 CHAPTER III. PART ONE The 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 practiced 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 put into my hands Condolax, Trate de Sensationes, and the logical and metaphysical volumes of his Hors de Etrudes, the first notwithstanding the superficial resemblance, green Condolax psychological system and my father's, quite as much for a warning as for an example. I am not sure whether it was in this winter or the next that I first read the history of the French Revolution. I learned with astonishment that the principles of democracy were apparently in no insignificant and hopeless a minority everywhere in Europe, had borne all before them in France thirty years earlier, and had been the creed of the nation. As may be supposed from this, I had previously a very vague idea of that great commotion. I knew only that the French had thrown off the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV and XIV, had put the king and queen to death, guillotined many persons, one of whom was Lavochier, and had ultimately fallen under the despotism of Bonaparte. From this time, as was natural, the subject took an immense hold on my feelings. It allied itself with all my juvenile aspirations to the character of a democratic champion. What had happened so lately seemed as if it might easily happen again, and the most transcendent glory I was capable of conceiving was that of figuring successfully or unsuccessfully as a geordinist in an English convention. During the winter of 1821-2, Mr. John Austin, with whom at the time of my visit to France my father had but lately become acquainted, kindly allowed me to read Roman law with him. My father, now standing his abhorrence of the chaos of barbarianism called English law, had turned his thoughts toward the bar as on the whole less inequitable for me than any other profession. And these readings with Mr. Austin, who had made Bentham's best ideas his own, and added much to them from other sources and from his own mind, were not only a valuable introduction to legal studies, but an important portion of general education. With Mr. Austin I read Anasius on the institutes, his Roman antiquities and part of his exposition of the pandasets to whom was added a considerable portion of Blackstone. It was at the commencement of these studies that my father, as a needful accompaniment to them, put into my hands Bentham's principal speculations as interpreted to the continent and indeed to all the world by Dumas. In the Trace de Legislation, the reading of this book was an epic in my life, one of the turning points in my mental history. My previous education had been, in a certain sense, already a course of Benthamism. The Benthamic standard of the greatest happiness was that which I had always been taught to apply. I was even familiar with an abstract discussion of it, forming an episode in an unpublished dialogue on government, written by my father on the Platonic model. Yet in the first pages of Bentham it burst upon me with all the force of novelty. What thus impressed me was the chapter in which Bentham passed judgment on the common modes of reasoning in morals and legislation, reduced from phrases like law of nature, right reason, the moral sense, natural reciditude, and the like, and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its sentiments on others under cover of sound and expressions which convey no reason for the sentiment, but set up the sentiment as its own reason. It had not struck me before that Bentham's principle put an end to all this, the feeling rushed upon me that all previous moralists were superseded, and that there indeed was the commencement of a new era in thought. This impression was strengthened by the manner in which Bentham put into scientific form the application of the happiness principle to the morality of actions by analyzing the various classes and orders of their consequences, but what struck me at the time most of all was the classification of offenses, which is much more clear, compact, and imposing in Dumont's redaction than in the original work of Bentham from which it was taken. Logic and the dialectics of Plato, which had formed so large a part of my previous training, had given me a strong relish for accurate classification. This taste had been strengthened and enlightened by the study of botany on the principles of what is called the natural method, which I had taken up with great zeal, though only as an amusement, during my stay in France, and when I found scientific classification applied to the great and complex subject of punishable acts under the guidance of the ethical principle of pleasurable and painful consequences, followed out in the method of detail introduced into these subjects by Bentham, I felt taken up to an eminence from which I could survey a vast mental domain and see stretching out into the distance intellectual results beyond all computation. As I proceeded further, there seemed to be added to this intellectual clearness the most inspiring prospects of practical improvement in human affairs. To Bentham's general view of the construction of a body of law, I was not altogether a stranger, having read with attention that admirable compendium my father's article on jurisprudence, but I had read it with little profit, and scarcely any interest, no doubt from its extremely general and abstract character, and also because it concerned the form more than the substance of the corpus juris, the logic rather than the ethics of law. But Bentham's subject was legislation, of which jurisprudence is only the formal part, and at every part he seemed to open a clearer and broader conception of what human opinions and institutions ought to be, how they might be made, what they ought to be, and how far removed from it they are now. When I laid down the last volume of the triate, I had become a different being. The principle of utility understood as Bentham understood it, and applied it in the manner in which he applied it, through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place through the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave utility to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions, a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy, in one among the best senses of the word, a religion, the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principle outward purpose of a life, and I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the condition of mankind through that doctrine. The trattes des législations wound up with what was, to me, a most impressive picture of human life, as it would be made by such opinions and such laws as were recommended in the treatise. The anticipations of practicable improvement were studiously moderate, appreciating and discontenting as reveries of vague enthusiasm, many things which will one day seem so natural to human beings, that injustice will probably be done to those who once thought them comerical. But in my state of mind the appearance of superiority to illusion added to the effect which Bentham's doctrine produced in me by heightening the impression of mental power and the vista of improvement which he did open was sufficiently large and brilliant to light up my life as well as to give a definite shape to my aspirations. After this I read, from time to time, the most important of the other works of Bentham which had then seen the light, either as written by himself or as edited by Dumar. This was my private reading, while under my father's direction my studies were carried into the higher branches of analytical psychology. I now read Locke's essay and wrote out an account of it consisting of a complete abstract of every chapter with such remarks as occurred to me which was read by, or I think, to, my father, and discussed throughout. I performed the same process with Ovidicus de l'Espere, which I read of my own choice. This preparation of abstracts subject to my father's censorship was of great service to me by compelling a precision in conceiving and expressing psychological doctrines, whether accepted as trues or not, regarded as the opinion of others. After Ovidicus, my father made me study what he deemed the really master production in the philosophy of mine, Hartley's Observations on Man. This book, though it did not like tratté de législation, give a new color to my existence, made a very similar impression on me in regard to its immediate subject. Hartley's Explanation, incomplete as in many points it is of the more complex moral phenomenon by the law of association, amended itself to me at once as a real analysis and made me feel, by contrast, the insufficiency of the merely verbal generalizations of condolapes and even of the instructive groupings and feelings about for psychological explanations of law. It was at this very time that my father commenced writing his Analysis of the Mind, which carried Hartley's motive of explaining the mental phenomenon to so much greater length and depth. He could only command the concentration of thought necessary for this work during the complete leisure of his holiday for a month or six weeks annually, and he commenced it in the summer of 1822, and the first holiday he passed at Dorking, in which, neighborhood from that time to the end of his life, with the exception of two years, he lived as far as his official duties permitted, for six months of every year. He worked at the Analysis during several successive vacations, up to the year 1829, when it was published, and allowed me to read the manuscript portion by portion as it advanced. The other principal English writers on mental philosophy I read as I felt inclined, particularly Berkeley, Hume's Essays, Reed, Dougal Steward, and Brown on Cause and Effect. These lectures I did not read until two or three years later, nor at the time had my father himself read them. Among the works read in the course of this year, which contributed materially to my development, I owe it to mention a book written on the foundation of some of Bentham's manuscripts and published under the pseudonym of Philip Bochamp entitled Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind. This was an examination not of the truth, but of the usefulness of religious belief in the most general sense, apart from the particularities of any special revelation, which of all the parts of the discussion concerning religion is the most important in this age, in which real belief in any religious doctrine is feeble and precarious, but the opinion of its necessity for moral and social purposes almost universal, and when those who reject revelation very generally take refuge in an optimistic deism, a worship of the order of nature and the supposed course of providence at least is full of contradiction and perverting to the moral sentiments as any of the forms of Christianity, if only it is as completely realized. Yet very little with any claim to a philosophical character has been written by skeptics against the usefulness of this form of belief. The volume bearing of the name of Philip Bochamp had this for its special object. Having been shown to my father in manuscript, it was put into my hands by him, and I made a marginal analysis of it as I had done of the elements of political economy. Next to the Tracte di Legislation, it was one of the books which by the searching character of its analysis produced the greatest effect upon me. On reading it lately, after an interval of many years, I find it to have some of the defects as well as the merits of the benthenic modes of thought, and to contain, as I now think, many weak arguments, but with a great overbalance of sound ones, and much good material, for a more completely philosophic and conclusive treatment of the subjects. I have now, I believe, mentioned all the books which had any considerable effect on my early mental development. From this point I began to carry on my intellectual cultivation by writing still more