A Fragment On Government 1891 PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1891 edition. Excerpt: ... Another symptom of the same shortcoming appears in the harshness of the judgments passed by Bentham upon other men. Like most reformers of clear narrow mind, he saw certain abuses so vividly and resented them so fiercely that he judged every one who upheld the institutions in which these abuses occurred to be not only stupid and bigoted but also false and corrupt. He disliked judiciary law. Accordingly he asserted that the judges in making law were guilty of a deliberate usurpation of legislative power; a usurpation committed in order to satisfy the greed and ambition of lawyers. Yet it is certain that judiciary law is only one mode of that development of law by experts which takes place in every progressive community. It is also certain that judiciary law would have been much better than it is had judges been more ambitious of legislating and less timidly anxious to cover themselves with the authority of their predecessors. But not official classes only, eminent individuals as well felt the license of Bentham's invective. Dr. Johnson was 'the miserable and misery-propagating ascetic and instrument of despotism.' Burke was a madman, an incendiary, a caster of verbal filth, and possessed by the unqualified thirst for lucre. In some passages of this kind Bentham combines the worst faults of Burke and of Cobbett with a literary impotence to which they were never liable. For Bentham, in his most abusive fits, leaves the reader unmoved. His reckless denunciation of all who differed from him respecting moral and political questions had not the excuse of irritability and suffering which we may allow for Burke, nor the excuse of low birth and chance education which we may allow for Cobbett. It may best be excused by remembering that he had...