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My old friend Frank Hutcheson, His Britannic Majesty's Vice-Consul at the port of Leghorn, was away on leave in England, his duties being relegated to young Bertram Cavendish, the pro-Consul.
My wife and I being in the second week of our honeymoon, naturally wanted someone else to join our party, so that when the cheery stranger, Elias P. Hutcheson, hailing from Isthmian City, Bleeding Gulch, Maple Tree County, Neb. turned up at the station at Frankfort, and casually remarked that he was going on to see the most all-fired old Methuselah of a town in Yurrup, and that he guessed that so much travelling alone was enough to send an intelligent, active citizen into the melancholy ward of a daft house, we took the pretty broad hint and suggested that we should join forces.
Indeed, there is much of the sturdy commonsense of the Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in that interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth. He is entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism.
"It is true that I play with the ball of the finger on the key, which necessitates a flat position of hand, with low wrist." Here the pianist illustrated the point by playing several pearly scales with straight, outstretched fingers. "I never realized, however, that I played in this way, until Mr. Ernest Hutcheson, the pianist, of Baltimore, recently called my attention to it.
The philosophy of the Scottish School was long in favor both in England and in France, where it was employed as a weapon against materialism. Home, in ethics a follower of Hutcheson, is fond of supporting his aesthetic views by examples from Shakespeare.
Anyhow, no matter how, it was done; and Elias P. Hutcheson became one of our party. Straightway Amelia and I found the pleasant benefit; instead of quarrelling, as we had been doing, we found that the restraining influence of a third party was such that we now took every opportunity of spooning in odd corners.
The black cat cast a swift upward glance, and we saw her eyes like green fire fixed an instant on Elias P. Hutcheson; and then her attention was given to the kitten, which lay still with just a quiver of her tiny limbs, whilst a thin red stream trickled from a gaping wound. With a muffled cry, such as a human being might give, she bent over the kitten licking its wounds and moaning.
Moreover, the side which Bentham took was, we may say, the winning side. The ordinary morality of the time was Utilitarian in substance. Hutcheson had invented the sacred phrase: and Hume had based his moral system upon 'utility. Bentham had learned much from Helvétius the French freethinker, and had been anticipated by Paley the English divine.
Now Hume's speculations on moral questions are not so remote from those of respectable professors, like Hutcheson, or saintly prelates, such as Butler, as to present any striking novelty.
Man, in fact, is by nature a trader and he is bound by nature to discover the means most apt to progress. Nor was he greatly troubled by differences of fortune. Like most of the Scottish school, especially Hutcheson and Hume, he thought that men are much alike in happiness, whatever their station or endowments.
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