than reading. In the summer of 1822 I wrote my first argumentative essay. I remember very little about it except that it was an attack on what I regarded as the aristocratic prejudice that the rich or were likely to be superior in moral qualities to the poor. My performance was entirely argumentative without any of the declamation which the subject would admit of, and might be expected to support to a young writer. In that department, however, I was and remained very inept. Dry argument was the only thing I could manage, or willingly attempt, though passively I was very susceptible to the effect of all composition, whether in the form of poetry or oratory, which appealed to the feelings on any basis of reason. My father, who knew nothing of this essay until it was finished, was well satisfied and, as I learned from others, even pleased with it, but perhaps from a desire to promote the exercise of other mental facilities that were purely logical, he advised me to take my next exercise in composition, one of the oratorial kind, on which the suggestion, availing myself of my familiarity with Greek history and ideas, and with the Athenian orators, I wrote two speeches, one an accusation, the other a defense of Heracles, on a supposed impeachment for not marching out to fight the Alassid demonians on their invasion of Attica. After this, I continued to write papers on subjects often very much beyond my capacity, but with great benefit both from the exercise itself and from the discussions which it led to with my father. I had also to converse on great subjects with the instructed men with whom I came in contact, and the opportunities of such contact naturally became more numerous. The two friends of my father, from whom I derived most and with whom I most associated, were Mr. Grote and Mr. John Austin. The acquaintance of both with my father was recent, but had ripened rapidly into intimacy. Mr. Grote was introduced to my father by Mr. Ricardo, I think in 1819, being then about twenty-five years old, and sought assiduously his society in conversation. Already a highly instructed man, he was yet by the side of my father a Tyro in the general subjects of human opinion, but he rapidly seized upon my father's best ideas, and in the Department of Political Opinion he made himself known as early as 1820 by a pamphlet in the sense of radical reform, and applied to a celebrated article by Sir James McIntosh, then, lately published in the Edinburgh Review. Mr. Grote's father, the banker, was, I believe, a thorough Tory and his mother intensely evangelical, so that for his liberal opinions he was in no way indebted to home influences. But unlike most persons who have the prospect of being rich by inheritance, he had, though actively engaged in the business of banking, devoted a great portion of time to philosophic studies, and his intimacy with my father did much to decide the character of the next stage in his method of progress. Him I often visited, and my conversations with him on politics, moral and philosophical subjects, gave me, in addition to much valuable instruction, all the pleasure and benefit of sympathetic communion with a man of the high intellectual and moral experience which his life and writings have since manifested into the world. CHAPTER 3 PART II AUTOBIOGRAPHY This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. CHAPTER 3 LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION AND FIRST OF SELF EDUCATION PART II Mr. Austin, who was four or five years older than Mr. Groke, was the eldest son of a retired miller in Suffolk, who had made money by contracts during the war, and who must have been a man of remarkable qualities, as I infer from the fact that all his sons were of more than common ability and all eminently gentlemen. The one with whom we are now concerned, and whose writings, on jurisprudence, have made him celebrated, was for some time in the army, and served in Sicily under Lord William Bentinich. After the peace he sold his commission and studied for the bar, to which he had been called for some time before my father knew him. He was not like Mr. Groke, to any extent a pupil of my father, but he had attained, by reading and thought, a considerable number of the same opinions, modified by his own very decided individuality of character. He was a man of great intellectual powers, which in conversation appeared at their very best. From the vigor and richness of expression, with which, under the excitement of discussion, he was accustomed to maintain some view or other of most general subjects. And from an appearance of not only strong, but deliberate and collected will, mixed with a certain bitterness, partly delivered from temperament, and partly from the general cast of his feelings and reflections. The dissatisfaction with life in the world felt more or less in the present state of society and intellect, by every discerning and highly conscientious mind, gave, in his case, a rather melancholy tinge to the character, very naturally to those whose passive moral susceptibilities are more than proportioned to their active energies. For it must be said that the strength of will of which his manner seemed to give such strong assurance expended itself principally in manner. With great zeal for human improvement, a strong sense of duty, and capabilities and acquirements, the extent of which is proved by the writings he has left, he hardly ever completed any intellectual task of magnitude. He had so high a standard of what ought to be done, so exaggerated a sense of deficiencies in his own performances, and was so unable to content himself with the amount of elaboration sufficient for the occasion and the purpose, that he not only spoiled much of his work for ordinary use by over-laboring it, but spent so much time and exertion in superfluorious study and thought, that when his task ought to have been completed, he had generally worked himself into an illness without having half finished what he undertook. For this mental infirmity, of which he is not the sole example among the accomplished and the able men whom I have known, combined with liability to frequent attacks of disabling, though not dangerous ill health, he accomplished, through life, little in comparison with what he seemed capable of, but what he did produce is held in the very highest estimation by the most competent judges, and, like Holridge, he might plead as a set-off that he had been to many persons, through his conversation, a source not only of much instruction, but of great elevation of character. On me his influence was most salutary. It was moral in the best sense. He took a sincere and kind interest in me, far beyond what could have been expected towards a mere youth from a man of his age. Standing and what seemed austerity of character, there was in his conversation and demeanor a tone of high-mindedness, which did not show itself so much, if the quality existed as much, in any of the other persons with whom, at that time, I associated. My intercourse with him was the more beneficial, owing to his being of a different mental type, from all other intellectual men whom I frequented, and he, from the first, set himself decidedly against the prejudices and narrownesses which are almost sure to be found in a young man, formed by a particular mode of thought, or a particular social circle. His younger brother, Charles Austin, of whom, at this time and for the next year or two, I saw much, had also a great effect on me, though of a very different description. He was but a few years older than myself, and had then just left the university, where he had shown, with great eclaire, as a man of intellect, as a brilliant orator, and converseur. The effect he produced on his Cambridge contemporaries deserves to be accounted an historical event, for it may in part be traced the tendency toward liberalism in general, and the pathetic and political economic form of it in particular, which showed itself in a portion of the more active-minded young men of the higher classes, from this time to 1830. The Union Debating Society, at that time, at the height of its reputation, was an arena where what were then thought extreme opinions in politics and philosophy, were weakly asserted, face to face, with their opposites, before audiences consisting of the elite of the Cambridge youth. And though many persons afterwards of more or less note, of whom Lord Macaulay is the most celebrated, gained their first oratorical laurels in those debates, the really influential mind among these intellectual gladiators was Charles Austen. He continued, after leaving the university, to be, by his conversation and personal ascendancy, a leader among the same class of young men who had been his associates there, and he attached me, among others, to his car. Through him, I became acquainted with Macaulay, Pied, and Charles Villaners, Strut, now Lord Belper, Romley, now Lord Romley and Master of the Rolls, and various others, who subsequently figured in literature or politics, and among whom I heard discussions on many topics, as yet to a certain degree new to me. The influence of Charles Austen over me differed from that of the persons I have hitherto mentioned in being not the influence of a man over a boy, but that of an elder contemporary. It was through him that I first felt myself not a pupil under teachers, but a man among men. He was the first person of intellect whom I met on a ground of equality, though as yet much his inferior on that common ground. He was a man who never failed to impress greatly those with whom he came in contact, even when their opinions were the very reverse of his. The impression he gave was that of boundless strength, together with talents which, combined with such apparent force of will and character, seemed capable of dominating the world. Those who knew him, whether friendly to him or not, always anticipated that he would play a conspicuous part in public life. It is seldom that men produce so great an immediate effect by speech unless they, in some degree, lay themselves out for it, and he did this in no ordinary degree. He loved to strike, and even to startle. He knew that decision is the greatest element of effect, and he uttered his opinions with all the decision he could throw into them, never so well pleased as when he astonished anyone by their audacity. Very unlike his brother, who made war against the narrow interpretations and applications of the principles they both professed, he, on the contrary, presented the Bethanic doctrines in the most startling form of which they were susceptible, exaggerating everything in them which tended to consequences offensive to anyone's preconceived feelings. All which he defended with such verve and vivacity, and carried off by a manner so agreeable as well as forcible, that he always either came off victor or divided the honors of the field. It is my belief that much of the notion popularly entertained of the tenets and sentiments of what are called benthamites, or utilitarians, had its origin in paradoxes thrown out by Charles Austen. It must be said, however, that his example was followed, hod passibosequus, by younger proselytites, and that to attire whatever was by anyone considered offensive in the doctrines and maxims of benthamism, he came at one time the badge of a small quartier of use. All of these who had anything in them, myself among others, quickly outgrew this boyish vanity. But those who had not became tired of differing from other people and gave up both the good and the bad part of the heterodox opinions they had for some time professed. It was in the winter of 1822-3 that I formed the plan of a little society to be composed of young men agreeing in fundamental principles, acknowledging utility as their standard in ethics and politics, and a certain number of the principal corollaries drawn from it in the philosophy I had accepted, and meeting once a fortnight to read essays and discuss