No More Learning

I was brought up from the first without any religious belief, in the
ordinary acceptation of the term. My father, educated in the creed of
Scotch Presbyterianism, had by his own studies and reflections been
early led to reject not only the belief in Revelation, but the
foundations of what is commonly called Natural Religion. I have heard
him say, that the turning point of his mind on the subject was reading
Butler's _Analogy_. That work, of which he always continued to speak
with respect, kept him, as he said, for some considerable time, a
believer in the divine authority of Christianity; by proving to him
that whatever are the difficulties in believing that the Old and New
Testaments proceed from, or record the acts of, a perfectly wise and
good being, the same and still greater difficulties stand in the way
of the belief, that a being of such a character can have been the
Maker of the universe. He considered Butler's argument as conclusive
against the only opponents for whom it was intended. Those who admit
an omnipotent as well as perfectly just and benevolent maker and ruler
of such a world as this, can say little against Christianity but what
can, with at least equal force, be retorted against themselves.
Finding, therefore, no halting place in Deism, he remained in a state
of perplexity, until, doubtless after many struggles, he yielded to
the conviction, that concerning the origin of things nothing whatever
can be known. This is the only correct statement of his opinion; for
dogmatic atheism he looked upon as absurd; as most of those, whom the
world has considered Atheists, have always done. These particulars are
important, because they show that my father's rejection of all that is
called religious belief, was not, as many might suppose, primarily a
matter of logic and evidence: the grounds of it were moral, still more
than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so
full of evil was the work of an Author combining infinite power with
perfect goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurned the
subtleties by which men attempt to blind themselves to this open
contradiction. The Sabaean, or Manichaean theory of a Good and an Evil
Principle, struggling against each other for the government of the
universe, he would not have equally condemned; and I have heard him
express surprise, that no one revived it in our time. He would have
regarded it as a mere hypothesis; but he would have ascribed to it no
depraving influence. As it was, his aversion to religion, in the sense
usually attached to the term, was of the same kind with that of
Lucretius: he regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental
delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest
enemy of morality: first, by setting up fictitious excellences--belief
in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies, not connected with the
good of human-kind--and causing these to be accepted as substitutes
for genuine virtues: but above all, by radically vitiating the
standard of morals; making it consist in doing the will of a being,
on whom it lavishes indeed all the phrases of adulation, but whom in
sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful. I have a hundred times
heard him say that all ages and nations have represented their gods as
wicked, in a constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone
on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect
conception of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have
called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. This _ne plus
ultra_ of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly
presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity. Think (he used to
say) of a being who would make a Hell--who would create the human race
with the infallible foreknowledge, and therefore with the intention,
that the great majority of them were to be consigned to horrible and
everlasting torment. The time, I believe, is drawing near when this
dreadful conception of an object of worship will be no longer
identified with Christianity; and when all persons, with any sense of
moral good and evil, will look upon it with the same indignation with
which my father regarded it. My father was as well aware as anyone
that Christians do not, in general, undergo the demoralizing
consequences which seem inherent in such a creed, in the manner or
to the extent which might have been expected from it. The same
slovenliness of thought, and subjection of the reason to fears,
wishes, and affections, which enable them to accept a theory involving
a contradiction in terms, prevents them from perceiving the logical
consequences of the theory. Such is the facility with which mankind
believe at one and the same time things inconsistent with one another,
and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths, any
consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings, that
multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an Omnipotent Author
of Hell, and have nevertheless identified that being with the best
conception they were able to form of perfect goodness. Their worship
was not paid to the demon which such a being as they imagined would
really be, but to their own ideal of excellence. The evil is, that
such a belief keeps the ideal wretchedly low; and opposes the most
obstinate resistance to all thought which has a tendency to raise it
higher. Believers shrink from every train of ideas which would lead
the mind to a clear conception and an elevated standard of excellence,
because they feel (even when they do not distinctly see) that such a
standard would conflict with many of the dispensations of nature, and
with much of what they are accustomed to consider as the Christian
creed. And thus morality continues a matter of blind tradition, with
no consistent principle, nor even any consistent feeling, to guide it.

