Jeremy Bentham, an English juridical philosopher, born in London, Feb. 15, 1748, died in Queen-square place, Westminster, his residence for 40 years previously, June 6, 1832. His great-grandfather, a prosperous London pawnbroker of the time of Charles II., had acquired some landed property, which remained in the family. His grandfather was a London attorney; his father, who followed the same profession, was a shrewd man of business, and added considerably to his patrimony, principally by fortunate purchases of land and leases. These London Benthams were probably an offshoot from an ancient Yorkshire family of the same name, which boasted a bishop among its members; but Jeremy did not trouble himself much to trace his genealogy beyond the pawnbroker. His mother, Alicia Grove, was the daughter of a retired Andover shopkeeper. Jeremy Bentham, the eldest and for nine years the only child of this marriage, was for the first 16 years of his life exceedingly puny, small, and feeble. At the same time he exhibited a remarkable precocity, which greatly stimulated the pride as well as affection of his father. He had a decided taste for music, and at five years of age acquired a knowledge of musical notes and learned to play the violin.

At four or earlier, having previously learned to write, he was initiated into Latin grammar, and in his seventh year entered Westminster school. Meanwhile he was taught French by a private master at home, and at seven read Telemaque, a book which strongly impressed him. Learning to dance was a much more serious undertaking; he was so weak in the legs as to make it laborious and painful. Young as he was, he acquired distinction at Westminster as a fabricator of Latin and Greek verses, the great end and aim of the instruction given there. When 12 years old he was entered as a commoner at Queen's college, Oxford, where he spent the next three years. The young Bentham had not been happy at school. He had suffered from the tyranny of the elder boys, though he escaped the discipline of corporal punishment, and was but once forced into a boxing match. Neither was he happy at Oxford. Though regarded by others and taught from infancy to regard himself as a prodigy, he was yet exceedingly diffident, and to the highest degree sensitive of any slight or neglect - peculiarities which, as well as his high estimate of himself, clung to him through life.

His tutor was morose, the college dull, while his sensitive pride suffered much from the mingled penurious-ness and meddlesomeness of his father, who kept him on very short allowance, and who, in spite of all his affection for his son, of whose ultimate distinction he had formed the highest hopes, failed entirely to comprehend the boy's delicacy and diffidence, and never gained either his confidence or his love. His mother had died two years before he entered the university, leaving him an only brother, afterward Sir Samuel Bentham. Several years after his father married for a second wife the widow of a clergyman, already the mother of two boys, of whom the eldest, Charles Abbott, was afterward speaker of the house of commons, and finally raised to the peerage as Lord Colchester. There were no children by this second marriage, yet it was a source of great vexation to Bentham, to whom his stepmother was far from being agreeable. Though very uncomfortable at Oxford, Bentham went through the exercises of the college with credit and even with some distinction. Some Latin verses of his on the accession of George III. attracted considerable attention as the production of one so young.

Into the disputations which formed a part of the college exercises he entered with much satisfaction; but he never felt at home in the university, of which he retained the most unfavorable recollection. In his old age he seldom spoke either of Westminster school or Oxford but with asperity and disgust. In 1703, while not yet 16, he took his degree of A. B. Shortly after he commenced eating his commons in Lincoln's Inn, but went back to Oxford to hear Blackstone's lectures. To these lectures he listened without the presumption, at that time, to set himself up as a critic, yet not without some occasional feelings of protest. Returning to London, he attended as a student the court of king's bench, then presided over by Lord Mansfield, of whom he continued for some years not only a great admirer, but a profound worshipper. Among the advocates, Dunning's clearness, directness, and precision most impressed him. He took his degree of A. M. at the age of 18, the youngest graduate, so says Dr. Southwood Smith, that had been known at either of the universities; and in 1772 he was called to the bar. Bentham's grandfather had been a Jacobite; his father, educated in the same opinions, had, like others of that party, transferred his sentiments of loyalty to the reigning family.

