Hume's mission was to undermine settled fallacies, and to scatter doubt among conventional certitudes; and this loosening of foundations prepared the way for a bolder political projector, who delivered his frontal attack in disdain of the philosopher's warnings. Political projectors, says the cautious Hume, are pernicious if they have power, and ridiculous if they want it. Bentham was quite confident that if he could only get the power he could radically change for the better the circumstances of a people in any part of the world, by legislation on the principles of Utility; and he was sure that character is indefinitely modifiable by circumstances. That human nature is constantly altering with, and adapting itself to, the environment, is an undeniable truth; but in the moral as in the physical world the natural changes occupy long periods, and to stir the soil hastily may produce a catastrophe. The latter result actually followed in France; while in England the doctrine of the unlimited power of legislation, to be used for the greatest happiness of the greatest number, and wielded by a sovereign State according to the dictates of public opinion, was met by alarm, suspicion, and protracted opposition. It is the habit of Englishmen to admit no proposition, however clear and convincing, until they discover what the propounder intends to do with it. Yet it will be seen that Bentham's plans of reform, if not his principles, did suggest, and to some extent shape, the main direction of judicial and administrative changes during the nineteenth century, though with some consequences that he neither anticipated nor desired. He thought that the State might be invested with power to modify society, and yet might be strictly controlled in the exercise of that power. He might have foreseen, what has actually happened, that the State, once established on a democratic basis, would exercise the power and disregard his carefully drawn limitations. A tendency toward State Socialism he would have detested above all things; and yet that is the direction inevitably taken by supreme authority when the responsibility for the greatest happiness of the greatest number is imposed upon it by popular demand.