When I returned, my
father was just finishing for the press his _Elements of Political
Economy_, and he made me perform an exercise on the manuscript, which
Mr. Bentham practised on all his own writings, making what he called
"marginal contents"; a short abstract of every paragraph, to enable
the writer more easily to judge of, and improve, the order of the
ideas, and the general character of the exposition. Soon after, my
father put into my hands Condillac's _Traite des Sensations_, and the
logical and metaphysical volumes of his _Cours d'Etudes_; the first
(notwithstanding the superficial resemblance between Condillac's
psychological system and my father's) quite as much for a warning as
for an example. I am not sure whether it was in this winter or the
next that I first read a history of the French Revolution. I learnt
with astonishment that the principles of democracy, then apparently in
so insignificant and hopeless a minority everywhere in Europe, had
borne all before them in France thirty years earlier, and had been the
creed of the nation. As may be supposed from this, I had previously a
very vague idea of that great commotion. I knew only that the French
had thrown off the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV.
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