questions comfortably to the premises thus agreed on. The fact would hardly be worth mentioning, but for the circumstance that the name I gave to the society I had planned was the Utilitarian Society. It was the first time that anyone had taken the title of utilitarian, and the term made its way into the language from this humble source. I did not invent the word, but found it in one of Galt's novels, The Annals of the Parish, in which the Scottish clergyman, for whom the book is a supposed autobiography, is represented as warning his parishioners not to leave the gospel and become utilitarians. With a boy's fondness for a name and a banner I seized on the word, and for some years called myself and others by it as a sectarian appellation, it came to be occasionally used by some others, holding the opinions which I was intended to designate. As those opinions attracted more notice, the term was repeated by strangers and opponents and got into rather common use. Just about the time when those who had originally assumed it laid down that along with other sectarian characteristics. The society, so called, consisted at first of no more than three members, one of whom being Mr. Bentham's Emanuensis, obtained for us permission to hold our meetings in his house. The number never, I think, reached ten, and the society was broken up in 1826. It had thus an existence of about three years and a half. The chief effect of it, as regards myself, over and above the benefit of practice in oral discussion, was that of bringing me in contact with several young men at that time less advanced than myself, among whom, as they professed the same opinions, I was for some time a sort of leader and had considerable influence on their mental progress. Any young man of education who fell in my way and whose opinions were not incompatible with those of the society, I endeavored it to press into its service, and some others I probably should never have known had they not joined it. Those of the members who became my intimate companions, no one of whom was in any sense of the word a disciple, but all of them independent thinkers on their own bases, were William Eaton Took, son of the eminent political economist, a young man of singular worth both moral and intellectual, lost to the world by an early death, his friend William Ellis, an original thinker in the field of political economy, now honorably known by his apostolic exertions for the improvement of education, Sir George Graham, afterwards official assignee of the bankruptcy court, a thinker of originality and power on almost all abstract subjects, and from the time when he came first to England to study for the bar in 1824 or 1825, a man who has made considerably more noise in the world than any of these, John Arthur Robuck. In May 1823 my professional occupation and status for the next thirty-five years of my life were decided by my father's obtaining for me an appointment from the East India Company in the office of the Examiner of India Correspondence, immediately under himself. I was appointed in the usual manner at the bottom of the list of clerks to rise, at least in the first instance, by seniority, but with the understanding that I should be employed from the beginning in preparing drafts of dispatches and be thus trained up as a successor to those who then filled the higher departments of the office. My drafts, of course, required for some time much revision for my immediate superiors, but I soon became well acquainted with the business, and by my father's instructions and the general growth of my own powers, I was, in a few years, qualified to be, and practically was, the chief conductor of the correspondence with India in one of the leading departments, that of the native states. This continued to be my official duty until I was appointed Examiner, only two years before the time when the ablation of the East India Company as a political body determined my retirement. I do not know any one of the occupations by which a subsistence can now be gained more suitable than such as this to anyone who, not being in independent circumstances, desires to devote a part of the twenty-four hours to private intellectual pursuits. Writing for the press cannot be recommended as a permanent resource to anyone qualified to accomplish anything in the higher departments of literature or thought, not only on account of the uncertainty of this means of livelihood, especially if the writer has a conscience, and will not consent to serve any opinions except his own, but also because the writings by which one can live are not the writings which themselves live, and are never those in which the writer does his best. Books destined to form future thinkers take too much time to write, and when written come, in general, too slowly into notice and repute, to be relied upon or sustenance, those who have to support themselves by their pen must depend on literary drudgery, or at best on writings addressed to the multitude, and can employ in the pursuits of their own choice only such time as they can spare from those of necessity, which is generally less than the leisure allowed by office occupations, while the effect on the mind is far more innervating and fatiguing. For my own part I have, through life, found office duties and actual rest from the other mental occupations which I have carried on simultaneously with them. They were sufficiently intellectual not to be a distasteful drudgery, without being such as to cause any strain upon the mental powers of a person used to abstract thought, or to the labour of careful literary composition. The drawbacks for every mode of life has its drawbacks, were not, however, unfelt by me. I cared little for the loss of the chances of riches and honours held by some of the professions, particularly the bar, which had been, as I have already said, the profession thought of for me. But I was not indifferent to exclusion from Parliament and public life, and I felt very sensibly the more immediate unpleasantness of confinement to London, the holiday allowed by India House practice, not exceeding a month in the year, while my taste was strong for a country life and my sojourn in France had left behind it an ardent desire for travelling. But though these tastes could not be freely indulged, they were at no time entirely sacrificed. I passed most Sundays throughout the year in the country, taking long, rural walks on that day, even when residing in London. The month's holiday was, for a few years, passed in my father's house in the country. Afterwards, a part or the whole was spent in tours, chiefly pedestrian, with one or more of the young men who were my chosen companions, and at a later period, in longer journeys or excursions, alone, or with other friends. France, Belgium, and Rheinisch Germany were within easy reach of the annual holiday, and in two longer absences, one of three, the other of six months, under medical advice, added Switzerland, the Tyrol, and Italy to my list. Fortunately also, both these journeys occurred rather early, so as to give the benefit and a charm of the remembrance to a large portion of my life. I am disposed to agree with what has been surmised by others, that the opportunity which my official position gave me of learning by personal observation, the necessary conditions of the practical conduct of public affairs, has been of considerable value to me as a theoretical reformer of the opinions and institutions of my time, not indeed that public business transacted on paper to take effect on the other side of the globe, as of itself calculated to give much practical knowledge of life. But the occupation accustomed me to see and hear the difficulties of every course, and the merits of obviating them, deliberately, with a view to execution. It gave me opportunities of perceiving when public measures and other political facts did not produce the effects which had been expected of them, and from what causes, above all, it was valuable to me by making me in this portion of my activity merely one wheel in a machine. I should have had no one to consult by myself, and should have entered in my speculations none of the obstacles which would have started up whenever they came to be applied to practice. But as a secretary conducting political correspondence I could not issue an order or express an opinion without satisfying various persons very unlike myself, that the thing was fit to be done. I was thus in a good position for finding out by practice the mode of putting a thought which gives it easiest admittance to minds not prepared for it by habit. While I became particularly conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-essential to preserve the essential, I learned how to obtain the best I could when I could not obtain everything. Instead of being indulgent or dispirited, because I could not have entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could have the smallest part of it, and when even that could not be to bear with complete equanimity the being overruled altogether. I have found, through life, these acquisitions to be of the greatest possible importance for personal happiness, and they are also a very necessary condition for enabling any one, whether as theorist or as practical man, to effect the greater amount of good compatible with his opportunities. THE OCCUPATION OF SO MUCH OF MY TIME BY OFFICE WORK DID NOT RELAXE. My attention to my own pursuits, which were never carried on more vigorously. It was about this time that I began to write in newspapers. The first writings of mine, which got into print, were two letters published towards the end of 1822, in the Traveler Evening Newspaper. The Traveler, which afterwards grew into the Globe and the Traveler, by the purchase and incorporation of the Globe, was then the property of the well-known political economist Colonel Torrance, and under the editorship of an able man, Mr. Walter Coulson, who, after being an Emanuensis of Mr. Bentham, became a reporter. Then an editor, next a barrister and conveyancer, and died counsel to the Home Office. It had become one of the most important newspaper organs of liberal politics. Colonel Torrance himself wrote much of the political economy of his paper, and had at this time made an attack upon some opinions of Ricardo and my father, to which, at my father's instigation, I attempted an answer, and Coulson, out of consideration for my father, and goodwill to me, inserted it. There was a reply by Torrance, to which I again rejoined. I soon after attempted something considerably more ambitious. The prosecutions of Richard Carlyle and his wife and sister, for publications hostile to Christianity, were then exciting much attention, and nowhere more than among the people I frequented. Freedom of discussion, even in politics, much more in religion, was at that time far from being, even in theory, the conceited point, which it at least seems to be now, and the holders of obnoxious opinions had to be always ready to argue and re-argue for the liberty of expressing them. I wrote a series of five letters under the signature of Wycliffe, going over the whole length and breadth of the question of free publication of all opinions on religion, and offered them to the morning chronicle. Three of them were published in January and February, 1823. The other two, containing things too outspoken for that journal, never appeared at all. A debate in the House of Commons was inserted as a leading article, and during the whole of this year, 1823, a considerable number of my contributions were printed in the chronicle and traveler. Sometimes, notice as a book, but often letters, commenting on some nonsense talked in parliament, or some other defect of the law, or misdoings of the magistracy of the courts of justice. In this last department, the chronicle was now rendering single service. After the death of Mr. Perry, the editorship and management of the paper had devolved on Mr. John Black, long