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Subject Area: Political Theory
Subject Area: Law

Bentham to Mordvinoff. - 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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Bentham to Mordvinoff.

“I am on the point of completing a Constitutional Code, having for its object the bettering this wicked world, by covering it over with Republics. I send you this notice out of mere magnanimity, that, in your situation of ‘President pour les Affaires civiles et ecclesiastiques,’ which it delights me, were it only for the sake of Russia, to see you filling, you may have time to establish a cordon sanitaire all round your imperial master’s dominions, as many lines deep as your Field Marshal may think sufficient, the men touching one another all the way; all which, however, I tell you in confidence, will be of no avail against the copies which I shall enclose in bombshells, and shoot over their heads. But, my dear friend, how come you to be so cruelly tardy in letting me know of your having received the quantity of stuff I sent you? My hypothesis was either, that you found a use for it in your peech, or that you had been sent to Siberia for its having been directed to you.

“This brings me to Speranski, to whom I sent a quantity of the same matter at the same time. He has had, likewise, the barbarity to leave me in the same ignorance. True it is, I never saw him; equally true it is, his sentiments, in regard to my stuff, are known to me by a letter of his to Dumont, which I have in my holy keeping, and which, when I am in a bragging mood, I produce every now and then to some young friends: yours will now be added to it.

“You and he, I rejoice to hear, are in habits, as well as on good terms, which is more than what (as I have read somewhere in a book) all colleagues are, in a government such as yours—not to speak of other governments.

“I forget to which of you it was that I sent, along with my trash, one humble petition, for a copy of what has been officially published in your country in relation to the state of the laws, since the establishment for that purpose was set on foot. I cannot think, but that two such mighty mighty men, as you and he, could contrive, between you, to steal a copy for such a purpose, without much danger of being whipt. Or what, if the magnanimous were magnanimous enough to send me one? I would not return it to him, as I did his ring. I have no use for his rings. I might have many uses for his laws. As to Rosenkampf, he is gone (I hear) to the dogs. He could not (I have a notion) have been more appropriately disposed of.

“But the abuses he discovered—Speranski, I mean, not Rosenkampf—ay, if one could but see some account of them, that, indeed, would be worth a Jew’s eye: not but that, if the sinister profit were all the mischief, I could stake my life upon sending him, in return, an indisputably true statement of some dozen times as much sinister profit, made, though by so much safer and irresistible means, in the same space of time here. Seriously though, I should now absolutely despair, but that here and there, in my Constitutional Code, an arrangement might be found applicable with no less advantage in your monarchy than in my Utopia.

“I am glad to hear your master has turned Philo-Botanist at last. I have myself been one above these sixty years: though, except as above, I cannot afford to receive anything from him, there are some things I can afford to give him. Amongst them I have found four seeds, which I send by Mr Fleury, of the American Cherimoya, a fruit from Peru, said by several, who have eat of it lately, to be the most delicious known. I showed Mr Fleury a plant I have just reared from two seeds of the same parcel: but as to the fruit, there can be little, if any, hopes of our ever seeing it raised in England. Even Petersburg would be better suited, on account of the heat of the summer and the comparative clearness of the sky at all times.

“I send you, by this conveyance, a little Republican squib—avant courrier of my Code. It may serve to turn into merriment the gravity of one of the councils which have the benefit of your Presidence. I am afraid your master is too serious to laugh at such things. He would be more inclined, perhaps, to write to brother George to stop the publication.”