6 within it! and the face of the country, every object which presents itself to travellers, tells him how effectually this has been done.' No Papist is to dwell in Limerick or Galway. Such is the history of Ireland-for we We are sorry we have nothing for which to praise Administration on the subject of the Catholic question—but it is but justice to say, that they have been very zealous and active in detecting fiscal abuses in Ireland in improving mercantile regulations, and in detecting Irish jobs. The commission on which Mr. Wallace presided has been of the greatest possible utility, and does infinite credit to the Government. The name of Mr. Wallace, in any commission, has now become a pledge to the public that there is a real intention to investigate and correct abuse. He stands in the singular predicament of being equally trusted by the rulers and the ruled. It is a new era in Government, when such men are called into action; and, if there were not proclaimed and fatal limits to that ministerial liberality-which, so far as it goes, we welcome without a grudge, and praise without a sneer-we might yet hope that, for the sake of mere consistency, they might be led to falsify our forebodings. But alas! there are motives more immediate, and therefore irresistible; and the time is not yet come, when it will be believed easier to govern Ireland by the love of the many than by the power of the few-when the paltry and dangerous machinery of bigoted faction and prostituted patronage may be dispensed with, and the vessel of the state be propelled by the natural current of popular interests and the breath of popular applause. In the mean time, we cannot resist the temptation of gracing our conclusion with the following beautiful passage, in which the author alludes to the hopes that were raised at another great era of partial concession and liberality - that of the revolution of 1782,-when, also, benefits were conferred which proved abortive, because they were incompleteand balm poured into the wound, where the envenomed shaft was yet left to rankle. all my own personal interest in all future riots and rebellions, to the one bright, seducing object of my country's liberty and repose. • When I contemplated such a man as the vene rable Charlemont, whose nobility was to the people like a fort over a valley-elevated above them solely for their defence; who introduced the polish of the courtier into the camp of the freeman, and served his country with all that pure, Platonic devotion, which a true knight in the time of chivalry proffered to his mistress; when I listened -when to the eloquence of Grattan, the very music of yet-in spite of the joint efforts of the Govern- My father, however, who saw the momentary dazzle by which I was affected, soon drew me out of this false light of hope in which I lay basking, and set the truth before me in a way but too convincing and ominous. "Be not deceived, boy," he would say, "by the fallacious appearances before you. Eminently great and good as is the man to whom Ireland owes this short era of glory, our work, believe me, will last longer than his. We have a power on our side that will not willingly let us die;' and, long after Grattan shall have disappeared from earth,-like that arrow shot into the clouds by Alcestes-effecting nothing, but leaving a long train of light behind him, the family of the ROCKS will continue to flourish in all their native glory, upheld by the ever-watchful care of the Legislature, and fostered by that 'And here,' says the gallant Captain Rock,-nursing-mother of Liberty,' the Church."'' as the free confession of weaknesses constitutes the chief charm and use of biography-I will candidly own that the dawn of prosperity and concord, which I now saw breaking over the fortunes of my country, so dazzled and deceived my youthful eyes, and so unsettled every hereditary notion of what I owed to my name and family, that shall I confess it?-I even hailed with pleasure the prospects of peace and freedom that seemed opening around me; nay, was ready, in the boyish enthusiasm of the moment, to sacrifice BENTHAM ON FALLACIES. (E. REVIEW, The Book of Fallacies: from Unfinished Papers of THERE are a vast number of absurd and the world for sense and virtue, while in truth they tend only to fortify error and encourage crime. Mr. Bentham has enumerated the most conspicuous of these in the book before us. Whether it be necessary there should be a middleman between the cultivator and the possessor, learned economists have doubted; but neither gods, men, nor booksellers can doubt the necessity of a middleman between Mr. Bentham and the public. Mr. Bentham is long; Mr. Bentham is occasionally involved and obscure; Mr. Bentham invents new and alarming expressions; Mr. Bentham loves division and subdivision- and he loves method itself, more than its consequences. Those only, therefore, who know his originality, his knowledge, his vigour, and his boldness, will recur to the works themselves. The great mass of readers will not purchase improvement at so dear a rate; but will choose rather to become acquainted with Mr. Bentham through the medium of Reviews after that eminent philosopher has been washed, trimmed, shaved, and forced into clean linen. One great use of a Review, indeed, is to make men wise in ten pages, who have no appetite for a hundred pages; to condense nourishment, to work with pulp and essence, and to guard the stomach from idle burden and unmeaning bulk. For half a page, sometimes for a whole page, Mr. Bentham writes with a power which few can equal; and by selecting and omitting, an admirable style may be formed from the text. Using this liberty, we shall endeavour to give an account of Mr. Bentham's doctrines, for the most part in his own words. Wherever any expression is particularly happy, let it be considered to be Mr. Bentham's: -the dulness we take to ourselves. question