a reporter on its establishment, a man of most extreme reading and information, great honesty and simplicity of mind, a particular friend of my father, imbued with many of his and Bentham's ideas, which he reproduced in his articles, among other valuable thoughts, with great facility and skill. From this time the chronicle ceased to be the merely wig organ it was before, and during the next ten years became to a considerable extent a vehicle of the opinions of the utilitarian radicals. This was mainly by what Black himself wrote, with some assistance from Black, who first showed his eminent qualities as a writer by articles and judy esprit in the chronicle. The defects of the law and of the administration of justice were the subject on which that paper rendered most service to improvement. Up to that time hardly a word has been said except by Bentham and my father, against the most peckant part of English institutions and of their administration. It was the almost universal creed of establishment that the law of England, the judicure of England, the unpaid magistrate of England, were models of excellence. I do not go beyond the mark in saying that after Bentham, who supplied the principal materials, the greatest share of the merit of breaking down this wretched superstition belongs to Black, as editor of the morning chronicle. He kept up an incessant fire against it, exposing the absurdities and devices of the law and the course of justice, paid and unpaid, until he forced some sense of them into the people's minds. On many other questions he became the organ of opinions, which in advance of any which had ever before found regular advocacy in the newspaper press. Black was a frequent visitor of my father, and Mr. Groke used to say that he always knew by the Monday morning's article whether Black had been with my father on the Sunday. Black was one of the most influential of the many channels through which my father's conversation and personal influence made his opinions tell on the world, operating with the effect of his writings in making him a power to the country such as it has rarely been the lot of an individual in a private station to be through the mere force of intellect and character, and a power which was often acting the most efficiently where it was least seen and suspected. I have already noticed how much of it was done by Ricardo, Hume and Groke was the result in part of his prompting and persuasion. He was the good genius by the side of Brahm in most of what he did for the public, either on education, law reform or any other subject, and his influence flowed in minor streams too numerous to be specified. This influence was now about to receive a great extension by the foundation of the Westminster Review. Contrary to what may have been supposed, my father was in no degree a party to setting up the Westminster Review. The need of a radical organ to meet head against the Edinburgh and Quarterly, then in the period of their greatest reputation and influence, had been a topic of conversation between him and Mr. Bentham many years earlier, and it had been a part of their chateau and espagne, that my father should be the editor, but the idea never assumed any practical shape. In 1823, however, Mr. Bentham determined to establish the Review at his own cost, and offered the editor's ship to my father, who declined it as incompatible with his India House appointment. It was then entrusted to Mr. now Sir John Boering, at that time a merchant in the city. Mr. Boering had been, for two or three years previous, an assiduous frequenter of Mr. Bentham, to whom he was recommended by many personal good qualities, by an ardent admiration for Bentham, a zealous adoption of many, though not all, of his opinions, and, not least, by an extensive acquaintance ship and correspondence with liberals of all countries, which seemed to qualify him for being a powerful agent in spreading Bentham's fame and doctrines through all quarters of the world. My father had seen little of Boering, but knew enough of him to have formed a strong opinion that he was a man of an entirely different type from what my father considered suitable for conducting a political and philosophical review. And he augured so ill of the enterprise that he regretted it altogether, feeling persuaded not only that Mr. Bentham would lose his money, but that discredit would probably be brought upon radical principles. He could not, however, desert Mr. Bentham, and he consented to write an article for the first number, as it had been a favorite portion of the scheme formally talked of, that part of the work should be devoted to reviewing the other reviews. This article of my father's was to be a general criticism of the Edinburgh Review from its commencement. Before writing it, he made me read through all the volumes of the review, or as much of each as seemed of any importance, which was not so arduous a task in 1823 as it would be now, and make notes for him of the articles which I thought he would wish to examine, either on account of their good or their bad qualities. This paper of my father's was the chief cause of the sensation which the Westminster Review produced at its first appearance, and is, both in conception and in execution, one of the most striking of all his writings. He began, by an analysis of the tendencies of periodical literature in general, pointing out that it cannot, like books, wait for success, but must succeed immediately or not at all, and is hence almost certain to profess and inculcate the opinions already held by the public to which it addresses itself, instead of attempting to rectify or improve those opinions. He next, to characterize the position of the Edinburgh Review as a political organ, entered into a complete analysis from the radical point of view of the British Constitution. He held up to notice its thoroughly aristocratic character, the nomination of a majority of the House of Commons by a few hundred families, the entire identification of the more in the country members with the great landholders, the different classes whom this narrow oligarchy was induced for convenience to admit to a share of power, and finally what he called its two props, the church and the legal profession. He pointed out the natural tendency of an aristocratic body of this composition to group itself into two parties, one of them in possession of the executive, the other endeavoring to supplant the former and to become the predominant section by the aid of public opinion, without any essential sacrifice of the aristocratic political predominance. He described the course likely to be pursued and the political ground occupied by an aristocratic party in opposition, coquettting with popular principles for the sake of popular support. He showed how this idea was realized in the conduct of the Whig Party and of the Edinburgh Review as its chief literary organ. He described as their main characteristic, what he termed seesaw, writing alternatively on both sides of the question, which touched the power or interest of the governing classes, sometimes in different articles, sometimes in different parts of the same article, and illustrated his position by copious specimens, so formidable an attack on the Whig Party and policy had never before been made, nor had so great a blow ever been struck in this country, for to radicalism, nor was there, I believe, any living person capable of writing that article except my father. Begin footnote. The continuation of this article in the second number of the review was written by me under my father's eye, and except as practice in composition in which respect it was, to me, more useful than anything else I ever wrote, was of little or no value. End footnote. In the meantime, the nascent review had formed a junction with another project of a purely literary periodical to be edited by Mr. Henry Southern, afterwards a diplomatist. Then a literary man by profession, the two editors agreed to unite their core and divide the editorship, bowering and taking the political southern of the literary department. Southern's review was to have been published by Longman, and that firm, though part proprietors of the Edinburgh, were willing to be the publishers of the new journal. But when all the arrangements had been made, and the prospectus sent out, Longman's saw my father's attack on the Edinburgh and drew back. My father was now appealed to for his interest with his own publisher Baldwin, which was exerted with a successful result, and so in April 1824, amidst anything but hope on my father's part, and that of the most of those who, afterwards, aided in carrying out the review, the first number made its appearance. That number was an agreeable surprise to most of us. The average of the articles was of much better quality than had been expected. The literary and artistic department had arrested chiefly on Mr. Bingham, a barrister, subsequently a police magistrate, who had been for some years a frequenter of Bentham, was a friend of both the Austans, and had adopted, with great ardour, Mr. Bentham's philosophical opinions. Partly from accident, there were in the first number as many as five articles by Bingham, and we were extremely pleased with them. I well remember the mixed feeling I myself had about the review, the joy of finding what we did not at all expect, that it was sufficiently good to be capable of being made a creditable organ of those who held the opinions it professed, and extreme vexation, since it was so good on the whole, at what we thought the blemishes of it, when, however, in addition to our generally favourable opinion of it, we learned that it had an extraordinary large sale for a first number, and found that the appearance of a radical review, with pretensions equal to those of the established organs of parties, had excited much attention. There could be no room for hesitation, and we all became eager in doing everything we could to strengthen and improve it. My father continued to write occasional articles. The quarterly review received its exposure as a sequel to that of the Edinburgh. Of his other contributions, the most important were an attack on Southley's Book of the Church. In the fifth number, and a political article in the twelfth, Mr. Austan only contributed one paper, but one of great merit, an argument against primogenitor, in reply to an article then lately published in the Edinburgh Review by McCullough. Grote also was a contributor only once, all the time he could spare being already taken up with his history of Greece. The article he wrote was on his own subject, and was a very complete exposure and castigation of Mitford, Bingham, and Charles Austan, continued to write for some time. Pham Bloch was a frequent contributor from the third number. Of my particular associates, Ellis was a regular writer up to the ninth number, and about that time when he left off. Others of the set began. Eaton took, Graham, and Roebuck. I was myself the most frequent writer of all, having contributed from the second number to the eighteenth, thirteen articles, reviews of books on history and political economy, or discussions on special political topics, as corn laws, game laws, laws of libel, occasional articles of merit, came in from other acquaintances of my father's and in time of mine. And some of Mr. Bowring's writers turned out well. On the whole, however, the conduct of a review was never satisfactory to any of the persons strongly interested in its principles, with whom I came in contact. Hardly ever did a number come out without containing several things extremely offensive to us, either in points of opinion, of taste, or by mere want of ability. The unfavorable judgments passed by my father, Grote, the two Austans and others, were re-echoed with exaggeration by us younger people. And as our youthful zeal rendered us by no means backward in making complaints, we led the two editors a sad life. From my knowledge of