Luckily for the utilitarians, there was an answer to some of these practical problems in the new ‘science’ of economics. You can measure it all with money, what Bentham called the ‘only common measure in the nature of things’. Using money means you can find the zero point between pleasure and pain, he said. So Bentham plunged himself into all things economic, getting to know the pioneer economist David Ricardo and seeing the new economists as the intellectual force which would put his movement into practice.
Towards the end of his life he worried that people would think only the majority mattered if he used the phrase ‘the greatest number’. He also worried that people would think only money had any value – ‘a vulgar error’ he said. By 1831, just a few months before his death, he had carefully reformulated what he meant: the optimal goal is ‘provision of an equal quantity of happiness for everyone’. But that makes the calculations even more difficult to manage. Especially these days, when the happiest people in the world were shown to be the Mexicans (the poorest) and the most miserable are known to be the Americans (the richest).
What about beauty? If you convert morality into a pseudoscience, how do you recognize the great benefits of creativity? What about spirituality? Bentham had three pianos and loved music, but it was Cardinal Newman who pointed out that he had ‘not a spark of poetry in him’. This was confirmed in a letter the philosopher wrote to Lord Holland. The difference between poetry and prose, he explained, is that – with poetry, the lines don’t reach the margin.
This was the stick with which his critics have beaten him ever since. But he seems to have agreed with them with his great defence of the game of shove-halfpenny: ‘Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.’ Fripperies, fripperies.
IV
When Bentham died, on 6 June 1832, he was surrounded by 70,000 pieces of un-indexed paper. It was left to his adoring disciples to do something with them, the first task of the political utilitarians before they got down to measuring the world. And foremost among them was James Mill, one of those frighteningly dour and driven Scots pioneers who had driven the reputation of the country in the eighteenth century. From the time he met him in 1808, Mill was walking from his home in Pentonville to have supper with Bentham every evening. By 1810, the whole Mill family had moved into John Milton’s draughty old house, which happened to be in Bentham’s garden, but he soon discovered this was so unhealthy, he moved back out to Stoke Newington. It was over the question of whether he could accept Bentham’s subsidy of his rent that the two eventually fell out. Mill needed someone to hero worship, and he found it in Bentham. Bentham needed followers and a driven mind to organize them. It was a perfect match. Rigid and stern though he was, Mill signed his letters to Bentham as ‘your most faithful and fervent disciple’.
Soon the patterns of Bentham’s days were set. Dictating as he powered round the garden early in the morning, – ‘vibrating in my ditch’, as he put it. There were very occasional meetings with visitors during the day. Then dinner was served progressively later to allow for more work, as Mill, Bowring and Chadwick ministered to his needs. At the end of the day there was an hour-long ritual, after which he tied on his night cap, gave his watch to his secretary, who then read to him, and after a strange ritual with his window, he leapt into a special sleeping bag of his own design.
It was a disturbing time, and as well as parliamentary reform, the talk was of education. Mill and Francis Place even started a school, which collapsed by 1816, only to be replaced by plans to build another one in Bentham’s back garden. David Ricardo even donated £200 to build it, but Bentham began to realize what having his home overlooked constantly by schoolboys might mean, and the scheme was abandoned. Meanwhile, Mill was trying another educational experiment of his own – on his eldest son. His history of India, dry and stern, had appeared in 1817 and as a result he was made Assistant to the Examiner of Indian Correspondence, with a hefty salary of £800. By 1830, he had risen to the rank of Examiner. By then he had been using every spare moment from writing the book to concentrate on John Stuart Mill’s education.
And so began a strange intensive indoctrination, which involved starting to learn ancient Greek at the age of three, with gruelling studies from 6 to 9 am and from 10 am to 1 pm every day. There were no holidays. There was no birching, but his father’s sarcasm was almost as unpleasant. There was to be no mixing with other children – the young John wasn’t even allowed to go to church. What he learned in the morning, he was expected to pass on to his eight brothers and sisters in the afternoon.
John could not exactly love his father tenderly, he said later in his Autobiography. He described him as ‘the most impatient of men’, and we can imagine what that simple sentence conceals. For the rest of his life, he confessed that his conscience spoke with his father’s voice. But he certainly gave him a 25-year head start over his contemporaries, which must have helped him slip into the role of the great Liberal philosopher of the Victorian age. The only area of human knowledge that he was kept in ignorance of was Utilitarianism: this he had to choose for himself, his father decided. Mill Senior needn’t have worried. When he introduced the idea to his 16-year-old son in a series of ‘lectures’ as they walked along, demanding an essay on the subject the next morning which would be re-written and re-written again, John Stuart was so enthusiastic that he formed his own Utilitarian Society. James Mill’s friends and allies looked on in astonishment. There was no doubt that John was a prodigy, said Francis Place, but he would probably end up ‘morose and selfish’. Unfortunately, he was right.
In 1820, just before he left for a life-broadening trip to Paris, James Mill took his son for a grave walk in Hyde Park, and told him that his education would single him out, and this should not be a source of pride. It was because of his father’s efforts and nothing to do with him. In fact, it would be disgraceful if he didn’t know more than everybody else in those circumstances.
It is hard to warm to Mill senior, or any of the unemotional utilitarians. Bentham said that his sympathy for the many sprang out of his hatred for the few. James Mill despised passionate emotions, describing them as a kind of madness. He showed almost no feelings at all – except for one: he was quite unable to hide how much he disliked his wife. He ‘had scarcely any belief in pleasure’, according to his son. ‘He would sometimes say that if life was made what it might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth having: but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even for that possibility.’
James Mill lived only a few years longer than Bentham. The dust he inhaled in his regular journeys to his country cottage in Mickleham gave him a serious lung haemorrhage in 1835, and he died on 23 June the following year, leaving it to his son John as the second generation to carry the baton for Utilitarianism. It was John who gave the movement its name: he found it in a novel called Annals of the Parish about a Scottish clergyman who warns his parishioners not to abandon God and become ‘utilitarians’.
At 20 John Stuart Mill – regarded by both his father and Bentham as their spiritual heir – set to with a will to finish Bentham’s Rationale of Evidence for publication. ‘Mr Bentham had begun his treatise three times at considerable intervals, each time in a different manner, and each time without reference to the preceding,’ he wrote. He spent months unpicking his crabbed handwriting, chopping his sentences up into manageable parts, and finally sending five volumes off to the printers. The following year he had a nervous breakdown or a ‘mental convulsion’ as the Victorians put it. The breakdown took the form of a series of doubts about the whole Bentham legacy.
‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.
It was an important