Bentham has finally, indubitably, "made it." Not as he had hoped to make it in his own time, as the reformer, indeed transformer, of society, law, and philosophy; nor even as he would seem to have made it now, as the subject of what is perhaps the most ambitious publishing venture of its kind ever to be undertaken in England; but rather as historical reputations are made-by becoming the focus of controversy. The controversy has already attracted the attention of bibliographers and commentators, and one may be confident that before long it, and thus Bentham himself, will receive the highest accolade of the profession: not the thirty-eight volumes of collected works that will represent over a quarter of a century of collective scholarship, but the slim volume in the Heath series that confers the title and status of a historical "problem." For it is as a problem that Bentham now engages us, and it is for the light that will be shed upon this problem that we will now read this new edition of his collected works.' It is difficult to see how else we may read it. Certainly most of Bentham's writings, in the form in which we already know them, are unreadable except to the most zealous scholar-and not always to him. "The bulk of Bentham's writings has passed into not unjust oblivion," one editor, in 1890, remarked in introducing one of the few works he judged worthy of reprinting.2 And it is unlikely that this bulk will become any more readable in its new, bulkier form. Anyone who has seen the Bentham manuscripts at University College, London, will admire the courage and enterprise of Professor J. H. Burns and his associates in this project but will have no illusions about the outcome. The new edition will be a monument to scholarship. It will be as accurate and comprehensive as Bentham's appalling handwriting and still more appalling habits of composition permit. But it may well prove to be even less readable than the eleven-volume edition published within a decade of Bentham's death by his secretary, John Bowring. To be sure, we shall be spared the double column, six-point type of the old eleven-volume edition; but are thirtyeight volumes, however agreeable in format, less forbidding? We shall also be spared the iibersetzt und verbessert Bentham that has been handed down to us by Bowring and other editors. But is the prospect of an unre-