It would have been wholly inconsistent with my father's ideas of duty,
to allow me to acquire impressions contrary to his convictions and
feelings respecting religion: and he impressed upon me from the first,
that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject
on which nothing was known: that the question, "Who made me? " cannot
be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information
from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty
a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself,
"Who made God? " He, at the same time, took care that I should be
acquainted with what had been thought by mankind on these impenetrable
problems. I have mentioned at how early an age he made me a reader of
ecclesiastical history; and he taught me to take the strongest interest
in the Reformation, as the great and decisive contest against priestly
tyranny for liberty of thought.

I am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has
not thrown off religious belief, but never had it: I grew up in a
negative state with regard to it. I looked upon the modern exactly as
I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned
me. It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe
what I did not, than that the men I read of in Herodotus should have done
so. History had made the variety of opinions among mankind a fact familiar
to me, and this was but a prolongation of that fact. This point in my
early education had, however, incidentally one bad consequence deserving
notice. In giving me an opinion contrary to that of the world, my father
thought it necessary to give it as one which could not prudently be avowed
to the world. This lesson of keeping my thoughts to myself, at that early
age, was attended with some moral disadvantages; though my limited
intercourse with strangers, especially such as were likely to speak to
me on religion, prevented me from being placed in the alternative of
avowal or hypocrisy. I remember two occasions in my boyhood, on which I
felt myself in this alternative, and in both cases I avowed my disbelief
and defended it. My opponents were boys, considerably older than myself:
one of them I certainly staggered at the time, but the subject was never
renewed between us: the other who was surprised and somewhat shocked, did
his best to convince me for some time, without effect.

The great advance in liberty of discussion, which is one of the most
important differences between the present time and that of my childhood,
has greatly altered the moralities of this question; and I think that
few men of my father's intellect and public spirit, holding with such
intensity of moral conviction as he did, unpopular opinions on religion,
or on any other of the great subjects of thought, would now either
practise or inculcate the withholding of them from the world, unless in
the cases, becoming fewer every day, in which frankness on these subjects
would either risk the loss of means of subsistence, or would amount to
exclusion from some sphere of usefulness peculiarly suitable to the
capacities of the individual. On religion in particular the time appears
to me to have come when it is the duty of all who, being qualified in
point of knowledge, have on mature consideration satisfied themselves
that the current opinions are not only false but hurtful, to make their
dissent known; at least, if they are among those whose station or
reputation gives their opinion a chance of being attended to. Such an
avowal would put an end, at once and for ever, to the vulgar prejudice,
that what is called, very improperly, unbelief, is connected with any
bad qualities either of mind or heart. The world would be astonished if
it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments--of those most
distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue--are
complete sceptics in religion; many of them refraining from avowal, less
from personal considerations than from a conscientious, though now in my
opinion a most mistaken, apprehension, lest by speaking out what would
tend to weaken existing beliefs, and by consequence (as they suppose)
existing restraints, they should do harm instead of good.

Of unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, there are many
species, including almost every variety of moral type. But the best
among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them
will hesitate to affirm, are more genuinely religious, in the best
sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to
themselves the title. The liberality of the age, or in other words the
weakening of the obstinate prejudice which makes men unable to see
what is before their eyes because it is contrary to their expectations,
has caused it be very commonly admitted that a Deist may be truly
religious: but if religion stands for any graces of character and not
for mere dogma, the assertion may equally be made of many whose belief
is far short of Deism. Though they may think the proof incomplete that
the universe is a work of design, and though they assuredly disbelieve
that it can have an Author and Governor who is _absolute_ in power as
well as perfect in goodness, they have that which constitutes the
principal worth of all religions whatever, an ideal conception of a
Perfect Being, to which they habitually refer as the guide of their
conscience; and this ideal of Good is usually far nearer to perfection
than the objective Deity of those who think themselves obliged to find
absolute goodness in the author of a world so crowded with suffering
and so deformed by injustice as ours.

