sure which they have long denied themselves. An old tyrant does
without popularity just as an old water-drinker does without wine. But,
though it is perfectly true that men who for the good of their health
have long abstained from wine feel the want of it very little, it would
be absurd to infer that men will always abstain from wine when their
health requires that they should do so. And it would be equally absurd
to say, because men who have been accustomed to oppress care little for
popularity, that men will therefore necessarily prefer the pleasure of
oppression to those of popularity.

Then, again, a man may be accustomed to wrong people in one point and
not in another. He may care for their good opinion with regard to one
point and not with regard to another. The Regent Orleans laughed at
charges of impiety, libertinism, extravagance, idleness, disgraceful
promotions. But the slightest allusion to the charge of poisoning threw
him into convulsions. Louis the Fifteenth braved the hatred and contempt
of his subjects during many years of the most odious and imbecile
misgovernment. But, when a report was spread that he used human blood
for his baths, he was almost driven mad by it. Surely Mr Bentham's
position "that no man cares for the good opinion of those whom he has
been accustomed to wrong" would be objectionable, as far too sweeping
and indiscriminate, even if it did not involve, as in the present case
we have shown that it does, a direct begging of the question at issue.

Mr Bentham proceeds:--

"Fourthly, The Edinburgh Reviewers are of opinion, that 'it might, with
no small plausibility, be maintained, that in many countries, there are
two classes which, in some degree, answer to this description;' [viz.]
'that the poor compose the class which government is established to
restrain; and the people of some property the class to which the powers
of government may without danger be confided.'

"They take great pains, it is true, to say this and not to say it. They
shuffle and creep about, to secure a hole to escape at, if 'what they
do not assert' should be found in any degree inconvenient. A man
might waste his life in trying to find out whether the Misses of the
'Edinburgh' mean to say Yes or No in their political coquetry. But
whichever way the lovely spinsters may decide, it is diametrically
opposed to history and the evidence of facts, that the poor ARE the
class whom there is any difficulty in restraining.