We do not speak of light-minded and enthusiastic people, of wits like Sheridan, or poets like Alfieri; but of the most virtuous and intelligent practical statesmen, and of the deepest, the calmest, the most impartial political speculators of that time.  What was the language and conduct of Lord Spencer, of Lord Fitzwilliam, or Mr. Grattan?  What is the tone of M. Dumont’s Memoirs, written just at the close of the eighteenth century?  What Tory could have spoken with greater disgust or contempt of the French Revolution and its authors?  Nay, this writer, a republican, and the most upright and zealous of republicans, has gone so far as to say that Mr. Burke’s work on the Revolution had saved Europe.  The name of M. Dumont naturally suggests that of Mr. Bentham.  He, we presume, was not ratting for a place; and what language did he hold at that time?  Look at his little treatise entitled Sophismes Anarchiques.  In that treatise he says, that the atrocities of the Revolution were the natural consequences of the absurd principles on which it was commenced; that, while the chiefs of the constituent assembly gloried in the thought that they were pulling down aristocracy, they never saw that their doctrines tended to produce an evil a hundred times more formidable, anarchy; that the theory laid down in the Declaration of the Rights of Man had, in a great measure, produced the crimes of the Reign of Terror; that none but an eyewitness could imagine the horrors of a state of society in which comments on that Declaration were put forth by men with no food in their bellies, with rags on their backs and pikes in their hands.  He praises the English Parliament for the dislike which it has always shown to abstract reasonings, and to the affirming of general principles.  In M. Dumont’s preface to the Treatise on the Principles of Legislation, a preface written under the eye of Mr. Bentham, and published with his sanction, are the following still more remarkable expressions:  “M.  Bentham est bien loin d’attacher une preference exclusive a aucune forme de gouvernement.  Il pense que la meilleure constitution pour un peuple est celle a laquelle il est accoutume . . .  Le vice fondamental des theories sur les constitutions politiques, c’est de commencer par attaquer celles qui existent, et d’exciter tout au moins des inquietudes et des jalousies de pouvoir.  Une telle disposition n’est point favorable au perfectionnement des lois.  La seule epoque ou l’on puisse entreprendre avec succes des grandes reformes de legislation est celle ou les passions publiques sont calmes, et ou le gouvernement jouit de la stabilite la plus grande.  L’objet de M. Bentham, en cherchant dans le vice des lois la cause de la plupart des maux, a ete constamment d’eloigner le plus grand de tous, le bouleversement de l’autorite, les revolutions de propriete et de pouvoir.”