ard of Chateaubriand; Mathieu de Montmorency held equally patrician views, and was as unsavoury as Chateaubriand himself to the king, who thought that his religious and political passions biased his whole judgment. Hyde de Neuville was Chateaubriand's lieutenant in the Lower House. The very violent but eloquent Labourdonnage was connected through his colleague the Comte de Bruges with the Comte d'Artois. The smooth Vitrolles, who was the scribe of the cabinet and the constant counsellor of the king's brother, applied his practised skill to obtain for the Comte d'Artois a credit among the foreign ambassadors which he did not possess. His efforts tended to cast suspicion on M. de Cazes, and to represent the Duc de Richelieu as an entire stranger to France on account of his long residence in Russia. In this he failed, and his efforts only exasperated the king. None of these men, however, belonged to the utterly vacant party of old courtiers; they were enthusiastic aristocrats, eager to play their part in the political world, and in this respect the very antipodes of the theocratic Bonald, whose aim was to compass an alliance of the court, the clergy, and the magistracy,—for his politics contained a remnant of old parliamentary ideas.

The majority of the deputies consisted of country gentlemen, whose chief organ was M. de Villèle, and who acquired in M. de Corbière a learned jurist of the old school. They formed the centre droit of the chamber, and would have suited the king if they could have united with the centre gauche of M. de Cazes. But this was impossible. The dry, utilitarian, bureaucratic spirit of De Cazes understood them not, nor did they understand him. Fiévée, their able representative in the press, irritated people by the keenness of his language. He was the inventor of the nickname doctrinaire, by which he described Royer-Collard and his friends, and, above all, Guizot. This was an excellent hit, and the name has remained in history. Fiévée sought to recommend the country squires, who followed Villèle and Corbière, as the men to whom power and authority in the provinces naturally belonged. This was very distasteful to De Cazes, who had an eye only to the administrative system, and who consequently had recourse to the men of the University, the men-of-letters like Villemain, the philosophical politicians of Royer-Collard's school, and the opening talents of Guizot.

The moment has now arrived which calls for a closer inspection of the character of our author; for in all these efforts to support M. de Cazes against the Chambre Introuvable, M. Guizot played a leading part as a writer, as a counsellor of state, as a committee-man and debater. In his Memoirs

he endeavours to soften and conceal as much as possible the part which he then played. We will endeavour to unmask him in our next Number; for we need not scruple to devote more than one article to this first volume, as the "interior or exterior difficulties" which prevented the appearance of the second in July or August will probably condemn the expectation of critics to further disappointments.

JEREMY BENTHAM'S GREATEST-HAPPINESS

PRINCIPLE.

The

"IF," says M. Vinet, "we proposed to review the moral doctrines of our age, we should have to begin with utilitarianism." It claims to be the one universal truth in morals; it impugns all moral criteria but its own, and calls all other systems mischievous. It is the parent of our popular philosophies, the soul of our legislation; its works are mature enough to show its stability, numerous enough to prove its power, solid enough to give it the prestige of success. Englishman may regard it as a national glory. "Even those who may dispute Bentham's first principles," says his disciple and editor, Mr. Burton, "cannot deny to him the supremacy of the practically operating minds of his age." He has led captive the rising political talent of our age, and has formed a school to which we owe what we have of parliamentary and municipal reform, free trade, mitigation of the criminal code, penal servitude for transportation, jury reforms, abolition of arrest in mesne process, transfer of responsibility from the debtor's person to his property, abolition of usury laws, of oaths, of law-taxes and fees, relaxation of the exclusionary rules in evidence, repeal of Catholic disabilities and of the test and corporation acts, reduction of taxes on knowledge, the new poor-law, pauper education, the system of savingsbanks and friendly societies, cheap postage, money orders, registration of births, marriages and deaths, of merchant-seamen, and of inventions, population returns, and publication of parliamentary papers. To this portentous list of successes Bentham's admirers add another of his proposals yet to be accomplished; among them we find compulsory national education, the ballot, equal electoral districts, local courts, public prosecutors, registers of real property, and sanitary laws. The mere enumeration shows the multifariousness of the man's mind; scarcely a subject of modern legislation has escaped

him; he has cut and carved them all, partitioned them, drawn up their rules, and tied them up with red tape.

But we must not confound multifariousness of practical talent with depth and grasp of philosophical intuition. Most of the items of the above lists pertain to the mere mechanics of legislation; they are only plans for doing, in the easiest and most effective way, what every body agrees ought to be done; and they require nothing beyond a clear head and fine nose to smell out the best means of attaining the end proposed. But some of them involve very real and decided principles; for instance, free trade, abolition of religious disabilities, and obligatory national education. Yet, whatever their apparent difference may be, Bentham makes a show of deducing them all from his one fundamental "greatest-happiness principle.' We propose, then, to examine whether in laying this foundation, and building upon it, he either reasoned like a philosopher or spoke like an honest man.