is, who are the old? and who are the young? Of individuals living at the same period, the oldest has, of course, the greatest experience; but among generations of men the reverse of this is true. Those who come first (our ancestors), are the young people, and have the least experience. We have added to their experience the experience of many centuries; and, therefore, as far as experience goes, are wiser, and more capable of forming an opinion than they were. The real feeling should be, not, can we be so presumptuous as to put our opinions in opposition to those of our ancestors? but can such young, ignorant, inexperienced persons as our ancestors necessarily were, be expected to have understood a subject as well as those who have seen so much more, lived so much longer, and enjoyed the experience of so many centuries? All this cant, then, about our ancestors is merely an abuse of words, by transferring phrases true of contemporary men to succeeding ages. Whereas (as we have before observed) of living men the oldest has, cæteris paribus, the most experience; of generations, the oldest has, cæteris paribus, the least experience. Our ancestors, up to the Conquest, were children in arms; chubby boys in the time of Edward the First; striplings under Elizabeth; men in the reign of Queen Anne; and we only are the white-bearded, silver-headed ancients, who have treasured up, and are prepared to profit by, all the experience which human life can supply. We are not disputing with our ancestors the palm of talent, in which they may or may not be our superiors, but the palm of experience, in which it is utterly impossible they can be our superiors. And yet, whenever the Chancellor comes forward to protect some abuse, or to oppose some plan which has the increase of human happiness for its object, his first appeal is always to the wisdom of our ancestors; and he himself, and many noble lords who vote with him, are, to this hour, persuaded that all alterations and amendments on their devices are an unblushing controversy between youthful temerity and mature experience!-and so, in truth, they are- - only that much-loved magistrate mistakes the young for the old, and the old for the young- and is guilty of that very sin against experience which he attributes to the lovers of innovation. We cannot of course be supposed to maintain that our ancestors wanted wisdom, or that they were necessarily mistaken in their institutions, because their means of information were more limited than ours. But we do confidently maintain that when we find it expedient to change any thing which our ancestors have enacted, we are the experienced persons, and not they. The quantity of talent is always varying in any great nation. To say that we are more or less able than our ancestors, is an assertion that requires to be explained. All the able men of all ages, who have ever lived in England, probably possessed, if taken all together, more intellect than all the able men now in England can boast of. But if authority must be resorted to rather than reason, the question is, What was the wisdom of that single age which enacted the law, compared with the wisdom of the age which proposes to alter it? What are the eminent men of one and the other period? If you say that our ancestors were wiser than us, mention your date and year. If the splendour of names is equal, are the circumstances the same? If the circumstances are the same, we have a superiority of experience, of which the difference between the two periods is the measure. It is necessary to insist upon this; for upon sacks of wool, and on benches forensic, sit grave men, and agricolous persons in the Commons, crying out Ancestors, Ancestors! hodie non! Saxons, Danes, save us! Fiddlefrig, help us! Howel, Ethelwolf, protect us!'. Any cover for nonsense any veil for trash- any pretext for repelling the innovations of conscience and of duty! - --- 'So long as they keep to vague generalities-so long as the two objects of comparison are each of them taken in the lump-wise ancestors in one lump, ignorant and foolish mob of modern times in the other the weakness of the fallacy may escape detection. But let them assign for the period of superior wisdom any determinate period whatsoever, not only will the groundlessness of the notion be apparent (class being compared with class in that period and the present one), but, unless the antecedent period be comparatively speaking a very such an amount in favour of modern times, that, modern one, so wide will be the disparity, and to in comparison of the lowest class of the people in modern times, (always supposing them proficients in the art of reading, and their proficiency employed in the reading of newspapers,) the very highest and best informed class of these wise ancestors will turn out to be grossly ignorant. 'Take, for example, any year in the reign of Henry the Eighth, from 1509 to 1546. At that time the House of Lords would probably have been in possession of by far the larger proportion of what little instruction the age afforded: in the House of Lords, among the laity, it might even then be a question whether, without exception, their lordships supposing them all in the fullest possession of that useful art, political science being the science in question, what instruction on the subject could they meet with at that time of day? were all of them able so much as to read. But even 'On no one branch of legislation was any book extant from which, with regard to the circumstances of the then present times, any useful instruction could be derived: distributive law, penal law, international law, political economy, so far from existing as sciences, had scarcely obtained a name: in all those departments under the head of quid faciendum, a mere blank: the whole literature of the age consisted of a meagre chronicle or two, containing short memorandums of the usual occurrences of war and peace, battles, sieges, executions, revels, deaths, births, processions, ceremonies, and other external events; but with scarce a speech or an incident that could enter into the composition of any such work as a history of the human mind - with scarce an attempt at investigation into causes, characters, or the state of the people at large. Even when at last, little by little, a scrap or two of political instruction came to be obtainable, the proportion of error and mischievous doctrine mixed up with it was so great, that whether a blank unfilled might not have been less prejudicial than a blank thus filled, may reasonably be matter of doubt. 