第72章 BENTHAM'S LIFE(16)

Cobbett,he thought in 1812,was a 'vile rascal,'and was afterwards pronounced to be 'filled with the odium humani generis --his malevolence and lying beyond everything.'(108)Cobbett's radicalism,in fact,was of the type most hostile to the Utilitarians.John Hunt,in the Examiner was 'trumpeting'Bentham and Romilly in 1812,and was praised accordingly.(109)Bentham formed an alliance with another leading Radical.He had made acquaintance by 1811with Sir F.Burdett,to whom he then appealed for help in an attack upon the delays of Chancery.(110)Burdett,indeed,appeared to him to be far inferior to Romilly and Brougham,but he thought that so powerful a 'hero of the mob'ought to be turned to account in the good cause.(111)Burdett seems to have courted the old philosopher;and a few years later a closer alliance was brought about.The peace of 1815was succeeded by a period of distress,the more acutely felt from the disappointment of natural hopes of prosperity;and a period of agitation,met by harsh repression,followed.

Applications were made to Bentham for permission to use his 'Catechism,'which was ultimately published (1818)in a cheap form by Wooler,well known as the editor of the democratic Black Dwarf.(112)Burdett applied for a plan of parliamentary reform.Henry Bickersteth (1783-1851),afterwards Lord Langdale and Master of the Rolls,at this time a rising barrister of high character,wrote an appeal to Bentham and Burdett to combine in setting forth a scheme which,with such authority,must command general acceptance.

The result was a series of resolutions moved by Burdett in the House of Commons on 2nd June 1818,(113)demanding universal suffrage,annual parliaments,and vote by ballot.Bentham had thus accepted the conclusions reached in a different way by the believers in that 'hodge-podge'of absurdities,the declaration of the rights of man.Curiously enough,his assault upon that document appeared in Dumont's French version in the year 1816,at the very time when he was accepting its practical conclusions.

The schemes in which Mill was interested at this time drew Bentham's attention in other directions.In 1813the Quaker,William Allen,who had been a close ally of Mill,induced Bentham to invest money in the New Lanark establishment.

Owen,whose benevolent schemes had been hampered by his partners,bought them out,the new capital being partly provided by Allen,Bentham,and others.

Bentham afterwards spoke contemptuously of Owen,who,as he said,'began in vapour and ended in smoke,'(114)and whose disciples came in after years into sharp conflict with the Utilitarians.Bentham,however,took pleasure,it seems,in Owen's benevolent schemes for infant education,and made money by his investment,for once combining business with philanthropy successfully.(115)Probably he regarded New Lanark as a kind of Panopticon.Owen had not as yet become a prophet of Socialism.

Another set of controversies in which Mill and his friends took an active part,started Bentham in a whole series of speculations.A plan (which Ishall have to mention in connection with Mill),was devised in 1815for a 'Chrestomathic school,'which was to give a sound education of proper Utilitarian tendencies to the upper and middle classes.Brougham,Mackintosh,Ricardo,William Allen,and Place were all interested in this undertaking.(116)Bentham offered a site at Queen's Square Place,and though the scheme never came to the birth,it set him actively at work.He wrote a series of papers during his first year at Ford Abbey(117)upon the theory of education,published in 1816as Chrestomathia;and to this was apparently due a further excursion beyond the limits of jurisprudence.Educational controversy in that ignorant day was complicated by religious animosity;the National Society and the 'British and Foreign'Society were fighting under the banners of Bell and Lancaster,and the war roused excessive bitterness.Bentham finding the church in his way,had little difficulty in discovering that the whole ecclesiastical system was part of the general complex of abuse against which he was warring.

He fell foul of the Catechism;he exposed the abuses of non-residence and episcopal wealth;he discovered that the Thirty-nine Articles contained gross fallacies;he went on to make an onslaught upon the Apostle St Paul,whose evidence as to his conversion was exposed to a severe cross-examination;and,finally,he wrote,or supplied the materials for,a remarkable Analysis of Natural Religion,which was ultimately published by Grote under the pseudonym 'Philip Beauchamp,'in 1822.This procedure from the particular case of the Catechism in schools up to the general problem of the utility of religion in general,is curiously characteristic of Bentham.

Bentham's mind was attracted to various other schemes by the disciples who came to sit at his feet,and professed,with more or less sincerity,to regard him as a Solon.Foreigners had been resorting to him from all parts of the world,and gave him hopes of new fields for codifying.As early as 1808he had been visited at Barrow Green by the strange adventurer,politician,lawyer,and filibuster,Aaron Burr,famous for the duel in which he killed Alexander Hamilton,and now framing wild schemes for an empire in Mexico.