[Sidenote: (_b_) The idea of Equality] [Sidenote: necessary to regulate sympathy;] The further influence required in the transition to utilitarianism is the idea of equality. The best expression of utilitarian doctrine followed soon after the assertion of the equal rights of men which signalised the politics of the end of last century in the French and American revolutions. Bentham was permeated by the spirit of this movement, however far he might be from accepting its abstractions about natural rights. In his hands, too, utilitarianism was a political rather than an ethical doctrine. "Everybody to count for one and nobody for more than one" follows naturally from the phrase, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number." Without this assertion of the necessity of an equal distribution, there is no safeguard against sympathy being restricted and partial in its operation. Indeed the feeling of sympathy in itself is naturally strongest towards those with whom one is in most frequent relation, or connected by numerous associative ties; and if left to itself, it might therefore be expected to give rise to the extended selfishness of class or family interest, only relieved by a spasmodic humanitarianism. This tendency is corrected by the dogma of human equality, which had been formulated as a juridical maxim in the Roman _Jus Gentium_, but afterwards passed into a political creed, and found vent in the literature of the eighteenth century and in the public events which marked its close. [Sidenote: influence of the idea on Bentham.] The change which this notion of human equality--passed through has been traced by Sir Henry Maine. "Where the Roman jurisconsult had written 'æquales sunt,' meaning exactly what he said, the modern civilian wrote 'all men are equal' in the sense of 'all men ought to be equal.' The peculiar Roman idea that natural law coexisted with civil law and gradually absorbed it, had evidently been lost sight of, or had become unintelligible, and the words that had at most conveyed a theory concerning the origin, composition, and development of human institutions, were beginning to express the sense of a great standing wrong suffered by mankind."[64] Now Bentham, however far he may have been from trusting to the system of 'natural law,'[65] was certainly not beyond the influence of the idea of human equality which it carried in its train; and, from his own point of view, he laboured to defend it. In assimilating this idea, utilitarianism has preserved one of the best results of the old "law of nature," without the ambiguity with which it had formerly been used,[66] if in a sense which admits of a somewhat narrow and abstract interpretation.