My father's moral convictions, wholly dissevered from religion, were
very much of the character of those of the Greek philosophers; and
were delivered with the force and decision which characterized all
that came from him. Even at the very early age at which I read with
him the _Memorabilia_ of Xenophon, I imbibed from that work and from
his comments a deep respect for the character of Socrates; who stood
in my mind as a model of ideal excellence: and I well remember how my
father at that time impressed upon me the lesson of the "Choice of
Hercules. " At a somewhat later period the lofty moral standard
exhibited in the writings of Plato operated upon me with great force.
My father's moral inculcations were at all times mainly those of the
"Socratici viri"; justice, temperance (to which he gave a very
extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter
pain and especially labour; regard for the public good; estimation of
persons according to their merits, and of things according to their
intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion in contradiction to one of
self-indulgent ease and sloth. These and other moralities he conveyed
in brief sentences, uttered as occasion arose, of grave exhortation,
or stern reprobation and contempt.

But though direct moral teaching does much, indirect does more; and
the effect my father produced on my character, did not depend solely
on what he said or did with that direct object, but also, and still
more, on what manner of man he was.

In his views of life he partook of the character of the Stoic, the
Epicurean, and the Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of
the word. In his personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His
standard of morals was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian,
taking as the exclusive test of right and wrong, the tendency of
actions to produce pleasure or pain. But he had (and this was the
Cynic element) scarcely any belief in pleasure; at least in his later
years, of which alone, on this point, I can speak confidently. He was
not insensible to pleasures; but he deemed very few of them worth the
price which, at least in the present state of society, must be paid
for them. The greater number of miscarriages in life he considered to
be attributable to the overvaluing of pleasures. Accordingly,
temperance, in the large sense intended by the Greek philosophers
--stopping short at the point of moderation in all indulgences--was
with him, as with them, almost the central point of educational
precept. His inculcations of this virtue fill a large place in my
childish remembrances. He thought human life a poor thing at best,
after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by.
This was a topic on which he did not often speak, especially, it may
be supposed, in the presence of young persons: but when he did, it
was with an air of settled and profound conviction. He would sometimes
say that if life were made what it might be, by good government and
good education, it would be worth having: but he never spoke with
anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility. He never varied in
rating intellectual enjoyments above all others, even in value as
pleasures, independently of their ulterior benefits. The pleasures of
the benevolent affections he placed high in the scale; and used to
say, that he had never known a happy old man, except those who were
able to live over again in the pleasures of the young. For passionate
emotions of all sorts, and for everything which bas been said or
written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt.
He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense" was with him a
bye-word of scornful disapprobation. He regarded as an aberration of
the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients,
the great stress laid upon feeling. Feelings, as such, he considered
to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right and wrong, good and
bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct--of acts and omissions;
there being no feeling which may not lead, and does not frequently lead,
either to good or to bad actions: conscience itself, the very desire to
act right, often leading people to act wrong. Consistently carrying
out the doctrine that the object of praise and blame should be the
discouragement of wrong conduct and the encouragement of right, he
refused to let his praise or blame be influenced by the motive of the
agent. He blamed as severely what he thought a bad action, when the
motive was a feeling of duty, as if the agents had been consciously
evil doers. He would not have accepted as a plea in mitigation for
inquisitors, that they sincerely believed burning heretics to be an
obligation of conscience. But though he did not allow honesty of purpose
to soften his disapprobation of actions, it had its full effect on his
estimation of characters. No one prized conscientiousness and rectitude
of intention more highly, or was more incapable of valuing any person
in whom he did not feel assurance of it. But he disliked people quite
as much for any other deficiency, provided he thought it equally likely
to make them act ill. He disliked, for instance, a fanatic in any bad
cause, as much as or more than one who adopted the same cause from
self-interest, because he thought him even more likely to be practically
mischievous. And thus, his aversion to many intellectual errors, or what
he regarded as such, partook, in a certain sense, of the character of a
moral feeling. All this is merely saying that he, in a degree once common,
but now very unusual, threw his feelings into his opinions; which truly
it is difficult to understand how anyone who possesses much of both, can
fail to do. None but those who do not care about opinions will confound
this with intolerance. Those who, having opinions which they hold to be
immensely important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful,
have any deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as
a class and in the abstract, those who think wrong what they think right,
and right what they think wrong: though they need not therefore be, nor
was my father, insensible to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed
in their estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead
of by the whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person,
being no more infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people
on account of opinions which do not merit dislike; but if he neither
himself does them any ill office, nor connives at its being donc by
others, he is not intolerant: and the forbearance which flows from a
conscientious sense of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom
of all opinions, is the only tolerance which is commendable, or, to the
highest moral order of minds, possible.

