logic, but have grown up
out of instincts, and correspond with certain immemorial needs and
aspirations of humanity. Hume had sketched, before Bentham, his Idea
of a Perfect Commonwealth; yet he begins by the warning that

'It is not with forms of government as with other artificial
contrivances; where an old engine may be rejected if we can
discover another more accurate and commodious ... the bulk of
mankind' (he adds) 'being governed by authority, not by reason, and
never attributing authority to anything that has not the
recommendation of antiquity.'

Hume's mission was to undermine settled fallacies, and to scatter
doubt among conventional certitudes; and this loosening of foundations
prepared the way for a bolder political projector, who delivered his
frontal attack in disdain of the philosopher's warnings. Political
projectors, says the cautious Hume, are pernicious if they have power,
and ridiculous if they want it. Bentham was quite confident that if he
could only get the power he could radically change for the better the
circumstances of a people in any part of the world, by legislation on
the principles of Utility; and he was sure that character is
indefinitely modifiable by circumstances. That human nature is
constantly altering with, and adapting itself to, the environment, is
an undeniable truth; but in the moral as in the physical world the
natural changes occupy long periods, and to stir the soil hastily may
produce a catastrophe. The latter result actually followed in France;
while in England the doctrine of the unlimited power of legislation,
to be used for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and
wielded by a sovereign State according to the dictates of public
opinion, was met by alarm, suspicion, and protracted opposition. It
is the habit of Englishmen to admit no proposition, however clear and
convincing, until they discover what the propounder intends to do with
it. Yet it will be seen that Bentham's plans of reform, if not his
principles, did suggest, and to some extent shape, the main direction
of judicial and administrative changes during the nineteenth century,
though with some consequences that he neither anticipated nor desired.
He thought that the State might be invested with power to modify
society, and yet might be strictly controlled in the exercise of that
power. He might have foreseen, what has actually happened, that the
State, once established