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Updated: June 15, 2025
The question is, whether thieving is at this moment an advisable trade to begin with all the possibilities of hanging not got over? This is the spirit of Mr Bentham's principle; and if there is anything opposed to it in any former statement, it may be corrected by the present."
He wrote hymns, and one of them, 'In the cross of Christ I glory, is said to have 'universal fame. A Benthamite capable of so singular an eccentricity judiciously agreed to avoid discussions upon religious topics with his master. To Bowring we also owe the Deontology, which professes to represent Bentham's dictation.
Even those who are most decidedly opposed to his political opinions the very chiefs of the Holy Alliance have publicly testified their respect for him. In England, on the contrary, many persons who certainly entertained no prejudice against him on political grounds were long in the habit of mentioning him contemptuously. Indeed, what was said of Bacon's philosophy may be said of Bentham's.
Codes were wanted; laws were being digested; and Bentham's work would supply the principles and the classification. A magnificent translation was ordered, and Russian officials wrote glowing letters in which Bentham was placed in a line with Bacon, Newton, and Adam Smith each the founder of a new science.
A letter from Mill in the University College MSS. describes a misunderstanding about borrowed books, a fertile, but hardly adequate, cause of quarrel. Bowring's religious principles prevented him from admitting some of Bentham's works to the collective edition. Works, x. 471-72. Ibid. x. 576. Ibid. x. 588. Works, xi. 37.
This underlying tendency may partly explain the coincidence of results though it would require a good many qualifications in detail; but here I need only take Bentham's more or less unconscious application.
The 'Penal Code' drawn by Macaulay as holder of the office was the first actual attempt to carry out Bentham's favourite schemes under British rule, and the influence of the chief of Bentham's disciples at the India House may have had something to do with its initiation.
Dumont, born at Geneva in 1759, had become a Protestant minister; he was afterwards tutor to Shelburne's son, and in 1788 visited Paris with Romilly and made acquaintance with Mirabeau. Romilly showed Dumont some of Bentham's papers written in French. Dumont offered to rewrite and to superintend their publication.
Bentham's habits remind us in some ways of Kant; and the thought may be suggested that he would have been more in his element as a German professor of philosophies. In such a position he might have devoted himself to the delight of classifying and co-ordinating theories, and have found sufficient enjoyment in purely intellectual activity. After a fashion that was the actual result.
The Roman theory guided men's efforts in the same direction as the theory put into shape by the Englishman; its practical results were not widely different from those which would have been attained by a sect of law-reformers who maintained a steady pursuit of the general good of the community. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose it a conscious anticipation of Bentham's principles.
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