'If we come down to the reign of James the First, we shall find that Solomon of his time eminently eloquent as well as learned, not only among crowned but among uncrowned heads, marking out for prohibition and punishment the practices of devils and witches, and without any the slightest objection on the part of the great characters of that day in their high situations, consigning men to death and torment for the misfortune of not being so well acquainted as he was with the composition of the Godhead. • Under the name of Exorcism the Catholic liturgy contains a form of procedure for driving out devils; even with the help of this instrument, the operation cannot be performed with the desired success, but by an operator qualified by holy orders for the working of this as well as so many other wonders. In our days and in our country the same object is attained, and beyond comparison more effectually, by so cheap an instrument as a common newspaper: before this talisman, not only devils but ghosts, vampires, witches, and all their kindred tribes, are driven out of the land, never to return again! The touch of holy water is not so into-generation's love for itself? lerable to them as the bare smell of printers' ink.' -(pp. 74-77.) have no claim to preference. If the prior generation were, in respect of intellectual qualification, ever so much superior to the subsequent generation - if it understood so much better than the subsequent generation itself the interest of that subsequent generation — could it have been in an equal degree anxious to promote that interest, and consequently equally attentive to those facts with which, though in order to form a judgment it ought to have been, it is impossible that it should have been acquainted? In a word, will its love for that subsequent generation be quite so great as that same Fallacy of irrevocable Laws. A law, says Mr. Bentham (no matter to what effect) is proposed to a legislative assembly, who are called upon to reject it, upon the single ground, that by those who in some former period exercised the same power, a regulation was made, having for its object to preclude for ever, or to the end of an unexpired period, all succeeding legislators from enacting a law to any such effect as that now proposed. Now it appears quite evident that, at every period of time, every Legislature must be endowed with all those powers which the exigency of the times may require and any attempt to infringe on this power is inadmissible and absurd. The sovereign power, at any one period, can only form a blind guess at the measures which may be necessary for any future period but by this principle of immutable laws, the government is transferred from those who are necessarily the best judges of what they want, to others who can know little or nothing about the matter. The thirteenth century decides for the fourteenth. The fourteenth makes laws for the fifteenth. The fifteenth hermetically seals up the sixteenth, which tyrannises over the seventeenth, which again tells the eighteenth how it is to act, under circumstances which cannot be foreseen, and how it is to conduct itself in exigencies which no human wit can anticipate. Men who have a century more of experience to ground their judgments on, surrender their intellect to men who had a century less experience, and who, unless that deficiency constitutes a claim, 'Not even here, after a moment's deliberate reflection, will the assertion be in the affirmative. And yet it is their prodigious anxiety for the welfare of their posterity that produces the propensity of these sages to tie up the hands of this same posterity for evermore-to act as guardians to its perpetual and incurable weakness, and take its conduct for ever out of its own hands. "If it be right that the conduct of the 19th century should be determined not by its own judgment, but by that of the 18th, it will be equally right that the conduct of the 20th century should be determined, not by its own judgment, but by that of the 19th. And if the same principle were still pursued, what at length would be the consequence? -that in process of time the practice of legislation would be at an end. The conduct and fate of all men would be determined by those who neither knew nor cared any thing about the matter; and the aggregate body of the Living would remain for ever in subjection to an inexorable tyranny, exercised as it were by the aggregate body of the Dead.'-(pp. 84-86.) The despotism, as Mr. Bentham well observes, of Nero or Caligula, would be more tolerable than an irrevocable law. The despot, through fear or favour, or in a lucid interval, might relent; but how are the Parliament, who made the Scotch Union, for example, to be awakened from that dust in which they repose- -the jobber and the patriot, the speaker and the doorkeeper, the silent voters and the men of rich allusions Cannings and cultivators, Barings and beggars-making irrevocable laws for men who toss their remains about with spades, and use the relics of these legislators, to give breadth to broccoli, and to aid the vernal eruption of asparagus? If the law be good, it will support itself; if bad, it should not be supported by the irrevocable theory, which is never resorted to |
