In all 13.'s ethical and political writings, the doctrine of utility is the leading and pervading principle; and his favorite vehicle for its expression is the phrase, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," which was first coined by Priestley, though its prominence in politics has been owing to Bentham. "In this phrase," he says, " I saw delineated for the first time a plain as well as a true standard for whatever is right or wrong, useful, useless, or mischievous, in human conduct, whether in the field of morals or politics." In need scarcely be remarked that the phrase affords no guidance as to how the benevolent end pointed at is to be attained; and is no more than a quasi concrete expression of the objects of true benevolence. In considering how to compass these objects, B. arrived at various conclusions, which lie advocated irrespective of the conditions of society in his day, and of the laws of social growth which, indeed, neither he nor his contemporaries understood. He demanded nothing less than the immediate remodeling of the government, and the codification and reconstruction of the laws; and insisted, among other changes, on those which came at a later day to be popularly demanded as the points of the "charter"—viz., universal suffrage, annual parliaments, Note by ballot, and paid representatives. However impossible some of these schemes were, it cannot be denied that B. did more to rouse the spirit of modern reform and improvement in laws and politics, than any other writer of his day. Many of his schemes have been, and many more are, in the course of being slowly realized; the end and object of them all was the general welfare, and his chief error—apart from his overestimate of the value of some changes which lie proposed—lay in conceiving that organic changes are possible through any other process than that of growth and modifi cation of the popular wants and sentiments. It was this error that led the philosopher,
in his closet in London, to devise codes of laws for Russia (through which country he made a tour in 1785) and America, the adoption of which would have been equivalent to revolutions in these countries, and then bitterly to bewail the folly of mankind when his schemes were rejected.
In ethics, as in politics, he pressed his doctrines to extremes. It has been said that his doctrine of utility was so extended that it would have been practically dangerous, but for the incapacity of the bulk of mankind for acting on a speculative theory.
By the death of his father in 1702, B. succeeded to property in London, and to farms in Essex, yielding from £500 to £000 a year. He lived frugally, but with elegance, in one of his London houses (Queen square, Westminster); and, employing young men as secretaries, corresponded and wrote daily. By a life of temperance and industry. with great self-complacency, in the society of a few devoted friends (who, says sir James Mackintosh, more resembled the hearers of an Athenian philosopher than the proselytes of a modern writer), B. attained to the age of 84. He died in June, 1832.