Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/456

 434 THE ECONOMIC JOURNAL management unless its superiority to private enterprise in the particular case was demonstrated. The municipalities, besides supplying gas and water, might, when necessary, have a stock of workmen's dwell- ings to be let at remunerative but not exorbitant rents. Mr. Graham discusses his several proposals with much practical sense. Fragment on Government. By JEREMY BENTHAM. Edited, with an Introduction, by F. C. MONTAOUE, M.A., late Fellow of Oriel College, pp. xi--241. Oxford. At the Clarendon Press, 1891, BENTHAM is one of those writers to whom it is still somewhat difficult to be fair. He was a man of so marked an individuality that most of his successors have been either his admirers or his enemies. By One set he has been reprobated as the author of the Pig Philosophy; by another set he has been almost worshipped as the man who laid the basis of the scientific study of Ethics and Jurisprudence. Mill, indeed, in his famous essay, gave a rare example of impartial and penetrating criticism; and Bentham has had the good fortune of being subsequently dealt with by another master of literary justice, Dr. Sidgwick. But even after all this, it is difficult to treat him without some bias; and one cannot but congratulate him, therefore, on having his celebrated Fragmet edited by so judicious and able a writer as Mr. Montague. As Mr. Montague remarks in his Preface,' the bulk of Bentham's writings has passed into not unjust oblivion': but the Fragment on Government is certainly one of the few that deserve to be kept alive. It is not, indeed, in itself a work of supreme importance. The very fact that it was so well done has helped to destroy its interest. its criticisms were so destructive at required; while its constructive have long since been superseded. the time that they have ceased to be efforts were so suggestive that they It was a brilliant beginning and end of much a swift charge of cavalry, we might say, perishing amid the rout of the eneny. It is certainly remarkable among Bentham's writings for the brightness and force of its style. It is a sort of Duzciad of Jurisprudence, with a Blackstone instead of a Blackmore, and a believer in ' the greatest happiness of the greatest number' instead of a believer in epigrams and the heroic couplet. That such a work should be either fair or profound it would be too much to expect. Indeed, these are qualities that we do not naturally look for in Bentham at any time. As Mill said, ' Bentham failed in deriving light from other minds'; and 'we must not look for subtlety, or the power of recondite analysis, among his intellect6al characteristics.' Least of all should we look for such qualities in a Fragment such as this. All that we can ask is that it should be bright and effective, and this it certainly is. It pillories with irresistible humour that philistine among jurists who took as his 'gig' the British Constitution and the ' attributes' of the king. It pelts him vith sarcasm; it breaks his head with logic; it pierces him through and through. But it is poor sport after all. The creature is dead and forgotten; or, if it lives at all, it lives assuredly in