It will be admitted, that a man of the opinions, and the character,
above described, was likely to leave a strong moral impression on any
mind principally formed by him, and that his moral teaching was not
likely to err on the side of laxity or indulgence. The element which
was chiefly deficient in his moral relation to his children was that
of tenderness. I do not believe that this deficiency lay in his own
nature. I believe him to have had much more feeling than he habitually
showed, and much greater capacities of feeling than were ever
developed. He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs
of feeling, and, by the absence of demonstration, starving the
feelings themselves. If we consider further that he was in the trying
position of sole teacher, and add to this that his temper was
constitutionally irritable, it is impossible not to feel true pity for
a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who
would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been
constantly feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source.
This was no longer the case later in life, and with his younger
children. They loved him tenderly: and if I cannot say so much of
myself, I was always loyally devoted to him. As regards my own
education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a loser or
gainer by his severity. It was not such as to prevent me from having a
happy childhood. And I do not believe that boys can be induced to
apply themselves with vigour, and--what is so much more
difficult--perseverance, to dry and irksome studies, by the sole force
of persuasion and soft words. Much must be done, and much must be
learnt, by children, for which rigid discipline, and known liability
to punishment, are indispensable as means. It is, no doubt, a very
laudable effort, in modern teaching, to render as much as possible of
what the young are required to learn, easy and interesting to them.
But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them
to learn anything _but_ what has been made easy and interesting, one
of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the
decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching, which,
however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application; but the new,
as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable
of doing anything which is disagreeable to them. I do not, then,
believe that fear, as an element in education, can be dispensed with;
but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element; and when it
predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on the part of
the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of
after years, and perhaps to seal up the fountains of frank and
spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature, it is an evil for
which a large abatement must be made from the benefits, moral and
intellectual, which may flow from any other part of the education.

During this first period of my life, the habitual frequenters of my
father's house were limited to a very few persons, most of them little
known to the world, but whom personal worth, and more or less of
congeniality with at least his political opinions (not so frequently
to be met with then as since), inclined him to cultivate; and his
conversations with them I listened to with interest and instruction.
My being an habitual inmate of my father's study made me acquainted
with the dearest of his friends, David Ricardo, who by his benevolent
countenance, and kindliness of manner, was very attractive to young
persons, and who, after I became a student of political economy,
invited me to his house and to walk with him in order to converse on
the subject. I was a more frequent visitor (from about 1817 or 1818)
to Mr. Hume, who, born in the same part of Scotland as my father, and
having been, I rather think, a younger schoolfellow or college
companion of his, had on returning from India renewed their youthful
acquaintance, and who--coming, like many others, greatly under the
influence of my father's intellect and energy of character--was
induced partly by that influence to go into Parliament, and there
adopt the line of conduct which has given him an honourable place in
the history of his country. Of Mr. Bentham I saw much more, owing to
the close intimacy which existed between him and my father. I do not
know how soon after my father's first arrival in England they became
acquainted. But my father was the earliest Englishman of any great
mark, who thoroughly understood, and in the main adopted, Bentham's
general views of ethics, government and law: and this was a natural
foundation for sympathy between them, and made them familiar
companions in a period of Bentham's life during which he admitted much
fewer visitors than was the case subsequently. At this time Mr.
Bentham passed some part of every year at Barrow Green House, in a
beautiful part of the Surrey Hills, a few miles from Godstone, and
there I each summer accompanied my father in a long visit. In 1813 Mr.
Bentham, my father, and I made an excursion, which included Oxford,
Bath and Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and Portsmouth. In this journey I
saw many things which were instructive to me, and acquired my first
taste for natural scenery, in the elementary form of fondness for a
"view. " In the succeeding winter we moved into a house very near Mr.
Bentham's, which my father rented from him, in Queen Square,
Westminster. From 1814 to 1817 Mr. Bentham lived during half of each
year at Ford Abbey, in Somersetshire (or rather in a part of
Devonshire surrounded by Somersetshire), which intervals I had the
advantage of passing at that place. This sojourn was, I think, an
important circumstance in my education. Nothing contributes more to
nourish elevation of sentiments in a people, than the large and free
character of their habitations. The middle-age architecture, the
baronial hall, and the spacious and lofty rooms, of this fine old
place, so unlike the mean and cramped externals of English
middle-class life, gave the sentiment of a larger and freer existence,
and were to me a sort of poetic cultivation, aided also by the
character of the grounds in which the Abbey stood; which were _riant_
and secluded, umbrageous, and full of the sound of falling waters.