The young Bentham had breathed from infancy, at home, at school, at college, and in the courts, an atmosphere conservative and submissive to authority. Yet in the progress of his law studies, beginning to contrast the law as it was with law such as he conceived it might be and ought to be, he came gradually to abandon the position of a submissive and admiring student, anxious only to make of the law a ladder by which to rise to wealtli and eminence, for that of a sharp critic, an indignant denouncer, a would-be reformer. His father, who fondly hoped to see him lord chancellor, had some cases in nurse for him on his admission to the bar, and took every pains to push him forward. But it was all to no purpose. His temperament, no less than his moral and intellectual constitution, wholly disqualified him for success as a practising lawyer. He soon abandoned with disgust, to the infinite disappointment of his father, all attempts in that line. With a feeling in the highest degree distressing of having failed to fulfil the great expectations formed of him by his friends, and entertained by himself, he continued for years, to borrow his own words, "to pine in solitude and penury in his Lincoln's Inn garret," living on a very narrow income, drawn partly from some legacies, and partly from a small property conveyed to him by his father at the time of his second marriage.

Still, however, he continued a diligent student and serious thinker, amusing himself with chemistry, then a new science though mainly devoted to jurisprudence, but rather as it should bo than as it was. The writings of Hume and Helvetius had led him to adopt utility as the basis of morals, and especially of legislation; and already he began to write down his ideas on this subject - the commencement of a collection of materials for and fragments of a projected but never completed code, which, for the whole remainder of his long life, furnished him with regular and almost daily employment. In the controversy between Great Britain and her American colonies, which became at this time a leading topic of public discussion, Bentham did not take any great interest. His tory education, and his idea of the law as it was, led him, un-warped, as he says, by connection or hopes, to favor the government side. In the arguments on behalf of the colonies, used on either side of the water, he saw nothing to change his mind. "The whole of the case," to borrow his own statement, " was founded on the assumption of natural rights, claimed without the slightest evidence of their existence, and supported by vague and declamatory generalities." Had the argument been placed on the ground of the impossibility of good government at such a distance, and the benefits that would accrue to both parties from a separation - grounds more in accordance with his ideas of the true basis of laws - it would then have attracted his attention.

As it was, he had some hand, though small, in a book, "Review of the Acts of the 13th Parliament," published in 1775, by a friend of his, one John Lind, in defence of Lord North's policy. The next year he ventured to print a book of his own, under the title of "A Fragment on Government." He had contemplated a critical commentary on the commentaries of Blackstone, then lately published; but in this piece he confined himself to what Blackstone says of the origin of government. Rejecting the fiction of an original contract, suggested by Locke and adopted by Blackstone, he found government sufficiently warranted and justified by its utility; while in place of conformity to the laws of God and nature, which appeared to him to rest too much in vague assertion and opinion, he suggested "the greatest happiness of the greatest number " as a precise and practicable test of right and wrong, both in morals and laws. This pamphlet, for it was scarcely more, appeared anonymously, and attracted at first some attention.

It was even ascribed to Mansfield, to Camden, and to Dunning. The impatient pride of Bentham's father having led him to betray the secret of its authorship, the public curiosity, which had been aroused by the work, not in its character of a philosophical treatise but of a personal attack, speedily subsided. A second pamphlet, published in 1778, a criticism, though on the whole a friendly one, on some amendments to the law of prison discipline, prepared in the form of a printed bill, with a preface by Mr. Eden (afterward Lord Auckland), assisted by Blackstone, did not attract much more attention. He was also disappointed in an attempt which he made at this time to be appointed secretary of the commission sent out by Lord North to propose terms to the revolted American colonies. Meanwhile his writings, though neglected at home, yet served to make him known at Paris, whence he received letters addressed to him in the character of a philosopher and reformer from D'Alembert, Morellet, Chastellux, Bris-sot, and others. They also gained for him the acquaintance and friendship of Lord Shel-burne, who in 1781 paid him a visit in his Lincoln's Inn garret.

After much urging, Shelburne at length prevailed upon him to become a visitor at his country seat of Bo-wood. The ice once broken, Bentham became a frequent inmate there, and a great favorite, especially with Lady Shelburne. He was indeed more noticed by the ladies, whose musical performances he accompanied on the violin, than by Camden, Barre, and other great men of the day whom he met there. Still this introduction to Bowood was a great thing for Bentham. It raised him, as he himself expressed it, from the "bottomless pit of humiliation" into which he was fast sinking, and inspired him with new confidence in himself and new zeal for his favorite studies. He had also the additional excitement of falling in love. A very young lady whom ho met there, whose frank simplicity was in strong contrast with the stiffness and prudery which was the prevailing style at Bowood, made an impression on his heart, which, though it did not result in marriage, yet lasted through life. Already before his acquaintance with Lord Shelburne he had printed part of an introduction to a penal code which he had undertaken to construct; but the unfavorable or lukewarm opinion of his undertaking expressed by Camden and Dunning, to whom Shelburne had shown the sheets, and by some other friends whom he consulted, joined to his ill success in finishing the work to his mind, long kept this printed fragment unpublished. - In 1785 he left England on a visit to his younger brother, then employed, with the rank of colonel in the Russian army, in the service of Prince Potemkin, in an abortive scheme, of which Krikov on the Don was the seat, for introducing English methods in manufactures and agriculture into that barbarous region.

