Jeremy Bentham wrote both these passages, although eighteen years separated them. The first, praising the Seditious Meetings Act of 1795, which banned large political meetings unless licensed by a magistrate, appears in Bentham’s little-known writings of 1798–9 on preventive police.3 The second, in critique of both the Seditious Meetings Act of 1817, which repeated the provisions of the Act of 1795 and added new penalties, and the suspension of habeas corpus, appears in the work by publication of which, eight years after initial drafting, Bentham declared himself a proponent of radical parliamentary reform. How is the contradiction to be explained, or how did the Bentham of 1799 come to view draconian restraints on liberty of association as a guarantor of security, when at all other times he viewed that liberty as a crucial characteristic of free governments? An examination of Bentham’s attitude to democracy sheds light upon this question and on ambiguities and developments in Bentham’s thinking about the exercise of political power and the appropriate means for its control.