The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches-2 [78]
to conceal the real objects of the agitators? Is it with declarations which involve "a suicide of hope" that man attempt to allure others? Was famine, pestilence, slavery, ever held out to attract the people? If levelling has been made a pretence for disturbances, the argument against Mr Bentham's doctrine is as strong as if it had been the real object of disturbances. But the great objection which Mr Bentham makes to our review, still remains to be noticed:-- "The pith of the charge against the author of the Essays is, that he has written 'an elaborate Treatise on Government,' and 'deduced the whole science from the assumption of certain propensities of human nature.' Now, in the name of Sir Richard Birnie and all saints, from what else SHOULD it be deduced? What did ever anybody imagine to be the end, object, and design of government AS IT OUGHT TO BE but the same operation, on an extended scale, which that meritorious chief magistrate conducts on a limited one at Bow Street; to wit, the preventing one man from injuring another? Imagine, then, that the Whiggery of Bow Street were to rise up against the proposition that their science was to be deduced from 'certain propensities of human nature,' and thereon were to ratiocinate as follows:-- "'How then are we to arrive at just conclusions on a subject so important to the happiness of mankind? Surely by that method, which, in every experimental science to which it has been applied, has signally increased the power and knowledge of our species,--by that method for which our new philosophers would substitute quibbles scarcely worthy of the barbarous respondents and opponents of the middle ages,--by the method of induction,-- by observing the present state of the world,--by assiduously studying the history of past ages,--by sifting the evidence of facts,--by carefully combining and contrasting those which are authentic,--by generalising with judgment and diffidence,--by perpetually bringing the theory which we have constructed to the test of new facts,--by correcting, or altogether abandoning it, according as those new facts prove it to be partially or fundamentally unsound. Proceeding thus,--patiently, diligently, candidly, we may hope to form a system as far inferior in pretension to that which we have been examining, and as far superior to it in real utility, as the prescriptions of a great physician, varying with every stage of every malady, and with the constitution of every patient, to the pill of the advertising quack, which is to cure all human beings, in all climates, of all diseases.' "Fancy now,--only fancy,--the delivery of these wise words at Bow Street; and think how speedily the practical catchpolls would reply, that all this might be very fine, but, as far as they had studied history, the naked story was, after all, that numbers of men had a propensity to thieving, and their business was to catch them; that they, too, had been sifters of facts; and, to say the truth, their simple opinion was, that their brethren of the red waistcoat--though they should be sorry to think ill of any man-- had somehow contracted a leaning to the other side, and were more bent on puzzling the case for the benefit of the defendants, than on doing the duty of good officers and true. Such would, beyond all doubt, be the sentence passed on such trimmers in the microcosm of Bow Street. It might not absolutely follow that they were in a plot to rob the goldsmiths' shops, or to set fire to the House of Commons; but it would be quite clear that they had got A FEELING,--that they were in process of siding with the thieves,--and that it was not to them that any man must look who was anxious that pantries should be safe." This is all very witty; but it does not touch us. On the present occasion, we cannot but flatter ourselves that we bear a much greater resemblance to a practical catchpoll than either Mr Mill or Mr Bentham. It would, to be sure, be very absurd in a magistrate discussing the arrangements of a police-office, to spout in the style either of our article or Mr Bentham's;