506 IV. THE NINETEENTH CENTURY " In England of his age." " He is the teacher of teachers." " To him it was given to discern more particularly those " truths with which existing doctrines were at variance."
- ' Bentham has been in this age and country the great ques-
" tioner of things established. It is by the influence of the " modes of thought with which his writings inoculated a con- " siderable number of thinking men, that the yoke of author- " ity has been broken, and innumerable opinions, formerly
- ' received on tradition as incontestable, are put upon their
" defence and required to give an account of themselves. " Who, before Bentham, dared to speak disrespectfully, in
- express terms, of the British Constitution or the English
law.? . . . Bentham broke the spell. It was not Bentham
- ' by his own writings ; it was Bentham through the minds
- and pens which those writings fed, — through the men in
- ' more direct contact with the world, into whom his spirit
" passed. If the superstition about ancestorial wisdom ; if
- ' the hardiest innovation is no longer scouted because it is
- an innovation, — establishments no longer considered
" sacred because they are establishments, — it will be found " that those who have accustomed the public mind to these
- ideas have learned them in Bentham's school, and that the
- assault on ancient institutions has been, and is, carried
- on for the most part with his weapons." ^
- Essay on Bentham, "Dissertations and Discussions" (Am. Ed.), vol.
i., pp. 355-358. John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography says: "During the winter of 1821-22, Mr. John Austin, with whom at the time of my visit to France my father had but lately become acquainted, kindly allowed me to read Roman law with him. [John Stuart Mill was then in his seventeenth year.] My father, notwithstanding his abhorrence of the chaos of barbarism called English law, had turned his thoughts towards the bar as on the whole less ineligible for me than any other profession; and these readings with Mr. Austin, who had made Ben- tham's best ideas his own, and added much to them from other sources and from his own mind, were not only a valuable introduction to legal studies, but an important portion of general education. With Mr. Aus- tin I read Heineccius on the Institutes, his Roman Antiquities, and part of his exposition of the Pandects, to which was added a considerable portion of Blackstone. It was at the commencement of these studies that my father, as a needful accompaniment to them, put into my hands Bentham's principal speculations, as interpreted to the Continent, and indeed to all the world, by Dumont, in the ' Traits de Legislation.' The reading of this book was an epoch in my life, one of the turning- points in my mental history" (chap. iii.). Further legal education Stuart Mill appears not to have received.