what I then was, I have no doubt that we were at least as often wrong as right. And I am very certain that if the review had been carried on according to our notions—I mean those of the juniors—it would have been no better, perhaps not even as good as it was. But it is worth noting, as a fact in the history of Benthonism that the periodical organ by which it was best known was from the first extremely unsatisfactory to those whose opinions on all subjects it was supposed specially to represent. Meanwhile, however, the review made considerable noise in the world and gave a recognized status, in the area of opinion and discussion, to the benthenic type of radicalism, out of all proportion to the number of its adherents and to the personal merits and abilities at that time of most of those who could be reckoned among them. It was a time, as is known, of rapidly rising liberalism. When the fears and animosities accompanying the war with France had been brought to an end, and people had, once more, a place in their thoughts for home politics, the tide began to set towards reform. The renewed oppression of the continent by the old reigning families, the continents apparently given by the English government to the conspiracy against liberty called the Holy Alliance, and the enormous weight of the national debt and taxation occasioned by so long and costly a war rendered the government and parliament very unpopular. Radicalism under the leadership of the Brudettes and Coburts had assumed a character and importance which seriously alarmed the administration, and their alarm had scarcely been temporarily assuaged by the celebrated Six Acts when the trial of Queen Caroline roused a still wider and deeper feeling of hatred. Though the outward signs of this hatred passed away with its exciting cause, there arose on all sides a spirit which had never shown itself before of opposition to abuse in detail. Mr. Hume's persevering scrutiny of the public expenditure, forcing the House of Commons to a division on every objectionable item in the estimates, had begun to tell with great force on public opinion, and had exhorted many minor retrenchments from an unwilling administration. Political economy had asserted itself with great vigor in public affairs by the petition of the merchants of London for free trade, drawn up in 1820 by Mr. Tuck, and presented by Mr. Alexander Bering, and by the noble exertions of Ricardo during the few years of his parliamentary life. His writings followed up the impulse given by the bouillon controversy and followed up in their turn by the expositions and comments of my father and McCullough, whose writings in the Edinburgh Review during these years were most valuable, had drawn general attention to the subject, making at least partial converts of the cabinet itself and Huskinson, supported by Canning, and commenced that gradual demolition of the protective system which one of their colleagues virtually completed in 1846, though the vast vestiges were only swept away by Mr. Gladstone in 1860. Mr. Peel, then Home Secretary, was entering cautiously into the untrodden and peculiar benthemic path of law reform, at this period when liberalism seemed to be becoming the tone of the time, when improvement of institutions was preached from the highest places, and a complete change of the constitution of parliament was loudly demanded in the lowest. It is not strange that attention should have been aroused by the regular appearance and controversy of what seemed a new school of writers, claiming to be the legislatures and theorists of this new tendency. The air of strong conviction with which they wrote, when scarcely anyone else seemed to have an equally strong faith in, as definite a creed, the boldness with which they tilted against the very front of both the existing political parties and their uncompromising profession of opposition to many of the generally received opinions, and the suspicion they lay under of holding others still more heterodox, that they professed the talent and verve of at least my father's articles, and the appearance of a core behind him sufficient to carry on a review, and finally the fact that the review was bought and read, made the so-called Bentham School in philosophy and politics, fill a greater place in the public mind than it had held before, or has ever again held since other equally earnest schools of thought have arisen in England. As I was in the headquarters of it knew of what it was composed, and as one of the most active of its very small number, might say without undue assumption quorum pa magna fui it belongs to me more than to most others to give some account of it. This supposed school then had no other existence than what was constituted by the fact that my father's writings and conversation drew around him a certain number of young men who had already imbibed or who imbibed from him a greater or smaller portion of his very decided political and philosophical opinions. The notion that Bentham was surrounded by a band of disciples who received their opinions from his lips is a fable to which my father did justice in his fragment on Macintosh, and which to all who knew Mr. Bentham's habits of life and manner of conversation is simply ridiculous. The influence which Bentham exercised by his writings, through them he has produced and is producing, affects on the condition of mankind, wider and deeper, no doubt, than any which can be attributed to my father. He is a much greater name in history but my father exercised a far greater personal ascendancy. He was sought for the vigor and instructiveness of his conversation and did use it largely as an instrument for the diffusion of his opinions. I have never known any man who could do such ample justice to his best thoughts in colloquial discussion. His perfect command over his great mental resources, the terseness and expressiveness of his language, the moral earnestness as well as intellectual force of his delivery, made him one of the most striking of all argumentative conversers, and he was full of anecdote, a hearty laughter, and when with people whom he liked, a most lively and amusing companion, it was not solely or even chiefly in diffusing his merely intellectual convictions that his power showed itself. It was still more through the influence of a quality of which I have only since learnt to appreciate the extreme rarity that exalted public spirit and regarded above all things to the good of the whole, which warmed into life and activity every germ of a similar virtue that existed in the minds he came in contact with, the desire he made them feel for his approbation, the shame at his disapproval, the moral support which his conversation and his very existence gave to those who were aiming at the same objects, and the encouragement he afforded to the faint-hearted or desponding among them, by the firm confidence which, though the reverse of sanguine as to the results to be expected in any one particular case, he always felt in the power of reason the general progress of improvement and the good which individuals could do by judicious effort. End of Chapter 4 Youthful Propagandism, the Westminster Review, Part 1, Recording by Gary Kilburg, Autobiography by John Stuart Mill, Chapter 4 Youthful Propagandism, the Westminster Review, Part 2. It was my father's opinions which gave the distinguishing character to the benthemic or utilitarian propagandism of that time. They fell singularly scattered from him in many directions, but they flowed from him in a continued stream, principally in three channels. One was through me, the only mind directly formed by his instruction, and through whom considerable influence was excited over various young men who became, in their turn, propagandists. A second was through some of the Cambridge contemporaries of Charles Austen, who either initiated by him or under the gentle mental impulse which he gave had adopted many opinions allied to those of my father, and some of the more considerable of whom afterwards sought my father's acquaintance, and frequented his house. Among these may be mentioned Strut afterwards, Lord Belper, and the present Lord Romley, with whose eminent father, Sir Samuel, my father, had of old been on terms of friendship. The third channel was that of a younger generation of Cambridge undergraduates, contemporary, not with Austen, but with Elton Took, who were drawn to that estinable person by affinity of opinions, and introduced to him by my father the most notable of these was Charles Buller. Various other persons individually received and transmitted a considerable amount of my father's influence, for example, Black, as before mentioned, and Fun Black, most of these, however, were accounted only partial allies. Fun Black, for instance, was always divergent from us on many important points. But indeed there was, by no means, complete unanimity among any portion of us, nor had any of us adopted implicitly all of my father's opinions. For example, although his essay on government was regarded probably by all of us as a masterpiece of political wisdom, our adhesion, by no means, extended to the paragraph of it, in which he maintains that women may, consistently, with good government, be excluded from the suffrage, because their interest is the same as that of men, from this doctrine I and all those who formed my chosen associates most positively dissented. It is due to my father to say that he denied having intended to affirm that women should be excluded any more than men under the age of forty, concerning whom he maintained in the very next paragraph an exactly similar thesis. He was, as he truly said, not discussing whether the suffrage had better be restricted, but only, assuming that it is to be restricted, what is the utmost limit of restriction which does not necessarily involve a sacrifice of the securities for good government. But I thought then, and I have always thought since, that the opinion which he acknowledged, no less than that which he disclaimed, is as great an error as any of those against which the essay was directed, that the interest of women is included in that of men exactly as much as the interest of subjects is included in that of kings and no more, and that every reason which exists for giving the suffrage to anybody demands that it should not be withheld from women. This was also the general opinion of the younger proselytites, and it is pleasant to be able to say that Mr. Bentham, on this important point, was wholly on our side. But though none of us, probably, agreed in every respect with my father, his opinions, as I have said before, were the principal element which gave its color and character to the little group of young men who were the first propagandars of what was afterwards called philosophic radicalism. Their mode of thinking was not characterized by Benthamism in any sense which was relation to Bentham as a chief or guide, but rather by a combination of Bentham's point of view with that of the modern political economy, and with the Hartlian metaphysics. Malthus' population principle was quite as much a banner, and point of union among us as any opinion, especially belonging to Bentham. This great doctrine originally brought forward as an argument against the indefinite improvability of human affairs we took up with an ardent zeal in the contrary sense, as indicating the sole means of realizing that improvability by securing full employment at high wages to the whole laboring population, through a voluntary restriction of the increase of their numbers. The other leading characteristic of the creed, which we held in common with my father, may be stated as follows. In politics an almost unbounded confidence in the efficacy of two things, representative government and complete freedom of discussion. So complete was my father's reliance on the influence of reason over the minds of mankind whenever it is allowed to reach them that he felt as if all