being left in a state of nature. The supply of food on an average remains constant; yet the tendency in every animal to increase by propagation is geometrical." This is seen for example in European animals left to run wild in America during the last few centuries. The check can, as a rule, be seldom pointed out precisely, though (on p. 191) he observes that the horses on the Falkland Islands are a case where this can be done.

In

Mr. A. R. Wallace, in his book on Darwinism (Macmillan, 1889) has, like Darwin himself, retained even the phrase "geometrical ratio." his statement (which is given in substance below [end of Book IV.], he makes the Malthusian law an integral part of Darwinism. In regard to the descent of Man, Mr. Wallace (Darwinism, p. 458) employs a deductive argument which is of interest in this connection. From the theory of natural selection it follows (he says) that there must have been "a large population spread over an extensive area," to supply "an adequate number of brain-variations for man's progressive improvement." The theory of progress by variations is thus made in some measure to support a priori the theory of Malthus.

CHAPTER II.

BENTHAM AND JAMES MILL.

BENTHAM (1748-1832) was the contemporary of Malthus, and shared with him the credit of defeating the famous Poor Law Bill of Pitt (1797-1798). In his Letters on Usury (1787) he extended Adam Smith's "simple system of natural liberty" to bargains about loans of money. In his Manual of Political Economy (published piecemeal in 1798 and afterwards) he presented Adam Smith's economical doctrines in more abstract language than their author's and with an arrangement of his own. He divided actions bearing on political economy into three groups, "sponte acta," or the acts of individuals and their results, "agenda" or "things to be done" by the State, which should be reduced to the lowest possible dimensions, and "non-agenda" "things not to be done" by the State, or cases of unwise interference, The last he denounces not as merely unwise but as unjust, for the individual is in economical matters all in all. Consideration of the community, however, cannot fail to come in, for Bentham differs from Adam Smith almost as much in his bent for legislation as in his indifference to history, and the legislator (in Bentham's own language) must regard "the greatest happiness of the greatest number.' Even his economical definitions show the prominence in his mind of this point of view. National wealth, or the total of the means of enjoyment in a nation, is distinguished from national opulence, or the proportion of the said total to the numbers of the nation. The chief end of wealth is "well-being," and a material object is wealth if it possesses "value, namely subservience to well-being." We even hear (though at random in a conversation) that "the value of money is its quantity multiplied by the felicity it produces,”—a say

ing which illustrates the fondness with which Utilitarians dwell on what later writers have called the subjective element in value.

It is to Bentham that we owe the close association of English political economy with Utilitarianism in Philosophy. Not only in matters of trade, but in all cases, men act (according to Bentham) with a view to their personal interests. In other words individualism means the same thing in ethics as it does in political economy. "To obtain the greatest portion of happiness for himself is the object of every rational being. Every man is nearer to himself than he can be to any other man, and no other man can weigh for him his pains and pleasures. Himself must necessarily be his own first concern." This is nearly the language of Adam Smith; but without his qualifications. Bentham has no reserve. "To interest duty must and will be made subservient." 3 "There is no true interest but individual interest." "Nature" (he says in the famous introductory chapter of the Principles of Morals and Legislation) "has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pleasure and pain. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do" (Clar. Press ed., p. 1). A man's actions result from his calculation of the balance of consequences in favour of greater pleasure or less pain to himself individually. Utility (he says) is not a new principle, but it has been vaguely defined. The sense it must bear is the tendency to produce happiness, and the sense happiness must bear is the greatest possible sum of pleasures.

In the same way (he goes on in the introduction. to Principles of Morals and Legislation) that which tends to increase the total happiness of the individuals composing a community is the Utility of the said community. Every individual is to count as one and no one as more than one. The aim and intention of all legislation

1 Deontology, vol. i., p. 18 (ed. Bowring, 1834).

2 Moral Sent., 6th ed., II. 99. See above, p. 37.

3 This quotation also is from the Deontology, which it is fair to remember is more paradoxical than any of the works published in Bentham's own life-time.

4 As to this phrase, see below, p. 234 n.

should be to secure the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number.' We must put aside all theories of a supposed Natural Law, or of Ascetic, or even of Sympathetic moralists. We start with Greatest Happiness as our first principle. Like other first principles, it cannot be proved directly, but it cannot be rejected without absurdities.

Both morals and legislation therefore deal with the tendency of actions to produce pleasure and pain. And these feelings are viewed as being identical in all men; they are palpable and familiar facts, with no mystery or mysticism about them. Pleasures (and pains) differ in intensity, duration, certainty, nearness in time, fecundity (or likeliness to give rise to other pleasures or pains), purity (or freedom from admixture of their opposite), and finally extent (or the great or small number of persons in whom they occur).' These are differences on which all are agreed and about which all can appeal to their own experience. But we cannot say that pleasures and pains differ in kind or quality one from another. No one can pronounce on their quality except the subject of them. The moralist and legislator have to deal with the palpable, comparable and measurable differences of quantity above mentioned; these are the criteria by which alone the tendency of an action is to be judged, and the action itself pronounced good or evil. The good of the individual is the greatest sum of pleasures possible to him; the good of society is the greatest sum of pleasures possible to the greatest number of its members.

With the influence of Bentham on Legislation, we have of course nothing directly to do, and the application of his ideas to Jurisprudence will be best viewed in connection with James Mill. But the general effect on the thinking public of England was precisely what Godwin had tried to produce in the case of political

For the history of this motto see Palgrave's Economical Dictionary, art. "Bentham."

* See Table of the Springs of Action (1817), p. 3. The last seems as compared with the rest to be an external difference. It goes beyond the mere sensation.

3 Except surely "extent."

philosophy as a whole; the appeal to custom and tradition was discredited, and writers were forced to give a reason for the steps they took and a first principle for the doctrines they advanced, as well as to define the terms they used.

The influence of Utilitarianism, and especially of Bentham's Utilitarianism, on Political Economy has been profound and enduring. It is certainly not by accident that nearly all leading English economists, and a large proportion of Continental economists since his time have been Utilitarians when they have had any philosophy at all. This applies to Ricardo, James and John Mill, Say, Sadler, Destutt de Tracy, Jevons, Cairnes, and Sidgwick. Going back to economists before Bentham. we find the conjunction in Malthus, and earlier still in Beccaria and Verri.' It will be best to consider the affinity (thus indicated) in special relation to the form of Utilitarianism which is, from one point of view, the purest, and, from another, the crudest,-the theory of Bentham himself, as distinguished from the later modifications of J. S. Mill, Spencer, and others.

A man like Ricardo, whose first and chief intellectual training in mature life had been derived from political economy, seemed to fall at once into line with the principles of Bentham as soon as he tried to express for himself a political philosophy at all. The two bodies of doctrine seemed to agree (1) in being directly related to palpable and tangible, or (to put it more bluntly) mundane and materialistic aims. Carlyle speaks of the monster Utilitarianism and the dismal science (of political economy) in the same breath, as symptoms of one and the same disease. John Stuart Mill speaks of Bentham's whole system as dealing almost entirely with the "business relations of human life, the relations in which men are

1 Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene, 1764. Verri, Sull' indole del Piacer, etc., 1773.

2 E.g. Carlyle, Signs of the Times (1830). Macaulay deplores the association of Benthamism with Political Economy as tending to discredit the latter. Edin. Rev., June, 1829, pp. 298, 299. See too Palgrave's Econom. Diction., article "Carlyle," and note to this chapter. 3 J. S. Mill, Essay on Bentham (Dissert. and Discuss.). Cf. Ricardo's Letters to Malthus, Clarend. Press, Preface.