Time has divested the controversy of the personal acerbities which at first surrounded it. What is it to us if Bentham went to bed in his boots, or trotted like a zany through the streets, or hallooed like a madman in his garden? What if he and his followers could make no claim to eloquence, were dogmatic, affected, despisers of grammar, and ignorant of the learned tongues which they quoted? Their philosophy may hold good in spite of their want of culture. But there is one point which, if Bentham should turn out to be unfair, will explain and qualify his dishonesty. His American intimate, Mr. Neal, says of him, "I have no doubt of his being an atheist ; a good many of his youthful followers are However, as a man may be a Christian and in some sense a Benthamite also; as Bentham expressly says that his rules are only applicable to nature, not to the supernatural ; and as he claims an axiomatic character for his principle,-we must contrive to forget his atheism while we are examining his system.

so.

Bentham's fundamental principle is, that utility is the sole possible end of human activity. Utility, in its broadest sense, is happiness; "that is useful which, taking all times and all persons into consideration, leaves a balance of happiness.' So there are degrees of utility, as of happiness; that which confers any momentary happiness is useful at the moment, that alone which makes us happy in the long-run is useful in the long-run. Hence the necessity of "taking all times and all persons into consideration;" for though all pleasure is in some sort happiness, yet real happiness is the state of a mind enjoying a continuity of pleasure. Each individual sensation

is a pleasure; the aggregate of these sensations becomes happiness. Happiness is therefore only continuous pleasure. Nevertheless Bentham does not own the continuity of pleasure to be essential to the reality of happiness; for he tells us that the "constant actual end" of every action of every individual is his "greatest happiness, according to his view of it at that moment;" yet we all know that we often forget the proverb, "better long little than soon nothing," and prefer an instantaneous pleasure to a more durable one. This, according to Bentham, is improper; for the proper end of each act is the "real greatest happiness" of the doer "from that moment to the end of life." But propriety does not constitute duty. Bentham erases the word "ought" from his dictionary. În fact, the particular instantaneous pleasure is, and must be, the end of man in each of his actions. The pleasure may be one of hope, of anticipation, of self-revenge, of any thing; but whatever it is, bad or good, beneficent or mischievous, it is the "constant actual end" of every action of every individual.

If we ask how this can be proved, we are told that it needs no proof; that it is a fundamental self-evident axiom, which man's reason must accept as universal and necessary as soon as it is propounded. But, we ask with Bentham, has reason so accepted it? "Has the rectitude of the principle been ever formally contested? It should seem that it had by those who have not known what they have been meaning. Is it susceptible of any direct proofs? It should seem not; for that which is used to prove every thing else cannot itself be proved: a chain of proofs must have their (sic) commencement somewhere. To give such proof is as impossible as it is needless."* Then, have all enemies of the principle been fools? Not so. "There have been not many perhaps even of the most intelligent who have been disposed to embrace it purely and without reserve. There are even few who have not taken some occasion or other to quarrel with it." He does not deign to tell us how that can be a fundamental principle of reason which few reasonable men have not impugned; how it is that when all men at once saw that the whole must be greater than the part, and that every event must have a cause, most men could never see that the sole possible aim, end, motive, and intention of every act is pleasure. Mr. Burton, however, does battle for his master: he accepts the difficulty; he owns that Bentham's details have found a wider acceptance than his principle; that practical men admit only his practical proposals, and scout his theory; that if he had exhibited

* Bentham, Morals and Legislation, c. i. no. 11. + Ibid. no. 12.

only his leading principle, he would have attracted no attention, whereas his fame rests on his particular applications of it, In other words, the logical or axiomatic character of Bentham's deductive proof is not that which subdues the mind, but his practical common sense in his details and accidental illustrations. If this is the case, it would be natural to suspect that the details may be separable from the principle, may remain true even though the principle were owned to be false, and may be neither derived nor derivable from it, leaving it a mere caput mortuum, a convenient vehicle in which Bentham's peculiar habit of mind led him to envelop his details. Mr. Burton never thought of this suspicion, and therefore made no attempt to prove that the happy results which his master elicited from his "greatest-happiness" principle (perhaps only as a conjuror pours fifty different wines from the same bottle) cannot be just as well elicited from another, or that it is necessary to accept it before we can rationally reprobate indiscriminate capital punishment or fraudulent contracts. On the contrary, Mr. Burton assumes the axiomatic character of the principle, and proceeds to explain how a self-evident thing can be obscure. The axiom, it appears, was contradicted only because it was too self-evident: Credo quia impossibile, said Tertullian; non credo quia necessarium, said the anti-Benthamist. The utilitarian principle dazzled by its excess of light; it provoked denial because it was too undeniable. The plain deduction from the principle, that "if murder was beneficial to society, it would be a virtue instead of a vice," provoked a general cry of horror; which horror, says Burton, was not at the conclusion, but at the supposition, not at the would be, but at the if. Since man ceased to be a savage, he has agreed that murder is the greatest of evils: don't moot the question again with your ifs. So utilitarianism gagged its own proof: it had made up its mind, and would not have its convictions unsettled. However ingenious Mr. Burton may think this argument, it is not true. Society has often rewarded men for useful murders, without absolving the murderers from the stings of conscience or the abhorrence of men. Assassination may be useful, but it can never be other than detestable. However advantageous, it remains a vice.

Although Bentham says that his principle cannot be proved, Mr. Burton tries to prove it. "All language presupposes it," he says. Yet no true Benthamite can adduce this argument seriously, for Bentham laughs at the proof of duty which is derived from language. He would rather reconstruct language than review his theory. Therefore Mr.