would be gained if the whole population were taught to read, if all sorts of opinions were allowed to be addressed to them by word and in writing, and if by means of the suffrage they could nominate a legislature to give effect to the opinions they adopted. He thought that when the legislature no longer represented a class interest it would aim at the general interest, honestly, and with adequate wisdom, since the people would be sufficiently under the guidance of educated intelligence, to make in general a good choice of persons to represent them. And having done so, to leave it to those whom they had chosen a liberal discretion. Accordingly, aristocratic rule, the government of the few in any of its shapes, being in his eyes the only thing which stood between mankind and an administration of their affairs by the best wisdom to be found among them, was the object of his sternest disapprobation, and a democratic suffrage, the principal article of his political creed, not on the ground of liberty, rights of man, or any of the phrases more or less significant by which up to that time democracy had usually been defended, but as the most essential of securities for good government. In this, too, he held fast only to what he deemed essentials. He was comparatively indifferent to monarchial or republican forms, far more so than in Bentham, to whom a king in the character of Corruptor General appeared necessarily very obnoxious. Next to the aristocracy, an established church, or corporation of priests, as being by position the great depravers of religion, and interested in opposing the progress of the human mind, was the object of his greatest detestation. Though he disliked no clergyman personally, who did not deserve it, and he was on terms of sincere friendship with several. In ethics his moral feelings were energetic and rapid on all points, which he deemed important to human well-being, while he was supremely indifferent in opinion, though his indifference did not show itself in personal conduct, to all those doctrines of the common morality, which he thought had no foundation but in asceticism and priestcraft. He looked forward, for example, to a considerable increase of freedom in the relations between the sexes, though without pretending to define exactly what would be, or ought to be, the precise condition of that freedom. His opinion was connected in him with no sensuality either of a theoretical or of a practical kind. He anticipated, on the contrary, as one of the beneficial effects of increased freedom, that the imagination would no longer dwell upon the principal objects of life, a perversion of the imagination and feelings, which he regarded as one of the deepest-seated and most pervading evils in the human mind. In psychology his fundamental doctrine was the formation of all human character by circumstances, through the universal principle of association and the consequent unlimited possibility of improving the moral and intellectual condition of mankind by education. Of all his doctrines none was more important than this, or needs more to be insisted on. Unfortunately there is none which is more contradictory to the prevailing tendencies of speculation, both in his time and since. These various opinions were seized upon with youthful fanaticism by the little knot of young men of whom I was one, and we put into them a secular spirit from which, in intention at least, my father was wholly free. What we, or rather a phantom substituted in the place of us, were sometimes, by a ridiculous exaggeration, called by others, namely a school, some of us, for a time really hoped, and aspired to me. The French philosophies of the eighteenth century were the examples we sought to imitate, and we hoped to accomplish no less result. No one of us went in so great excesses in his boyish ambition, as I did, which might be shown by many particulars were it not for a useless waste of space and time. All this, however, is probably only the outside of our existence, or at least the intellectual part alone, and no part than one side of that. In attempting to penetrate inward, and give any indication of what we were as human beings, I must be understood, as speaking only of myself, of whom alone I can speak from sufficient knowledge, and I do not believe that the picture would suit any of my companions without many and great modifications. I conceive that the description so often given, of a benthamite, as a mere reasoning machine, though extremely inapplicable to most of those who have been designated by that title, was during two or three years of my life not altogether untrue of me. It was perhaps as applicable to me as it can well be to anyone just entering into life, to whom the common objects of desire must in general have at least the attraction of novelty. There is nothing very extraordinary in this fact. No youth of the age I then was can be expected to be more than one thing, and this was the thing I happened to be. Ambition and desire of distinction I had in abundance, and zeal for what I thought the good of mankind was my strongest sentiment, mixing with and coloring all others, but my zeal was as yet little else, at that period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions. It had not its root in genuine benevolence or sympathy with mankind, though these qualities had their due place in my ethical standard, nor was it connected with any high enthusiasm for ideal nobleness. Yet of this feeling I was imaginatively very susceptible, but there was at that time an intermission of its natural ailment, poetical culture, while there was a superabundance of the discipline antagonistic to it, that of mere logic and analysis. Add to this that, as already mentioned, my father's teachings tended to the undervaluing of feeling, it was not that he was himself cold-hearted or insensible. I believe it was rather, from the contrary quality, he thought that feeling could take care of itself, that there was sure to be enough of it, if actions were properly cared about. Offended by the frequency with which, in ethical and philosophical controversies, feeling is made the ultimate reason and justification of conduct, instead of being itself called in for a justification, while, in practice, actions, the effect of which on human happiness is mischievous, are defended as being required by feeling, and the character of a person of feeling obtains a credit for dessert which he thought only due to actions. He had a real impatience of attributing praise to feeling, or to any but the most sparing reference to it, either in the estimation of persons or in the discussion of things. In addition to the influence which this characteristic in him had on me and others, we found all the opinions to which we attained the most importance consistently attacked on the ground of feeling. Utility was denounced as cold calculation, political economy as hard-hearted anti-population doctrines as repulsive to the natural feelings of mankind. We retorted by the word sentimentality, which along with declamation and vague generalities, served us as common items of approbation, although we were generally in the right as against those who were opposed to us. The effect was that of the cultivation of feeling, except the feelings of public and private duty, was not in much esteem among us, and had very little place in the thoughts of most of us, myself in particular. What we particularly thought of was to alter people's opinions, to make them believe according to evidence, and to know what was their real interest, which, when they once knew, they would, we thought, by the instruments of opinion, enforce a regard to it upon one another, while fully recognizing the superior excellence of unselfish benevolence and love of justice. We did not expect the regeneration of mankind from any direct action on those sentiments, but from the effect of educated intellect, enlightening the selfish feelings. Although this last is prodigiously important as a means of improvement in the hands of those who are themselves impelled by nobler principles of action, I do not believe that any one of the survivors of the Benthamites, or utilitarians of that day, now relies mainly upon it to the general amendment of human conduct. From this neglect, both in theory and in practice, of the cultivation of feeling naturally resulted, among other things, an undervaluing of poetry, and of imagination generally, as an element of human nature. It is or was, part of the popular notion of the Benthamites, that they are enemies of poetry. This was partly true of Bentham himself. He used to say that all poetry is misrepresentation. But in the sense in which he said it, the same might have been said of all impressive speech, of all representation, or inclusion, more oratorical in its character than a sum in arithmetic. An article of Bentham's in the first number of the Westminster Review, in which he offered as an explanation of something which he disliked in Moore, that Mr. Moore is a poet, and therefore is not a reasoner, did a good deal to attach the notion of hating poetry to the writers of the Review. But the truth was, that many of us were great readers of poetry. Bingham himself had been a writer of it, while as regards me, and the same thing might be said of my father, the correct statement would be, not that I disliked poetry, but that I was theoretically indifferent to it, I disliked any sentiments in poetry which I should have disliked in prose, and that included a great deal. And I was wholly blind to its place in human culture as a means of educating the feelings, but I was personally very susceptible to some kinds of it in the most sectarian period of my Benthamism. I happened to look into Pope's essay on man, and though every opinion in it was contrary to mine, I well remembered how powerfully it acted on my imagination. Perhaps at the time political composition of any higher type than eloquent discussion in verse might not have produced a similar effect upon me at all events I seldom gave it an opportunity. This, however, was a mere passive state. Long before I had enlarged in any considerable degree the basis of my intellectual creed, I had obtained, in the natural course of my mental progress, poetic culture of the most valuable kind, by means of reverential admiration for the lives and characters of heroic persons, especially the heroes of philosophy. The same inspiring effect which so many of the benefactors of mankind have left on record that they had experienced from Plutarch's lives was produced on me by Plato's pictures of Socrates, and by some modern biographers, above all Condorcet's Life of Turgot, a book well calculated to rouse the best sort of enthusiasm, since it contains one of the wisest and noblest of lives, delineated by one of the wisest and noblest of men. The heroic virtue of these glorious representatives of the opinions with which I sympathize deeply affected me, and I perpetually recurred to them as others due to a favorite poet. When, needing to be carried up into the more elevated regions of feeling and thought, I may observe, by the way, that this book cured me of my sectarian follies. The two or three pages beginning, il rigare trate secte comennuisble, and explaining why Turgot always kept himself perfectly distinct from the encyclopedists, sank deeply into my mind. I left off designating myself and others as utilitarians, and by the pronoun we, or any other collective designation, I ceased to effecture sectarianism. My real inward sectarianism I did not get rid of till later, and much more gradually. By the end of 1824, beginning of 1825, Mr. Bentham having lately got back his papers on evidence from Michel Dumont, whose trate des pèvres judiciaris, grounded on them, was then first completed and published, resolved to have them printed in the original, and be thought himself of me as capable of preparing them for the press, in the same manner as his book of fallacies, had been