Note 17 — THE MAIN-CHANCE

Mr. Bentham proposes to new-model the penal code, on the principle of a cool and systematic calculation of consequences. Yet of all philosophers, the candidates for Panopticons and Penitentiaries are the most short-sighted and refractory. Punishment has scarcely any effect upon them. Thieves steal under the scaffold; and if a person’s previous feelings and habits do not prevent his running the risk of the gallows, assuredly the fear of consequences, or his having already escaped it, with all the good resolutions he may have made on the occasion, will not prevent his exposing himself to it a second time. It is true, most people have a natural aversion to being hanged. The perseverance of culprits in their evil courses seems a fatality, which is strengthened by the prospect of what is to follow. Mr. Bentham argues that all ‘men act from calculation, even madmen reason.’ So far it may be true that the world is not unlike a great Bedlam, or answers to the title of an old play—‘A Mad World, my masters!’ This is our world, but not his. Life, on looking back to it, too often resembles a disturbed dream, which does not infer its having been guided by reason in its progress.