s to expect, friendly feeling in every one
towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the
opposite. In England it is only of the best bred people, in the upper
or upper middle ranks, that anything like this can be said.
In my way through Paris, both going and returning, I passed some time
in the house of M. Say, the eminent political economist, who was a
friend and correspondent of my father, having become acquainted with
him on a visit to England a year or two after the Peace. He was a man
of the later period of the French Revolution, a fine specimen of the
best kind of French Republican, one of those who had never bent the
knee to Bonaparte though courted by him to do so; a truly upright,
brave, and enlightened man. He lived a quiet and studious life, made
happy by warm affections, public and private. He was acquainted with
many of the chiefs of the Liberal party, and I saw various noteworthy
persons while staying at this house; among whom I have pleasure in the
recollection of having once seen Saint-Simon, not yet the founder
either of a philosophy or a religion, and considered only as a clever
original. The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw,
was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of
which I ever afterwards kept myself _au courant_, as much as of
English politics: a thing not at all usual in those days with
Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development,
keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England--and from
which even my father, with all his superiority to prejudice, was not
exempt--of judging universal questions by a merely English standard.
After passing a few weeks at Caen with an old friend of my father's,
I returned to England in July, 1821 and my education resumed its
ordinary course.
CHAPTER III
LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION
For the first year or two after my visit to France, I continued my old
studies, with the addition of some new ones. When I returned, my
father was just finishing for the press his _Elements of Political
Economy_, and he made me perform an exercise on the manuscript, which
Mr. Bentham practised on all his own writings, making what he called
"marginal contents"; a short abstract of every paragraph, to enable
the writer more easily to judge of, and improve, the order of the
ideas, and the general character of the exposition. Soon after, my
father
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