Furnished with funds by a maternal uncle, Bentham proceeded by way of Paris, his third visit thither, across the Alps to Leghorn. There he embarked in an English ship for Smyrna, and from Smyrna sailed in a Turkish vessel to Constantinople. After passing several weeks in that city, he travelled by land through Bulgaria, Wallachia, Moldavia, and the Ukraine, to his destination in White Russia. Here he spent a year and a half, living most of the time a very solitary life, occupied amid many annoyances and privations, among which was want of books, with his favorite studies. Tired out at last, in the absence of his brother, detained at Kherson by an expected attack from the Turks, he started for home by way of Poland, Germany, and Holland, and reached England in the spring of 1788. While residing at Krikov he had written his "Letters on Usury," occasioned by the report that the legal rate of interest was to be lowered. He sent the manuscript to England; his father caused it to be printed while he still remained absent, and it proved with the English public the most successful of his works. Renewing his visits to Bowood, he there met Romilly, whom he had known slightly before, and with whom he now formed an intimacy which lasted as long as Romilly lived.

He now also first formed the acquaintance of the Swiss Dumont, who had been domesticated at Lord Shelburne's during his absence. Bentham had become so much disgusted at his failure to attract attention in England that he had adopted the idea of publishing in French, and had made some essays in that language. Romilly had shown some of these French sketches to Dumont, who, very much impressed by them, offered his services to correct and rewrite them with a view to publication. Another friend of Bentham's, with whom he had kept up a correspondence while absent in Russia, had written to him of Paley's success in applying the principle of utility to morals, and had urged him to set to work to complete some of his own treatises, or at least to publish the already printed part of his introduction to his unfinished penal code. These sheets, after lying in hand for eight years, were now at length published under the title of "An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation," but they attracted very little attention. Dumont, however, who about this time went to Paris and became connected with Mirabeau, aided to spread Bentham's reputation, and in the Courrier de Provence, of which he was one of the editors, gave publicity to some of his manuscripts.

Meanwhile Bentham, with the idea of aiding the deliberations of the states general, then about to meet, drew up and printed, but did not publish, his "Parliamentary Tactics," and with the same object in view prepared and printed a " Draft of a Code for the Organization of the Judicial Establishment in France;" services which the national assembly recognized, by conferring on him the citizenship of France, in a decree (Aug. 23, 1792) in which his name was included with those of Priestley, Paine, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Mackintosh, Anach arsis Clootz, Pestalozzi, Washington, Klopstock, Kosciuszko, and several others. In this character of French citizen Bentham next year addressed to the national convention a new pamphlet, "Emancipate your Colonies," the first work which laid dowm the principle of ranking colonies as integral parts of the mother country. - While residing at Krikov, Bentham's attention had been attracted by an architectural idea of his brother's, who was a person of great mechanical genius, though like himself given to running from one thing to another without stopping to finish anything. This idea was that of a circular building so constructed as that from the centre all the inmates could be overlooked.

The younger Bentham had attempted to realize it with a dew to the oversight of his Russian workmen. The elder brother seized upon it, in connection with his study of penal legislation, as applicable to prison discipline. He gave to this building the name of panopticon, and while still in Russia wrote a series of letters in explanation of its construction and its uses. These letters, after his return, were printed at Dublin by the Irish parliament, the adoption of his prison discipline scheme having been proposed there. In 1791 they were brought out at London, with additions, under the title of "Panopticon, or the Inspection House." In 1792 Bentham's father died, leaving him the family mansion in Queen's-square place, Westminster, where he chiefly resided for the rest of his life, and a freehold and leasehold property of between £500 and £600 a year. He left about an equal amount to the younger brother, who by this time had returned from Russia, and had zealously entered with his elder brother into the perfecting of the panopticon, with a view to applying it to prison discipline.

