miracles never cease, to be sure; but they are not to be had wholesale,
or _to order_. Mr. Owen, who is another of these proprietors and
patentees of reform, has lately got an American savage with him, whom he
carries about in great triumph and complacency, as an antithesis to his
_New View of Society_, and as winding up his reasoning to what it mainly
wanted, an epigrammatic point. Does the benevolent visionary of the
Lanark cotton-mills really think this _natural man_ will act as a foil
to his _artificial man_? Does he for