urselves. We wish, however, to intimate to the actual writer
of that attack that our civilities were intended for the author of the
"Preuves Judiciaires," and the "Defence of Usury"--and not for him. We
cannot conclude, indeed, without expressing a wish--though we fear it
has but little chance of reaching Mr Bentham--that he would endeavour
to find better editors for his compositions. If M. Dumont had not been
a redacteur of a different description from some of his successors, Mr
Bentham would never have attained the distinction of even giving his
name to a sect.

*****

UTILITARIAN THEORY OF GOVERNMENT. (October 1829.)

Westminster Review (XXII., Article 16), on the Strictures
of the Edinburgh Review (XCVIII., Article 1), on the
Utilitarian Theory of Government, and the "Greatest
Happiness Principle."

We have long been of opinion that the Utilitarians have owed all their
influence to a mere delusion--that, while professing to have submitted
their minds to an intellectual discipline of peculiar severity, to have
discarded all sentimentality, and to have acquired consummate skill
in the art of reasoning, they are decidedly inferior to the mass of
educated men in the very qualities in which they conceive themselves to
excel. They have undoubtedly freed themselves from the dominion of some
absurd notions. But their struggle for intellectual emancipation has
ended, as injudicious and violent struggles for political emancipation
too often end, in a mere change of tyrants. Indeed, we are not sure that
we do not prefer the venerable nonsense which holds prescriptive sway
over the ultra-Tory to the upstart dynasty of prejudices and sophisms by
which the revolutionists of the moral world have suffered themselves to
be enslaved.

The Utilitarians have sometimes been abused as intolerant, arrogant,
irreligious,--as enemies of literature, of the fine arts, and of the
domestic charities. They have been reviled for some things of which
they were guilty, and for some of which they were innocent. But scarcely
anybody seems to have perceived that almost all their peculiar faults
arise from the utter want both of comprehensiveness and of precision
in their mode of reasoning. We have, for some time past, been convinced
that this was really the case; and that, whenever their philosophy
should be boldly and unsparingly scrutinised, the world would see that
it had been under a mistake respecting them.

We h