ct to do more than protect us against a difficulty--a most
formidable one certainly--of language. The whole question remains open
as to the motives of societies in imposing these commands on
themselves, as to the connection of these commands with each other, and
the nature of their dependence on those which preceded them, and
which they have superseded. Bentham suggests the answer that
societies modify, and have always modified, their laws according to
modifications of their views of general expediency. It is difficult to
say that this proposition is false, but it certainly appears to be
unfruitful. For that which seems expedient to a society, or rather to
the governing part of it, when it alters a rule of law is surely the
same thing as the object, whatever it may be, which it has in view
when it makes the change. Expediency and the greatest good are nothing
more than different names for the impulse which prompts the
modification; and when we lay down expediency as the rule of change in
law or opinion, all we get by the proposition is the substitution of
an express term for a term which is necessarily implied when we say
that a change takes place.

There is such wide-spread dissatisfaction with existing theories of
jurisprudence, and so general a conviction that they do not really
solve the questions they pretend to dispose of, as to justify the
suspicion that some line of inquiry necessary to a perfect result has
been incompletely followed or altogether omitted by their authors. And
indeed there is one remarkable omission with which all these
speculations are chargeable, except perhaps those of Montesquieu. They
take no account of what law has actually been at epochs remote from
the particular period at which they made their appearance. Their
originators carefully observed the institutions of their own age and
civilisation, and those of other ages and civilisations with which
they had some degree of intellectual sympathy, but, when they turned
their attention to archaic states of society which exhibited much
superficial difference from their own, they uniformly ceased to
observe and began guessing. The mistake which they committed is
therefore analogous to the error of one who, in investigating the laws
of the material universe, should commence by contemplating the
existing physical world as a whole, instead of beginning with the
particles which are its simplest ingredients. One does not certainly
see why such a scie