I owed another of the fortunate circumstances in my education, a
year's residence in France, to Mr. Bentham's brother, General Sir
Samuel Bentham. I had seen Sir Samuel Bentham and his family at their
house near Gosport in the course of the tour already mentioned (he
being then Superintendent of the Dockyard at Portsmouth), and during a
stay of a few days which they made at Ford Abbey shortly after the
Peace, before going to live on the Continent. In 1820 they invited me
for a six months' visit to them in the South of France, which their
kindness ultimately prolonged to nearly a twelvemonth. Sir Samuel
Bentham, though of a character of mind different from that of his
illustrious brother, was a man of very considerable attainments and
general powers, with a decided genius for mechanical art. His wife, a
daughter of the celebrated chemist, Dr. Fordyce, was a woman of strong
will and decided character, much general knowledge, and great
practical good sense of the Edgeworth kind: she was the ruling spirit
of the household, as she deserved, and was well qualified, to be.
Their family consisted of one son (the eminent botanist) and three
daughters, the youngest about two years my senior. I am indebted to
them for much and various instruction, and for an almost parental
interest in my welfare. When I first joined them, in May, 1820, they
occupied the Chateau of Pompignan (still belonging to a descendant of
Voltaire's enemy) on the heights overlooking the plain of the Garonne
between Montauban and Toulouse. I accompanied them in an excursion to
the Pyrenees, including a stay of some duration at Bagneres de
Bigorre, a journey to Pau, Bayonne, and Bagneres de Luchon, and an
ascent of the Pic du Midi de Bigorre.