Being now possessed of means, Bentham, in conjunction with his brother, submitted plans to Mr. Pitt for taking charge of 1,000 convicts, in a building to be erected for that purpose at the expense of the government, but - upon certain conditions, and at a certain rate of pay for each convict - to be under the entire control of the Benthams for their joint lives. Mr. Pitt, Mr. Dundas, Mr. Rose, and others, entered with much enthusiasm into the idea, and in 1794 an act of parliament authorized the contract. The Benthams obtained an advance from the treasury, and spent several thousand pounds of borrowed money on the strength of this arrangement, involving themselves thereby in great embarrassments, but from some mysterious cause could not get any further advances, nor a signature of the contract. The ministers, however, continued favorable, and made use of a parliamentary committee in 1797 to urge the completion of the contract, when at length the hitherto mysterious delay was explained, and the affair again brought to a standstill, by the refusal of the king to sign a treasury warrant for a sum of money needed to perfect the title to the land on which the building was to be erected, and for which considerable expenditures had already been made.

George III. had taken an antipathy to Bentham, partly, as Bentham believed, from having looked into his treatise on the organization of the French judiciary, and partly because he had discovered him to be the author of two newspaper articles signed "Anti-Machi-avel," and published in 1787, attacking the policy of a war with Russia, which the king had much at heart. Thirteen years more were spent in vain solicitations, till finally, in 1811, an act of parliament annulled the contract, and provided for the erection of a prison on a different plan, and at much greater expense to the public. In order to get a conveyance of the land, the imperfect title of which stood in Bentham's name, this act provided for an award on the question of damages, under which the Benthams three years after received the sum of £32,000. It may well be supposed that Bentham's experience in this matter could not but embitter him against the existing management of public concerns. - Meanwhile Dumont, having returned to England, had obtained from Bentham all his manuscripts, and had applied himself with zeal to the task of extracting from them and his printed works a vivid and popular statement, in French, of Bentham's system and ideas.

This labor of love Dumont performed with remarkable success; and the first fruits of it, published at Paris in 1802, during the peace of Amiens, under the title of Traites de legislation civile et penale - a publication in which Talleyrand took a great interest, offering himself, if necessary, to bear the whole expense - speedily made Bentham known and famous throughout the continent of Europe as the philosopher of jurisprudence. In England, too, he acquired some new disciples and cooperators. Brougham joined Romilly in acknowledging his genius, and accepting many of his ideas. In 1808 he formed the acquaintance of James Mill, who, next to Dumont, did most to diffuse his doctrines. Mill lived for several years, a large part of the time, in Bentham's house, who still labored away some six or eight hours daily on his codes, stopping, however, as occasion offered, to launch forth vehement attacks on the English system of jurisprudence. Such were his "Scotch Reform compared with English Non-Reform," published in 1808, and his "Elements of the Art of Packing as applied to Special Juries," printed in 1808, but which he was dissuaded by Romilly from publishing, lest it might expose him to a prosecution for libel.

Some difficulty was even met with in finding a publisher for the "Rationale of Judicial Evidence," edited by Mill from Bentham's manuscripts, lest that, too, especially the part of it assailing the whole technical method of English judicial procedure, might be regarded as a libel on the administration of justice. This work, indeed, did not appear till 1827, when it was published in 5 vols. 8vo. Confirmed, meanwhile, by his growing reputation, in his always strong interior faith in himself, Bentham became anxious to bring out, not as a mere draft, but as an actual body of law, his ideal code, on which he had been laboring all his life, but which yet existed only in his brain and in an immense mass of fragmentary manuscripts. He had hoped, on the strength of promises from Miranda, to become the legislator of Venezuela, to which country he had even thoughts of removing. But Miranda's project failed. In 1811 - Dumont having in that year brought out a new French work, edited from his manuscripts, Theorie des peines et des recompenses - he addressed an elaborate letter to President Madison, offering, upon the receipt of a letter importing the president's approbation, and, as far as depended upon him, acceptance of his proposition, to forthwith set about drawing up for the use of the United States, or such of them as might accept it, "a complete body of law; in one word, a pannomion, or as much of it as the life and health of a man, whose age wanted little of four and sixty, might allow of," asking and expecting no reward beyond the employment and the honor of it.

