The end of this period,moreover,was bringing him into closer contact with English political life.Bentham,as we have seen,rejected the whole Jacobin doctrine of abstract rights.So long as English politics meant either the acceptance of a theory which,for whatever reason,gathered round it no solid body of support,or,on the other hand,the acceptance of an obstructive and purely conservative principle,to which all reform was radically opposed,Bentham was necessarily in an isolated position.He had 'nothing particular to say'to Fox.He was neither a Tory nor a Jacobin,and cared little for the paralysed Whigs.He allied himself therefore,so far as he was allied with any one,with the philanthropic agitators who stood,like him,outside the lines of party.The improvement of prisons was not a party question.
A marked change --not always,I think,sufficiently emphasised by historians --had followed the second war.The party-divisions began to take the form which was to become more marked as time went on.The old issues between Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin no longer existed.Napoleon had become the heir of the revolution.
The great struggle was beginning in which England commanded the ocean,while the Continent was at the feet of the empire.For a time the question was whether England,too,should be invaded.After Trafalgar invasion became hopeless.The Napoleonic victories threatened to exclude English trade from the Continent:while England retorted by declaring that the Continent should trade with nobody else.Upon one side the war was now appealing to higher feelings.It was no longer a crusade against theories,but a struggle for national existence and for the existence of other nations threatened by a gigantic despotism.Men like Wordsworth and Coleridge,who could not be Anti-Jacobins,had been first shocked by the Jacobin treatment of Switzerland,and now threw themselves enthusiastically into the cause which meant the rescue of Spain and Germany from foreign oppression.The generous feeling which had resented the attempt to forbid Frenchmen to break their own bonds,now resented the attempts of Frenchmen to impose bonds upon others.The patriotism which prompted to a crusade had seemed unworthy,but the patriotism which was now allied with the patriotism of Spain and Germany involved no sacrifice of other sentiment.
Many men had sympathised with the early revolution,not so much from any strong sentiment of evils at home as from a belief that the French movement was but a fuller development of the very principles which were partially embodied in the British Constitution.They had no longer to choose between sympathising with the enemies of England and sympathising with the suppressors of the old English liberties.
But,on the other hand,an opposite change took place.The disappearance of the Jacobin movement allowed the Radicalism of home growth to display itself more fully.English Whigs of all shades had opposed the war with certain misgivings.They had been nervously anxious not to identify themselves with the sentiments of the Jacobins.They desired peace with the French,but had to protest that it was not for love of French principles.That difficulty was removed.There was no longer a vision --such as Gillray had embodied in his caricatures --of a guillotine in St.James's Street:or of a Committee of Public Safety formed by Fox,Paine,and Horne Tooke.Meanwhile Whig prophecies of the failure of the war were not disproved by its results.Though the English navy had been victorious,English interference on the Continent had been futile.Millions of money had been wasted:and millions were flowing freely.
Even now we stand astonished at the reckless profusion of the financiers of the time.And what was there to show for it?The French empire,so far from being destroyed,had been consolidated.If we escaped for the time,could we permanently resist the whole power of Europe?When the Peninsular War began we had been fighting,except for the short truce of Amiens,for sixteen years;and there seemed no reason to believe that the expedition to Portugal in 1808would succeed better than previous efforts.The Walcheren expedition of 1809was a fresh proof of our capacity for blundering.Pauperism was still increasing rapidly,and forebodings of a war with America beginning to trouble men interested in commerce.The English Opposition had ample texts for discourses;and a demand for change began to spring up which was no longer a refection of foreign sympathies.An article in the Edinburgh of January 1808,which professed to demonstrate the hopelessness of the Peninsular War,roused the wrath of the Tories.The Quarterly Review was started by Canning and Scott,and the Edinburgh,in return,took a more decidedly Whig colour.
The Radicals now showed themselves behind the Whigs.Cobbett,who had been the most vigorous of John Bull Anti-Jacobins,was driven by his hatred of the tax-gatherer and the misery of the agricultural labourers into the opposite camp,and his Register became the most effective organ of Radicalism.demands for reform began again to make themselves heard in parliament.Sir Francis Burdett,who had sat at the feet of Horne Tooke,and whose return with Cochrane for Westminster in 1807was the first parliamentary triumph of the reformers,proposed a motion on 15th June 1809,which was,of course,rejected,but which was the first of a series,and marked the revival of a serious agitation not to cease till the triumph of 1832.
Meanwhile Bentham,meditating profoundly upon the Panopticoin,had at last found out that he had begun at the wrong end.His reasoning had been thrown away upon the huge dead weight of official indifference,or worse than indifference.Why did they not accept the means for producing the greatest happiness of the greatest number?Because statesmen did not desire the end.