Principles of Morals and

Principles of Morals and Legislation/213
to a roturier, the law confers on you the condition of a gentilhomme; by
forbearing to confer on him those privileges, it imposes on him the con-
dition of a roturier. The rights, out of which the two advantageous con-
ditions here exemplified are both of them as it were composed, have for
their counterpart a sort of services of forbearance, rendered, as we have
seen, not by private individuals, but by the law itself. As to the duties
which it creates in rendering you these services, they are to be consid-
ered as duties imposed by the legislator on the ministers of justice.
It may be observed, with regard to the greater part of the conditions
here comprised under the general appellation of civil, that the relations
corresponding to those by which they are respectively constituted, are
not provided with appellatives. The relation which has a name, is that
which is borne by the party favoured to the party bound: that which is
borne by the party bound to the party favoured has not any. This is a
circumstance that may help to distinguish them from those conditions
which we have termed domestic. In the domestic conditions, if on the
one side the party to whom the power is given is called a master; on the
other side, the party over whom that power is given, the party who is the
object of that power, is termed a servant. In the civil conditions this is
not the case. On the one side, a man, in virtue of certain services of
forbearance, which the rest of the community are bound to render him,
is denominated a knight of such or such an order: but on the other side,
these services do not bestow any particular denomination on the persons
from whom such services are due. Another man, in virtue of the
legislator’s rendering that sort of negative service which consists in the
not prohibiting him from exercising a trade, invests him at his option
with the condition of a trader: it accordingly denominates him a farmer,
a baker, a weaver, and so on: but the ministers of the law do not, in
virtue of their rendering the man this sort of negative service, acquire
for themselves any particular name. Suppose even that the trade you
have the right of exercising happens to be the object of a monopoly, and
that the legislator, besides rendering you himself those services which
you derive from the permission he bestows on you, obliges other per-
sons to render you those farther services which you receive from their
forbearing to follow the same trade; yet neither do they, in virtue of their
being thus bound, acquire any particular name.
After what has been said of the nature of the several sorts of civil
conditions that have names, the offences to which they are exposed may,
without much difficulty, be imagined. Taken by itself, every condition

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214/Jeremy Bentham
which is thus constituted by a permission granted to the possessor, is of
course of a beneficial nature: it is, therefore, exposed to all those of-
fences to which the possession of a benefit is exposed. But either on
account of a man’s being obliged to persevere when once engaged in it,
or on account of such other obligations as may stand annexed to the
possession of it, or on account of the comparative degree of disrepute
which may stand annexed to it by the moral sanction, it may by accident
be a burthen: it is on this account liable to stand exposed to the offences
to which, as hath been seen, every thing that partakes of the nature of a
burthen stands exposed. As to any offences which may concern the ex-
ercise of the functions belonging to it, if it happens to have any duties
annexed to it, such as those, for instance, which are constituted by regu-
lations touching the exercise of a trade, it will stand exposed to so many
breaches of duty; and lastly, whatsoever are the functions belonging to
it, it will stand exposed at any rate to disturbance.
In the forming however of the catalogue of these offences, exact-
ness is of the less consequence, inasmuch as an act, if it should happen
not to be comprised in this catalogue, and yet is in any respect of a
pernicious nature, will be sure to be found in some other division of the
system of offences: if a baker sells bad bread for the price of good, it is
a kind of fraud upon the buyer; and perhaps an injury of the simple
corporal kind done to the health of an individual, or a neighbourhood: if
a clothier sells bad cloth for good at home, it is a fraud; if to foreigners
abroad, it may, over and above the fraud put upon the foreign pur-
chaser, have pernicious effects perhaps in the prosperity of the trade at
home, and become thereby an offence against the national wealth. So
again with regard to disturbance: if a man be disturbed in the exercise
of his trade, the offence will probably be a wrongful interception of the
profit he might be presumed to have been in a way to make by it: and
were it even to appear in any case that a man exercised a trade, or what
is less unlikely, a liberal profession, without having profit in his view,
the offence will still be reducible to the head of simple injurious
restrainment, or simple injurious compulsion.
§ 4. 
Advantages of the present method
LVI. A few words, for the purpose of giving a general view of the method
of division here pursued, and of the advantages which it possesses, may
have their use. The whole system of offences, we may observe, is branched
out into five classes. In the three first, the subordinate divisions are

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