This first introduction to the highest order of mountain scenery made
the deepest impression on me, and gave a colour to my tastes through
life. In October we proceeded by the beautiful mountain route of
Castres and St. Pons, from Toulouse to Montpellier, in which last
neighbourhood Sir Samuel had just bought the estate of Restincliere,
near the foot of the singular mountain of St. Loup. During this
residence in France I acquired a familiar knowledge of the French
language, and acquaintance with the ordinary French literature; I took
lessons in various bodily exercises, in none of which, however, I made
any proficiency; and at Montpellier I attended the excellent winter
courses of lectures at the Faculte des Sciences, those of M. Anglada
on chemistry, of M. Provencal on zoology, and of a very accomplished
representative of the eighteenth century metaphysics, M. Gergonne, on
logic, under the name of Philosophy of the Sciences. I also went
through a course of the higher mathematics under the private tuition
of M. Lentheric, a professor at the Lycee of Montpellier. But the
greatest, perhaps, of the many advantages which I owed to this episode
in my education, was that of having breathed for a whole year, the
free and genial atmosphere of Continental life. This advantage was not
the less real though I could not then estimate, nor even consciously
feel it. Having so little experience of English life, and the few
people I knew being mostly such as had public objects, of a large and
personally disinterested kind, at heart, I was ignorant of the low
moral tone of what, in England, is called society; the habit of, not
indeed professing, but taking for granted in every mode of
implication, that conduct is of course always directed towards low and
petty objects; the absence of high feelings which manifests itself by
sneering depreciation of all demonstrations of them, and by general
abstinence (except among a few of the stricter religionists) from
professing any high principles of action at all, except in those
preordained cases in which such profession is put on as part of the
costume and formalities of the occasion. I could not then know or
estimate the difference between this manner of existence, and that of
a people like the French, whose faults, if equally real, are at all
events different; among whom sentiments, which by comparison at least
may be called elevated, are the current coin of human intercourse,
both in books and in private life; and though often evaporating in
profession, are yet kept alive in the nation at large by constant
exercise, and stimulated by sympathy, so as to form a living and
active part of the existence of great numbers of persons, and to be
recognised and understood by all. Neither could I then appreciate the
general culture of the understanding, which results from the habitual
exercise of the feelings, and is thus carried down into the most
uneducated classes of several countries on the Continent, in a degree
not equalled in England among the so-called educated, except where an
unusual tenderness of conscience leads to a habitual exercise of the
intellect on questions of right and wrong. I did not know the way in
which, among the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things
of an unselfish kind, except occasionally in a special thing here and
there, and the habit of not speaking to others, nor much even to
themselves, about the things in which they do feel interest, causes
both their feelings and their intellectual faculties to remain
undeveloped, or to develop themselves only in some single and very
limited direction; reducing them, considered as spiritual beings, to
a kind of negative existence. All these things I did not perceive till
long afterwards; but I even then felt, though without stating it
clearly to myself, the contrast between the frank sociability and
amiability of French personal intercourse, and the English mode of
existence, in which everybody acts as if everybody else (with few, or
no exceptions) was either an enemy or a bore. In France, it is true,
the bad as well as the good points, both of individual and of national
character, come more to the surface, and break out more fearlessly in
ordinary intercourse, than in England: but the general habit of the
people is to show, as well as to expect, friendly feeling in every one
towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the
opposite. In England it is only of the best bred people, in the upper
or upper middle ranks, that anything like this can be said.

In my way through Paris, both going and returning, I passed some time
in the house of M. Say, the eminent political economist, who was a
friend and correspondent of my father, having become acquainted with
him on a visit to England a year or two after the Peace. He was a man
of the later period of the French Revolution, a fine specimen of the
best kind of French Republican, one of those who had never bent the
knee to Bonaparte though courted by him to do so; a truly upright,
brave, and enlightened man. He lived a quiet and studious life, made
happy by warm affections, public and private. He was acquainted with
many of the chiefs of the Liberal party, and I saw various noteworthy
persons while staying at this house; among whom I have pleasure in the
recollection of having once seen Saint-Simon, not yet the founder
either of a philosophy or a religion, and considered only as a clever
original. The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw,
was a strong and permanent interest in Continental Liberalism, of
which I ever afterwards kept myself _au courant_, as much as of
English politics: a thing not at all usual in those days with
Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development,
keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England--and from
which even my father, with all his superiority to prejudice, was not
exempt--of judging universal questions by a merely English standard.
After passing a few weeks at Caen with an old friend of my father's,
I returned to England in July, 1821 and my education resumed its
ordinary course.