This letter, besides a sketch of his plan, which embraced not merely the text of a code, but a perpetual running commentary of reasons, included also a vigorous attack upon the existing system of English and American jurisprudence, and an answer to certain anticipated objections, both to the plan and to himself as legislator. Mr. Brougham wrote at the same time to some American friends, expressing his opinion that no person in Europe was so capable as Bentham of such a task. No answer had been received to this letter when, in 1814, Mr. Gallatin was a little while in England, in his capacity of commissioner, to treat for peace. Not only had Gallatin received from Dumont, who was his countryman, a presentation copy of the Traites de legislation, but he had, as he told Bentham; who had an interview with him, been his disciple for 25 years, in consequence of having read, soon after its publication, a copy of the " Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation," put into his hands by Col. Burr. We may mention by the way that Burr himself, when in England six years before, had obtained an introduction to Bentham from Dumont, and had even passed a considerable time under his roof - one object of Bentham doubtless being to avail himself of Burr's knowledge of American affairs.

In consequence of this interview with Gallatin, Bentham was led, in a letter to Governor Snyder of Pennsylvania, enclosing a printed copy of his letter to Madison and a letter of introduction from Gallatin, to renew his offer of himself as a codifier. At length, in 1816, Madison returned a courteous reply to Bentham's letter of 1811, referring to the intervening war as an apology for his long silence, stating that a compliance with Bentham's proposals was "not within the scope of his proper functions," suggesting some obstacles to the proposed codification, and objections to it, but fully admitting the desirability of such a reform. This letter was conveyed to London by J. Q. Adams, appointed American minister to England, and who became during his residence there intimate with Bentham. When Adams returned home in 1817, to assume the office of secretary of state, he became the bearer of a circular letter, addressed by Bentham to the governors of the states, accompanied by copies of the letter to Madison, and a renewal of his offer of himself as legislator.

Bentham's proposals, which he followed up by a series of short letters on the same subject, addressed to the people of the states, were laid before the legislatures of Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. He received appreciative letters from Governors Snyder and Plumer of those states, but nothing further resulted. Several years later, Edward Livingston sent him a copy of his draft of a penal code for Louisiana, with strong expressions of admiration for his genius, and acknowledgments of the instruction received from the study of his works. Meanwhile, in 1814, Bentham had made an offer of his legislative aid to the emperor of Russia, in the language of which country two translations had appeared of the Traites de legislation, one of them, it was said, by the special procurement of the government. The emperor replied in a letter written by his own hand, in which he promised to submit Bentham's proposal to the commission at work on a code for the empire. He sent at the same time a valuable ring, which Bentham returned, sending with it a second letter, in which he gave reasons why nothing could be expected to come of the reference of his proposals to a commission which, in one shape or another, had been in session for more than a century without any result.

In the expectation that Prince Adam Czartoryski, who was one of his disciples, would be appointed regent of Poland, he had hopes of legislating for that country; but another person was appointed, and this hope failed. The revolutions in 1820, which established liberal governments in the Spanish peninsula, gave Bentham new and stronger hopes. Dumont's compilations had been translated into Spanish, and were well known to the leading liberals of Spain and Spanish America. The Portuguese cortes caused them to be translated into Portuguese. In 1822 he published also his "Codification Proposal," addressed to all nations professing liberal opinions, tendering his services as legislator, and arguing in favor of a code emanating from a single mind. He was consulted on the Spanish penal code, on which in 1822 he published some letters addressed to the conde de Toreflo; and similar applications were made to him from Spanish America. But the downfall of liberalism in the peninsula, and the protracted civil wars in the late Spanish colonies, disappointed his expectations in that quarter. - While thus seeking the office of legislator, another idea had engrossed much of his attention.

He had taken a great interest in the educational system of Bell and Lancaster, and in 1817 he had published, under the title of "Chrestomathia," a proposal to apply this system to the higher branches of education. There was even a scheme for erecting a building in his garden on the panopticon system, in which the experiment was to be tried; but, like so many other of his plans, it did not go on. - Though Bentham had always boasted of being a man of no party, as well as of all countries, he had come at length to occupy at home the position of a party chief. He espoused with characteristic zeal and enthusiasm the ideas of the radicals, who now first appeared as a political party. He went indeed the full length, not merely of republicanism, but on many points of democracy. He wrote pamphlets and drew up plans in behalf of parliamentary reform and other movements of the radicals, and became a sort of spiritual head of the party. It was he who furnished the money to set up the "Westminster Review," established in 1823 as the organ of the radicals. The political editor was Mr. Bowring (afterward Sir John Bowring), with whom Bentham had formed an acquaintance through their mutual interest in the Spanish liberal movement.

