That fact was to a certain extent measurable.

One could, for instance, count the number of persons who suffered this year from an Indian famine, and compare it with the number of those who suffered last year.

It was clear also that some pains and pleasures were more intense than others, and that therefore the same man could in a given number of seconds experience varying amounts of pleasure or pain.
Above all, the standard of pleasure and pain was one external to the political thinker himself.

John Stuart Mill quotes Bentham as saying of all philosophies which competed with his Utilitarianism: 'They consist, all of them, in so many contrivances for avoiding the obligation of appealing to any external standard, and for prevailing upon the reader to accept the author's sentiment or opinion as a reason for itself.'[29] [29] Bentham's _Works_, vol.i.p.

8, quoted in Lytton's _England and the English_ (1833), p.469.This passage was written by Mill, cf.
preface.
A 'Benthamite,' therefore, whether he was a member of Parliament like Grote or Molesworth, or an official like Chadwick, or an organising politician like Francis Place, could always check his own feelings about 'rights of property,' 'mischievous agitators,' 'spirit of the Constitution,' 'insults to the flag,' and so on, by examining statistical facts as to the numerical proportion, the income, the hours of work, and the death rate from disease, of the various classes and races who inhabited the British Empire.
But as a complete science of politics Benthamism is no longer possible.
Pleasure and pain are indeed facts about human nature, but they are not the only facts which are important to the politician.