CHAPTER III

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 practised 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 Condillac's _Traite des Sensations_, and the
logical and metaphysical volumes of his _Cours d'Etudes_; the first
(notwithstanding the superficial resemblance between Condillac's
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 a history of the French Revolution. I learnt
with astonishment that the principles of democracy, then apparently in
so 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 XV. , had put
the King and Queen to death, guillotined many persons, one of whom was
Lavoisier, and had ultimately fallen under the despotism of Bonaparte.
From this time, as was natural, the subject took an immense hold of 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, successful or
unsuccessful, as a Girondist 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, notwithstanding his
abhorrence of the chaos of barbarism called English Law, had turned
his thoughts towards the bar as on the whole less ineligible 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 Heineccius on the Institutes, his _Roman Antiquities_,
and part of his exposition of the Pandects; to which 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 Dumont, in the _Traite de Legislation_.
The reading of this book was an epoch 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, deduced from phrases like "law of nature,"
"right reason," "the moral sense," "natural rectitude," and the like,
and characterized them as dogmatism in disguise, imposing its
sentiments upon others under cover of sounding 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 here 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 analysing the
various classes and orders of their consequences. But what struck me
at that time most of all, was the Classification of Offences, 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 page 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 now are. When
I laid down the last volume of the _Traite_, I had become a different
being. The "principle of utility," understood as Bentham understood
it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these
three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held
together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge
and beliefs. It gave unity 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 principal 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 _Traite de Legislation_
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, deprecating and discountenancing 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 chimerical. But, in my state of mind, this appearance of superiority
to illusion added to the effect which Bentham's doctrines produced on 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 Dumont.
This was my private reading: while,
under my father's direction, my studies were carried into the higher
branches of analytic 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 _Helvetius de L'Esprit_, 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 precision in conceiving and
expressing psychological doctrines, whether accepted as truths or only
regarded as the opinion of others. After Helvetius, my father made me
study what he deemed the really master-production in the philosophy
of mind, Hartley's _Observations on Man_. This book, though it did
not, like the _Traite de Legislation_, give a new colour 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 mental phenomena by the law of association,
commended itself to me at once as a real analysis, and made me feel by
contrast the insufficiency of the merely verbal generalizations of
Condillac, and even of the instructive gropings and feelings about for
psychological explanations, of Locke. It was at this very time that my
father commenced writing his _Analysis_ of the Mind, which carried
Hartley's mode of explaining the mental phenomena 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, in the first holiday he passed at Dorking; in which
neighbourhood, 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_, Reid, Dugald Stewart and Brown on Cause and Effect. Brown's
_Lectures_ I did not read until two or three years later, nor at that
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 pseudonyme of Philip Beauchamp) 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 peculiarities 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 as full of contradictions, 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
sceptics against the usefulness of this form of belief. The volume
bearing the name of Philip Beauchamp 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 Traite de 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 Benthamic 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 subject.

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 by 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 were,
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 suggest to
a young writer. In that department, however, I was, and remained, very
inapt. Dry argument was the only thing I could, manage, or willingly
attempted; 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 learnt from others, even pleased with it; but, perhaps from a
desire to promote the exercise of other mental faculties than the
purely logical, he advised me to make my next exercise in composition
one of the oratorical kind; on which 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 defence
of Pericles, on a supposed impeachment for not marching out to fight
the Lacedemonians 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 now also begun to converse, on general 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 and
conversation. Already a highly instructed man, he was yet, by the side
of my father, a tyro in the great subjects of human opinion; but he
rapidly seized on my father's best ideas; and in the department of
political opinion he made himself known as early as 1820, by a
pamphlet in defence of Radical Reform, in reply to a celebrated
article by Sir James Mackintosh, then lately published in he
_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 mental progress. Him I often visited, and my
conversations with him on political, 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 eminence which his life and writings have since
manifested to the world.

Mr. Austin, who was four or five years older than Mr. Grote, 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 Bentinck. 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. Grote, 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
vigour 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
derived from temperament, and partly from the general cast of his
feelings and reflections. The dissatisfaction with life and 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 natural 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 capacities 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 spoilt much of his work for ordinary use by overlabouring it, but
spent so much time and exertion in superfluous 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. From this mental infirmity (of which he is not the sole
example among the accomplished and 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 Coleridge, 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 demeanour 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 shone with
great _eclat_ as a man of intellect and a brilliant orator and
converser. The effect he produced on his Cambridge contemporaries
deserves to be accounted an historical event; for to it may in part be
traced the tendency towards Liberalism in general, and the Benthamic
and politico-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 weekly
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 Austin. He continued, after leaving the
University, to be, by his conversation and personal ascendency, 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, Hyde and Charles Villiers, Strutt
(now Lord Belper), Romilly (now Lord Romilly 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 Austin 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 narrower interpretations and applications of the
principles they both professed, he, on the contrary, presented the
Benthamic 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 honours 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 Austin. It must be said, however, that his example
was followed, _haud passibus aequis_, by younger proselytes, and that to
_outrer_ whatever was by anybody considered offensive in the doctrines
and maxims of Benthamism, became at one time the badge of a small coterie
of youths. All of these who had anything in them, myself among others,
quickly outgrew this boyish vanity; and 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 conformably 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 Scotch
clergyman, of 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; and it came to be occasionally used by some
others holding the opinions which it 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 amanuensis,
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 endeavoured 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
basis--were William Eyton Tooke, 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 honourably known by his apostolic
exertions for the improvement of education; 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 Roebuck.

