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lecture vi The Period of Benthamism or Individualism1 individualism as regards legislation is popularly, and not without reason, connected with the name and the principles of Bentham. The name of one man, it is true, can never adequately summarise a whole school of thought, but from 1825 onwards the teaching of Bentham exercised so potent an influence that to him is fairly ascribed that thorough-going though gradual amendment of the law of England which was one of the main results of the Reform Act.2 Bentham’s genius and position were fully understood by his contemporaries . The age of law reform and the age of Jeremy Bentham are one and the same. He is the father of the most important of all the branches of reform, the leading and ruling department of human improvement. No one before him had ever seriously thought of exposing the defects in our English system of jurisprudence. All former students had confined themselves to learn its principles—to make themselves masters of its eminently technical and arti- ficial rules; and all former writers had but expounded the doctrines handed down from age to age. . . . He it was who first made the mighty step of trying the whole provisions of our jurisprudence by the test of expediency, fearlessly examining how far each part was connected with the rest; and with a yet more undaunted courage, inquiring how far even its most consistent and 1. See Bentham, “Memoirs and Correspondence,” Works, x. xi.; Montague, Bentham’s Fragment on Government; L. Stephen, English Utilitarians, i., especially chaps. i.–iii.; Elie Halévy, La formation du radicalisme philosophique; G. Wallas, Life of Francis Place, ch. iii.; Bowen on “Administration of the Law, from 1837–1887,” Reign of Queen Victoria, i. 281. 2. The influence even on law reform of Adam Smith and his disciples ought, of course, not to be forgotten, but in 1830 the economists and the Benthamites formed one school. 92 / Lecture VI symmetrical arrangements were framed according to the principle which should pervade a code of laws—their adaptation to the circumstances of society, to the wants of men, and to the promotion of human happiness. Not only was he thus eminently original among the lawyers and the legal philosophers of his own country; he might be said to be the first legal philosopher that had appeared in the world.3 These are the words of Brougham, published in 1838; they strike the right note. Bentham was primarily neither a utilitarian moralist nor a philanthropist : he was a legal philosopher and a reformer of the law. The object of his lifelong labours was to remodel the law of England in accordance with utilitarian principles. These labours were crowned by extraordinary success, though the success was most manifest after the end of Bentham’s life. This is Bentham’s title to fame. His life cannot here be told, but it is well to insist upon the circumstances or conditions which favoured his success as a law reformer. Both the date and the length of Bentham’s life are important. He was born in 1748, two years after the failure of the last attempt to restore the Stuarts; he died immediately before the passing of the Reform Act, 1832. The eighty-four years of his life thus span over the period which divides the last endeavour to establish in England the real supremacy of the Crown from the commencement in England of modern democratic government. This era stretched indeed beyond the limits of the eighteenth century, but though Bentham lived till the first third of the nineteenth century had nearly come to an end, he was in spirit entirely a child of the eighteenth century, and in England was the best representative of the humanitarianism and enlightenment of that age. Length of days was no small aid in the performance of his life’s work. Bentham, like Voltaire,4 ultimately owed much of his authority to the many years for which he was able to press his doctrines upon the world. Iteration and reiteration are a great force; when employed by a teacher of genius they may become an irresistible power. For well nigh sixty years, that is to say to two generations, Bentham preached the necessity, and explained the principles, of law reform . He began his career as an unknown youth whose ideas were scouted 3. Brougham’s Speeches, ii. pp. 287, 288. 4. Voltaire, born 1694, died 1778. Each lived to the...

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