The preceding article was written, and was actually in types, when a letter from Mr. Bentham appeared in the newspapers, importing that, “though he had furnished the Westminster Review with some _memoranda_ respecting ‘the greatest happiness principle,’ he had nothing to do with the remarks on our former article.” We are truly happy to find that this illustrious man had so small a share in a performance which, for his sake, we have treated with far greater lenity than it deserved. The mistake, however, does not in the least affect any part of our arguments; and we have therefore thought it unnecessary to cancel or cast anew any of the foregoing pages. Indeed, we are not sorry that the world should see how respectfully we were disposed to treat a great man, even when we considered him as the author of a very weak and very unfair attack on ourselves. We wish, however, to intimate to the actual writer of that attack that our civilities were intended for the author of the “Preuves Judiciaires,” and the “Defence of Usury”--and not for him. We cannot conclude, indeed, without expressing a wish--though we fear it has but little chance of reaching Mr. Bentham--that he would endeavour to find better editors for his compositions. If M. Dumont had not been a _rédacteur_ of a different description from some of his successors, Mr. Bentham would never have attained the distinction of even giving his name to a sect. UTILITARIAN THEORY OF GOVERNMENT. (1) (_Edinburgh, Review_, October 1829.) We {92}have long been of opinion that the Utilitarians have owed all their influence to a mere delusion--that, while professing to have submitted their minds to an intellectual discipline of peculiar severity, to have discarded all sentimentality, and to have acquired consummate skill in the art of reasoning, they are decidedly inferior to the mass of educated men in the very qualities in which they conceive themselves to excel. They have undoubtedly freed themselves from the dominion of some absurd notions. But their struggle for intellectual emancipation has ended, as injudicious and violent struggles for political emancipation too often end, in a mere change of tyrants. Indeed, we are not sure that we do not prefer the venerable nonsense which holds prescriptive sway over the ultra-Tory to the upstart dynasty of prejudices and sophisms by which the revolutionists of the moral world have suffered themselves to be enslaved. The Utilitarians have sometimes been abused as intolerant, arrogant, irreligious,--as enemies of literature, of the fine arts, and of the domestic charities. (1) Westminster Review, (XXII. Art. 16,) on the Strictures of the Edinburgh Review (XCVIII. Art. 1) on the Utilitarian Theory of Government, and the “Greatest Happiness Principle.”