But the great objection which Mr. Bentham makes to our review, still remains to be noticed:--{ 73}"The pith of the charge against the author of the Essays is, that he has written ‘an elaborate Treatise on Government,’ and ‘deduced the whole science from the assumption of certain propensities of human nature.’ Now, in the name of Sir Richard Birnie and all saints, from what else should it be deduced? What did ever anybody imagine to be the end, object, and design of government as it ought to be but the same operation, on an extended scale, which that meritorious chief magistrate conducts on a limited one at Bow-street; to wit, the preventing one man from injuring another? Imagine, then, that the Whiggery of Bow-street were to rise up against the proposition that their science was to be deduced from ‘certain propensities of human nature,’ and thereon were to ratiocinate as follows:--
“‘_How then are we to arrive at just conclusions on a subject so ‘important to the happiness of mankind? Surely by that method, which, in every experimental science to which it has been applied, has signally increased the power and knowledge of our species,--by that method for which our new philosopher! would substitute quibbles scarcely worthy of the barbarous respondents and opponents of the middle ages,--by the method of induction,--by observing the present state of the world,--by assiduously studying the history of past ages,--by sifting the evidence of facts,--by carefully combining and contrasting those which are authentic,--by generalising with judgment and diffidence,--by perpetually bringing the theory which we have constructed to the test of new facts,--by correcting, or altogether abandoning it, according as those new facts prove it to be partially or fundamentally unsound. Proceeding thus,--patiently, diligently, candidly, we may hope to form a system as far inferior in pretension to that which we have been examining, and as far superior to it in real utility, as the prescriptions of a great physician, varying with every stage of every malady, and with the constitution of every patient, to the pill of the advertising quack, which is to cure all human beings, in all climates, of all diseases.’”