Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832)
Autograph letter and two autograph manuscripts, 1791
Autograph letter signed (‘Jeremy Bentham’) to [William Petty, 1st Marquess of Lansdowne], Hendon, Middlesex, ‘Thursday’ 24 February 1791, 9 pages, 213 x 185mm;
[enclosing:] Autograph manuscript, ‘Answers to the Questions relative to the Competition between Parliamentary and Military Duty under the English Law’, 11 pages;
[and:] Autograph manuscript, ‘Questions avec responses sur le rituel de la Chambre des Communes en Angleterre’, in French, the six ‘Questions’ in Lord Lansdowne’s hand, 14 pages.
Altogether 35 pages. Provenance: Marquesses of Lansdowne; their sale, Christie’s, Bowood House sale, 12 October 1994, lot 4.

Bentham responds to an enquiry from the Diet of Poland on the organisation of the English system of government. Prince Adam Kasimir Czartoryski (1731-1823), a member of the Diet of Poland, had written to Lord Lansdowne on 4 January 1791 [letter included here, in French, 6 pages] with a set of six questions on the constitutional position in England of Members of Parliament who were also officers in the armed forces. At the request of Lord Lansdowne, who had evidently written a flattering letter, Bentham sends back his replies, writing in the covering letter ‘The answers I send to the two strings of questions are in several instances rather what I expect to find conformable to the truth, than what I know to be so. Your Lordship certainly does not expect me to be much acquainted for instance with the practice of Court-Martials’, thanking him for offering to enclose Bentham’s ‘An Essay on Political Tactics’, to be presented the King of Poland, noting of his writing on the subject: ‘What I profess to understand, or to be able to find out, is what it is most for the advantage of any country that the Law relative to any head should be. If I touch any where upon what I conceive the Law actually to be, it is only in the way of illustration. I would not, were all the crowned heads in Europe to join in begging of me, sit down to write a law book, shewing what the law is any where, with any other view’.

Published: Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 4, pp.243-254.