recently edited by Bingham. I gladly undertook this task, and had occupied nearly all my leisure for about a year, exclusive of the time afterwards spent in seeing the five large volumes through the press. Mr. Bentham had begun the treatise three times, at considerable intervals, each time in a different manner, and each time without reference to the preceding two of the three times he had gone over nearly the whole subject. These three masses of manuscript it was my business to condense into a single treatise, adapting the one last written as the groundwork, and incorporating with it as much of the two others as it had not completely superseded. I had also to unroll such of Bentham's involved and parenthetical sentences as seemed to overpass by their complexity the measure of what readers were likely to take the pains to understand. It was further Mr. Bentham's particular desire that I should, from my self-endever, to supply any lacune which he had left, and at his insistence I read, for this purpose, the most authoritative treatise on the English law of evidence, and commented on a few of the objectionable points of the English rules which had escaped Bentham's notice. I also replied to the objections which had been made to some of his doctrines by reviewers of Dumas's book, and added a few supplementary remarks on some of the more abstract parts of the subject, such as the theory of improbability and impossibility. The controversial part of these editorial editions was written in a more assuming tone than became one so young and inexperienced as I was. But indeed I had never contemplated coming forward in my own person, and as an anonymous editor of Bentham I fell into the tone of my author, not thinking it unsuitable to him or to the subjects, however it might be so to me. My name as editor was put to the book after it was printed, Mr. Bentham's positive desire, which I in vain attempted to persuade him to forego. The time occupied in this editorial work was extremely well employed in respect to my own improvement. The rationale of judicial evidence is one of the richest in matter of all Bentham's productions. The theory of evidence being in itself one of the most important of his subjects, and ramifying into most of the others the book contains very fully developed a great proportion of his best thoughts. While among more special things it comprises the most elaborate exposure of the vices and defects of English law as it then was, which is to be found in his works, not confined to the law of evidence, but including by way of illustrative episode the entire procedure or practice of Westminster Hall, the direct knowledge therefore which I obtained from the book, and which was imprinted upon me much more thoroughly than it could have been by mere reading, was itself no small acquisition. But this occupation did for me what might seem less to be expected. It gave a great start to my powers of composition. Everything which I wrote subsequently to this editorial employment was markedly superior to anything that I had written before it. Because later style, as the world knows, was heavy and cumbersome from the excess of a good quality, the love of precision, which made him introduce claws within claws into the heart of every sentence that the reader might receive into his mind the modifications and qualifications simultaneously with the main proposition. And the habit grew on him until his sentences became to those not accustomed to them most laborious reading. But his earlier style, that of the fragment on government, plan of a judicial establishment, etc., is a model of liveliness and ease combined with fullness of matter scarcely ever surpassed, and of his earlier style there was mainly striking specimens in the manuscripts on evidence, all of which I endeavored to preserve, so long a course of this admirable writing had a considerable effect upon my own, and I added to it by the assiduous reading of other writers, both French and English, who combined in a remarkable degree ease with force, such as Goldsmith, Fielding, Pascal, Voltaire, and Courier. Through these influences my writing lost the jujuneness of my early compositions, the bones and cartilage began to clothe themselves with flesh, and the style became, at times, lively and almost light. CHAPTER IV EUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM THE WEST MINSTER REVIEW PART III This improvement was first exhibited in a new field, Mr. Marshall of Leeds, father of the present generation of Marshalls, the same who was brought into Parliament for Yorkshire, when the representation forfeited by Grampound was transferred to it, an earnest parliamentary reformer, and a man of large fortune, of which he made a liberal use, had been much struck with Benjamin's Book of Fallacies, and the thought had occurred to him that it would be useful to publish annually the parliamentary debates, not in the chronological order of Hansard, but classified according to subjects, and accompanied by a commentary, pointing out the fallacies of the speakers. With this intention he very naturally addressed himself to the editor of the Book of Fallacies, and Bingham, with the assistance of Charles Austen, undertook the editor's ship. The work was called Parliamentary History and Review. Its sale was not sufficient to keep it existent, and it only lasted three years. It excited, however, some attention among parliamentary and political people. The best strength of the party was to put forth in it, and its execution did them much more credit than that of the Washington Review had ever done. Bingham and Charles Austen wrote much of it, as did Stretch Romney, and several other liberal lawyers. My father wrote one such article in his best style, The Elder Austen Another. Austen wrote one of Great Merit. It fell to my lot to lead off the first number by an article on the principal topic of the session, that of 1825, the Catholic Association and the Catholic Disabilities. In the second number I wrote an eloquent essay on the commercial crisis of 1825, and the currency debates. In the third I had two articles, one on a minor subject, the other on the reciprocity principle in commerce, a proposal of a celebrated diplomatic correspondence between Canning and Gallatin. These writings were no longer mere reproductions and applications of the doctrines I had been taught. They were original thinking as far as that name can be applied to old ideas in new forms and convictions. I do not exceed the truth in saying that there was a maturity and a well-digested character about them, which there had not been in any of my previous performances. In execution, therefore, they were not at all juvenile, but their subjects have either gone by or have been so much better treated since that they are entirely superseded, and should remain buried in the same oblivion with my contributions to the first dynasty of the Westminster Review. While thus engaged in writing for the public, I did not neglect other modes of self-cultivation. It was at this time that I learned German, beginning it on the Hamiltonian method for which purpose I and several of my companions formed a class. For several years from this period our social studies assumed a shape which contributed very much to my mental progress. The idea occurred to us of carrying on, by reading and conversation, a joint study of several of the branches of science which we wished to be masters of. We assembled to the number of a dozen or more. Mr. Grote let a room in his house in Threadneedle Street for the purpose, and his partner Prescott, one of the three original members of the Utilitarian Society, made one among us. We met two mornings in every week, from half past eight till ten, at which hour most of us were called off to our daily occupations. Our first subject was political economy. We chose some systematic treasy as our textbook, my father's Elements, being our first choice. One of us read aloud a chapter or some smaller portion of the book. The discussion was then opened up, and everyone who had objection or other remark to make made it. Our rule was to discuss thoroughly every point raised, whether great or small, prolonging the discussion until all who took part were satisfied with the conclusion they had individually arrived at, and to follow up every topic of collateral speculation which the chapter or the conversation suggested, never leaving it until we had untied every knot which we found. We repeatedly kept up the discussion of some one point for several weeks, thinking intently on it until the interval of our meetings and contriving solutions of the new difficulties which had risen up in the last morning's discussion. When we had finished in this way, my father's Elements, we went in the same manner through Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Bailey's Dissertation on Value. These close and vigorous discussions were not only improving on a high degree to those who took part in them, but brought out new views of some topics of abstract political economy, the theory of the international values which I had afterwards published emanated from these conversations, as did also the modified form of Ricardo's Theory of Prophets, laid down in my essay on Prophets and Interest, those among us with whom new speculations chiefly originated were Ellis, Graham, and I, though others gave great aid to the discussion, especially Prescott and Roebuck, the one by his knowledge, the other by his dialectical acuteness. The theories of international values and of Prophets were ex-cognated and worked out in about equal proportions by myself and Graham, and if our original project had been executed, my essays on some unsettled questions of political economy would have been brought out along with some papers of his under our joint names. But when my exposition came to be written, I found that I had so much overestimated my agreement with him, and he dissented so much from the most original of the two essays that on international values, that I was obliged to consider the theory as now exclusively mine, and it came out as such when published many years later. I may mention that among the alterations which my father made in revising his elements for the third edition, several were founded on criticisms elicited by these conversations, and particularly he modified his opinions, though not to the extent of new speculations, on both the points to which I have adverted. When we had had enough of political economy, we took up the syllogistic logic in the same manner. Grote now joining us. Our first textbook was Aldrich, but being disgusted with his superficiality, we reprinted one of the most finished among the many manuals of the school logic, which my father, a great collector of such books, possessed the Macanouni to add logikem of the Jesuit Dutrier. After finishing this, we took up Whiteley's logic, when first republished from the Encyclopedia Metropolitana, and finally the Comprutato Sivelogica of Hobbes. These books dealt with, in our manner, afforded a high range for original metaphysical speculation, and most of what has been done in the first book of my Sythem of Logic to rationalize and correct the principles and distinctions of the school logicians, and to improve the theory of the import of propositions had its origin in these discussions. Graham and I originated most of the novelties, while Grote and others furnished an excellent tribunal or test. From this time, I formed the project of writing a book on logic, though on a much humbler scale than the one I ultimately executed. Having done with logic, we launched into analytic psychology, and having chosen, heartily for our textbook, we raised Priestly's addition to an exaggerated place by searching through London to furnish each of us with a copy. When we had finished heartily, we suspended our meetings, but my father's analysis of the mind being published soon after, we reassembled for the purpose of reading