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Subject Area: Political Theory
Subject Area: Law

Vicinage of a Jury. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 10 (Memoirs Part I and Correspondence) [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 10.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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Vicinage of a Jury.

“If Vicinage is at all a matter to be regarded in a Jury, it should be vicinage to the witnesses, not to the parties. Vicinage to the witnesses whose character for veracity is at stake; upon whose veracity depends the truth of the relation: not vicinage to the parties upon whose veracity nothing depends, since nothing is taken from their relation.”

I find, in the handwriting of Bentham’s father, (dated 1773,) “Verses by a young gentleman of Oxford, on the report of a design to make barracks for recruits of the building in St James’s Park, adjoining to the garden of Jeremiah Bentham, Esq., in which is erected a temple to the memory of Milton, whose house it was, and where he lived when he wrote his immortal poem of Paradise Lost.”

  • “Peace to these shades! where once our Milton trod—
  • Where yet his spirit reigns, a guardian god!
  • Far off let Mars his crimson standard rear—
  • Divine poetic peace inhabits here.
  • Where hireling troops, with wanton license stray,
  • Milton’s free spirit would disdain to stay.
  • Hence then, stern god! and other mansions choose:
  • Be these reserved for Milton and the Muse!”

No doubt Bentham was the author of these lines. The adjoining of the barracks to his hermitage troubled him to the end of his days. His studies were sometimes interrupted by the cries of the soldiers who were flogged in the barrack-yard; and I have often heard him speak with the utmost indignation and horror of that most unnecessary penalty, whose infliction was so frequently called to his mind by the sufferings of its victims.

From Bentham’s Commonplace Book for 1774-5, I copy the passages that follow:—

“Oh, Britain! Oh, my country! the object of my waking and my sleeping thoughts! whose love is my first labour and greatest joy—passing the love of woman, thou shalt bear me witness against these misruling men.

“I cannot buy, nor ever will I sell my countrymen. My pretensions to their favour are founded not on promises, but on past endeavours,—not on the having defended the popular side of a question for fat fees, but on the sacrifice of years of the prime of life—from the first dawnings of reflection to the present hour—to the neglect of the graces which adorn a private station; deaf to the calls of present interest, and to all the temptations of a lucrative profession.”