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 despatches, 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 from 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 abolition 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 on for subsistence. 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 enervating
and fatiguing. For my own part I have, through life, found office duties
an 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 out 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 of 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 at my father's house in the
country; afterwards a part or the whole was spent in tours, chiefly
pedestrian, with some 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 Rhenish Germany were
within easy reach of the annual holiday: and 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 charm of the
remembrance to a large portion of 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, was 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 means of obviating them,
stated and discussed 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, the whole of which had to work together. As a speculative
writer, I should have had no one to consult but myself, and should
have encountered 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 into minds not prepared for it by
habit; while I became practically 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 learnt how
to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain everything;
instead of being indignant 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 anyone, either as theorist or as practical man,
to effect the greatest amount of good compatible with his opportunities.




CHAPTER IV

YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. THE "WESTMINSTER REVIEW"


The occupation of so much of my time by office work did not relax 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 _Traveller_ evening newspaper.
The _Traveller_ (which afterwards grew into the _Globe and Traveller_,
by the purchase and incorporation of the _Globe_) was then the property
of the well-known political economist, Colonel Torrens, and under the
editorship of an able man, Mr. Walter Coulson (who, after being an
amanuensis 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 Torrens himself wrote much of the political economy of his
paper; and had at this time made an attack upon some opinion 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 Torrens, to which I again
rejoined. I soon after attempted something considerably more ambitious.
The prosecutions of Richard Carlile 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 conceded 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 Wickliffe, 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.
But a paper which I wrote soon after on the same subject, _a propos_ of
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 _Traveller_: sometimes
notices of books, but oftener letters, commenting on some nonsense
talked in Parliament, or some defect of the law, or misdoings of the
magistracy or the courts of justice. In this last department the
_Chronicle_ was now rendering signal 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
extensive 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 Whig 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 Fonblanque, who first showed his eminent
qualities as a writer by articles and _jeux d'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 had been said, except by
Bentham and my father, against that most peccant part of English
institutions and of their administration. It was the almost universal
creed of Englishmen, that the law of England, the judicature of England,
the unpaid magistracy 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 vices of the law and the courts of justice, paid and
unpaid, until he forced some sense of them into people's minds. On many
other questions he became the organ of opinions much 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. Grote 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; cooperating with the
effect of his writings in making him a power in 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 what was done by Ricardo, Hume, and
Grote was the result, in part, of his prompting and persuasion. He was
the good genius by the side of Brougham 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 make 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 en Espagne_ that my father should be the
editor; but the idea had never assumed any practical shape. In 1823,
however, Mr. Bentham determined to establish the _Review_ at his own
cost, and offered the editorship to my father, who declined it as
incompatible with his India House appointment. It was then entrusted to
Mr. (now Sir John) Bowring, at that time a merchant in the City. Mr.
Bowring 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
acquaintanceship 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 Bowring, 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
favourite portion of the scheme formerly 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 independent portion, the county 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 endeavouring to supplant the former and
become the predominant section by the aid of public opinion, without any
essential sacrifice of the aristocratical predominance. He described the
course likely to be pursued, and the political ground occupied, by an
aristocratic party in opposition, coquetting 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 alternately 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 Radicalism; nor
was there, I believe, any living person capable of writing that article
except my father. [2]

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 corps, and divide the editorship,
Bowring taking the political, Southern 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 prospectuses sent out, the Longmans 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 most of those who afterwards aided in
carrying on 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 rested 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 Austins, 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 Southey's
_Book of the Church_, in the fifth number, and a political article in
the twelfth. Mr. Austin only contributed one paper, but one of great
merit, an argument against primogeniture, in reply to an article then
lately published in the _Edinburgh Review_ by McCulloch. 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 Austin continued to write for some time;
Fonblanque was a frequent contributor from the third number. Of my
particular associates, Ellis was a regular writer up to the ninth
number; and about the time when he left off, others of the set began;
Eyton Tooke, Graham, and Roebuck.