[26] Locke, Second Treatise of Government, 1690, ed. 1821, p. 191.

When the leaders of the American revolution sought for certainty in their argument against George the Third they too found it in the fact that men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.’

Rousseau and his French followers rested these rights on a presumed social contract.  Human rights stood upon that contract as the elephant upon the tortoise, though the contract itself, like the tortoise, was apt to stand upon nothing at all.

At this point Bentham, backed by the sense of humour of mankind, swept aside the whole conception of a science of politics deduced from natural right.  ‘What sort of a thing,’ he asked, ’is a natural right, and where does the maker live, particularly in Atheist’s Town, where they are most rife?’[27]

[27] Escheat vice Taxation, Bentham’s Works, vol. ii. p. 598.

Bentham himself believed that he had found the standard in the fact that all men seek pleasure and avoid pain.  In that respect men were measurable and comparable.  Politics and jurisprudence could therefore be made experimental sciences in exactly the same sense as physics or chemistry.  ‘The present work,’ wrote Bentham, ’as well as any other work of mine that has been or will be published on the subject of legislation or any other branch of moral science, is an attempt to extend the experimental method of reasoning from the physical branch to the moral.’[28]

[28] MS. in University College, London, quoted by Halevy, La Jeunesse de Bentham, pp. 289-290.

Bentham’s standard of ‘pleasure and pain’ constituted in many ways an important advance upon ‘natural right.’  It was in the first place founded upon a universally accepted fact; all men obviously do feel both pleasure and pain.  That fact was to a certain extent measurable.  One could, for instance, count the number of persons who suffered this year from an Indian famine, and compare it with the number of those who suffered last year.  It was clear also that some pains and pleasures were more intense than others, and that therefore the same man could in a given number of seconds experience varying amounts of pleasure or pain.  Above all, the standard of pleasure and pain was one external to the political thinker himself.  John Stuart Mill quotes Bentham as saying of all philosophies which competed with his Utilitarianism:  ’They consist, all of them, in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept the author’s sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself.’[29]

[29] Bentham’s Works, vol. i. p. 8, quoted in Lytton’s England and the English (1833), p. 469.  This passage was written by Mill, cf. preface.

A ‘Benthamite,’ therefore, whether he was a member of Parliament like Grote or Molesworth, or an official like Chadwick, or an organising politician like Francis Place, could always check his own feelings about ‘rights of property,’ ‘mischievous agitators,’ ’spirit of the Constitution,’ ‘insults to the flag,’ and so on, by examining statistical facts as to the numerical proportion, the income, the hours of work, and the death rate from disease, of the various classes and races who inhabited the British Empire.