“PILLAGED by all the world, he remains always wealthy,” Talleyrand said of Bentham; and in quoting the sentence Professor Holland says that “to trace the results of his teachings in England alone would be to write the history of the legislation of half a century.” Taking from Beccaria the maxim that all government should be a mode of securing the greatest possible good to the greatest possible number of people, he became a power in his own generation and, through John Stuart Mill, one of the controlling intellectual forces of the nineteenth century. It is said that “the reading of Dumont’s exposition of Bentham’s doctrines in the ‘Traité de la Législation’ was an epoch in Mill’s life, awakening in him an ambition as enthusiastic and impassioned as a young man’s first love.”

  Bentham was born in London, February 15th, 1748. It is said that at “three years old, he read eagerly such works as Rapin’s ‘History’ and began the study of Latin,” and that “a year or two later he learned the violin and French conversation.” This assertion made by Professor Holland, of Oxford, is no more incredible than is the actual achievement of Bentham’s mature intellect, illustrated in the results of his attempts to force England away from feudalism. He lived to be eighty-five years old, dying June 6th, 1832.