That acquaintance speedily ripened into a very close intimacy and friendship, which lasted to the end of Bentham's life. His connection with the radicals, and his vehement attacks on law abuses and the lawyers, had rather cooled off Lord Brougham, but in his place Bentham acquired a new disciple and pupil in the person of Daniel O'Connell. Mr. Peel, in his movements in the house of commons for the amendment of the criminal law, seemed to be starting in Bentham's direction. Bentham even entertained the hope that he might persuade the duke of Wellington, with whom he corresponded, to undertake, in addition to Catholic emancipation, those reforms in the administration of justice which Cromwell had attempted, but in which the lawyers had baffled him. - The acknowledgment of his genius by the most eminent men of his times, his world-wide reputation, and the share he was now taking in the actual movement of affairs, more than made up for the sneers, to which, indeed, he paid no attention, cast at him as a visionary schemer; and the satisfaction and even gayety of the latter part of his life formed a strong contrast with the gloom of his youth and early manhood. In his last ten years he seldom left his own home, taking exercise in his garden.

He retained to the last his love of music, of pet animals, cats particularly, and of flowers, but spent regularly six or more hours a day in composition, employing generally two secretaries. He saw no company except at dinner. His hour of dining was 7; his table was delicately spread, but admission to it, though he generally had two or three guests, was only obtained as a particular favor. Dinner was followed by music on the organ. He was of a gay and lively temper, hopeful, enthusiastic, and in spirit young to the last. His last published work was his "Constitutional Code," of which a volume appeared in 1830. At the time of his death he was engaged with Bowring in an attempt to present his fundamental ideas in a more popular form. This work was published in 1834, after his death, under the title of "Deontology." Bentham gave a practical exemplification of his principles by bequeathing his body to his friend Dr. Southworth Smith, for the purpose of dissection. A collection of his works, in 11 vols. 8vo, published at Edinburgh under the supervision of Bowring, his executor, was completed in 1843. It includes, at the end, a memoir made up principally of letters and of Bentham's reminiscences, as noted down by Bowring, very badly put together, but containing a great deal of interesting matter.

Dumont, just before his own death, edited and published at Brussels, in 1828, a complete collection of his compilations from Bentham in 6 double volumes, demi-octavo. A translation into English by Richard Hildreth of the Traites de legislation was published at Boston in 1840, under the title of "Theory of Legislation." It is from this work (a translation of which, with some additions from Bentham's manuscripts, is included in Bowring's edition of Bentham's works) that the general reader will best obtain a knowledge of Bentham's system. - In his earlier writings, and in many of his pamphlets, Bentham expresses himself with great terseness and energy, but in his didactic works he often loses himself in parentheses, and protracts his sentences to a tedious length. In his later writings he sacrificed everything to precision, for which purpose he employed many new words, some of which, such as international, codify, codification, maximize, minimize, etc, have become permanent additions to the language.

His analysis of human nature, on which he based his system, can hardly rank him high as a metaphysician; his employment of the exhaustive method of reasoning frequently led him into-useless subdivisions and unnecessary refinements; but he had a very acute intellect, a thorough devotion to truth, and a strong spirit of benevolence, unwarped by any selfish or party views. Unawed by authority, he appealed to reason alone, and, having devoted his whole life to the study of jurisprudence, his works abound with suggestions and ideas as novel as they are just. "Nobody has been so much plundered as Bentham," said some one to Talleyrand. "True," he replied; "yet how rich he still is." In the improvements introduced of late years into the administration of the law, both in England and America, many of his suggestions have been followed, often without acknowledgment, or even knowledge perhaps, of the source whence they originated. There are many more of his ideas that may yet be put to use. The 4th part of his treatise on the penal code, as published by Dumont, of which the subject is the indirect means of preventing oflfences, contains a mine of wisdom, which legislative bodies might explore with advantage.