it. With this, our exercises ended. I have always dated from these conversations my own real inauguration as an original and independent thinker. It was also, through them, that I acquired, or very much strengthened, a mental habit to which I attribute all that I have ever done, or ever shall do, in speculation, that of never accepting half solutions of difficulties as complete, never abandoning a puzzle, but again and again returning to it until it was cleared up, never allowing obscure corners of a subject to remain unexplored because they did not appear important, never thinking that I understood any part of a subject until I understood the whole. Our doings, from 1825 to 1830, in the way of public speaking, filled a considerable place in my life during those years, and, as they had important effects on my development, something ought to be said of them. There was, for some time in existence, a society of Owenites called the Cooperative Society, which met for weekly public discussions in Chancey Lane. In the early part of 1825, accident brought Roebuck in contact with several of its members and led to his attending one or two of the meetings and taking part in the debate in opposition to Owenism. Someone of us started the notion of going there in a body and having a general battle, and Charles Austin and some of his friends, who did not usually take part in our joint exercises, entered into the project. It was carried out by concert with the principal members of the society themselves, nothing loath as they naturally preferred a controversy with opponents to attain discussion among their own body. The question of population was proposed as the subject of debate. Charles Austin led the case on our side with a brilliant speech, and the fight was kept up by adjournment through five or six weekly meetings before crowned authorities, including among with the members of the society and their friends, many hearers and some speakers from the ends of court. When this debate was ended, another was commenced on the general merits of Owen's system, and the contest altogether lasted about three months. It was a Luticor Ascor between Owenites and political economists, whom the Owenites regarded as their most invenerate opponents, but it was a perfectly friendly dispute. We who represented political economy had the same objects in view as they had and took pains to show it, and the principal champion on their side was a very estimable man with whom I was well acquainted, Mr. William Thompson of Cork, author of a book on the distribution of wealth and of an appeal in behalf of women against the passage relating to them in my father's essay on government. Ellis Roebuck and I took an active part in the debate, and among those from the ends of court who joined in, I remember Charles Villanors, the other side obtained also on the population question, very efficient support from without. The well-known Gale Jones, then an elderly man, made one of his florid speeches, but the speaker with whom I was most struck, though I dissented from nearly every word he said, was Thurwall, the historian, since Bishop of St. David's, then a chancery barrister, unknown except by a high reputation for eloquence acquired at the Cambridge Union before the era of Austen and Macaulay. His speech was in answer to one of mine. Before he had uttered ten sentences, I set him down as the best speaker I had ever heard, and I have never since heard anyone whom I placed above him. The great interest of these debates predisposed some of those who took part in them to catch at a suggestion thrown out by McCullough, the political economist, that a society was wanted in London similar to the speculative society at Edinburgh in which Rome, Horner, and others first cultivated public speaking. Our experience at the cooperative society seemed to give cause for being segwine as to the sort of men who might be brought together in London for such a purpose. McCullough mentioned the matter to several young men of influence, to whom he was then giving private lessons in political economy. Some of these entered warmly into the project, particularly George Wilners, after Earl of Clarendon. He and his brothers, Hyde and Charles Romley, Charles Austen and I, with some others, met and agreed on a plan. We determined to meet once a fortnight from November to June at the Freemasons Tavern, and we had soon a fine list of members containing, along with several members of Parliament, nearly all the most noted speakers of the Cambridge Union and of the Oxford United Debating Society. It is curiously illustrative of the tendencies of the time that our principal difficulty in recruiting for the society was to find a sufficient number of Tory speakers, almost all of whom we could press into the service were liberals, of different orders and degrees. Besides those already named, we had Macaulay, Thirwald, Prade, and Lord Horwick, Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, Charles Poulet, Thomas, afterwards Lord Syndenham, Edward and Henry Linton Bollwer, Fontainebleau, and many others whom I cannot now recollect, but who made themselves afterwards more or less conspicuous in public or literary life. Nothing could seem more promising, but when the time for action drew near, and it was necessary to fix on a president and find somebody to open the first debate, none of our celebrities would consent to perform either office. Of the many who were pressed on the subject, the only one who could be prevailed on was a man of whom I knew very little, but who had taken high honors at Oxford, and was said to have acquired a great oratorical reputation there, who some time afterward became a Tory member of Parliament. He, accordingly, was fixed in, both for filling the president's chair and for making the first speech. The important day arrived, the benches were crowded, all our great speakers were present to judge of, but not to help our efforts. The Oxford orator's speech was a complete failure. He threw a damp on the whole concern. The speakers who followed were few, and none of them did their best. The affair was a complete fiasco, and the oratorical celebrities we had counted on went away never to return, giving to me at least a lesson in knowledge of the world. This unexpected breakdown altered my whole relation to the project. I had not anticipated taking a prominent part, nor speaking much or often, particularly at first, but I now saw that the success of the scheme depended on the new men, and I put my shoulder to the wheel. I opened the second session, and from that time spoke in nearly every debate. It was very uphill work for some time. The three villainers, and Romley, stuck to us for some time longer, but the patience of all the founders of the society was at last exhausted, except me and Robuck. In the season following, 1826-7, things began to mend. We had acquired two excellent Tory speakers, Hayward and Shee. Afterwards, Sergeant Shee. The radical side was reinforced by Charles Buller, Cockburn, and others of the second generation of Cambridge Benthamites, and with there and other occasional aid, and the two Tories as well as Robuck and me for regular speakers, almost every debate was a bagatelle rangée between the philosophic radicals and the Tory lawyers until our conflicts were talked about, and several persons of note and consideration came to hear us. This happened still more in subsequent sessions, 1828 and 1829, when the Coleragians, in the persons of Maurice and Sterling, made their appearance in the society as a second liberal and even radical party on totally different grounds from Benthamism and vehemently opposed to it. Bringing into these discussions the general doctrines and modes of thought of the European reaction against the philosophy of the 18th century and ending a third and very important belligerent party to our contests, which were now no bad exponent of the moment of opinion among the most cultivated part of the new generation. Our new debates were very different from those of common debating societies, for they habitually consisted of the strongest arguments and most philosophic principles which either side was able to produce, thrown often into close and sire confrontations of one another. The practice was necessarily very useful to us and eminently to me. I never indeed acquired real fluency and had always a bad and ungraceful delivery, but I could make myself listened it to and as I always wrote my speeches when from the feelings involved or the nature of the ideas to be developed expression seemed important. I greatly increased my power of effective writing acquiring and not only an ear for smoothness and rhythm, but a practical sense for telling sentences and an intimate criterion of their telling property by their effect on a mixed audience. The society and the preparation for it together with the preparation for the morning conversations which were going on simultaneously occupied the greater part of my leisure and made me feel it a relief when in the spring of 1828 I ceased to write for the Westminster. The review had fallen into difficulties, though the sale of the first number had been very encouraging. The permanent sale had never, I believe, been sufficient to pay the expenses on the scale on which the review was carried on. Those expenses had been considerably but not sufficiently reduced. One of the editors, Southern, had resigned and several of the writers including my father and me who had been paid like other contributors for our earlier articles had laterally written without payment. Nevertheless the original funds were nearly or quite exhausted and if the review was to be continued some new arrangement of its affairs had to become indispensable. My father and I had several conferences with Bowering on the subject. We were willing to do our utmost for maintaining the review as an organ of our opinion but not under Brownring's editorship while the impossibility of its any longer supporting a paid editor afforded a ground on which without a front to him we could propose to dispense with his services. We and some of our friends were prepared to carry on the review as unpaid writers either finding among ourselves an unpaid editor or sharing the editorship among us. But while this negotiation was proceeding with Browning's apparent acquiescence he was carrying on another in a different quarter with Colonel Pernay Thompson of which we received the first information in a letter from Bowering as editor informing us merely that an arrangement had been made and proposing to us to write for the next number with promise of payment. We did not dispute Bowering's right to bring a front if he could an arrangement more favorable to himself than the one we had proposed but we thought the concealment which he had practiced toward us while seemingly entering into our own project and a front and even had we not thought so we were indisposed to expand any more of our time in trouble in attempting to write up the review under his management. Accordingly my father excused himself from writing though two or three years later on great pressure he did write one more political article as for me I positively refused and thus ended my connection with the original Westminster. The last article which I wrote for it cost me more labor than any previous but was a labor of love being a defense of the early French revolutionists against the Tory misrepresentations of Mr. Walter Scott in the introduction to his life of Napoleon. The number of books which I read for this purpose making notes and extracts even the number I had to buy for in those days there was no public or subscription library from which books of reference could be taken home far exceeded the worth of the immediate object but I had at that time a half formed intention of writing a history of the French Revolution and though I never executed it my collections afterwards were very useful to Carlisle for a similar purpose.