Even at this stage the vindictive or retributive character of punishment remains, but gradually, and specially after the humanist movement under thinkers like Beccaria and Jeremy Bentham, new theories begin to emerge.
Bentham's family connexions would naturally have given him a fair start at the bar, but this was not the career for which he was preparing himself.
The first fruits of Bentham's studies, the Fragment on Government, appeared in 1776.
Henceforth Bentham was a frequent guest at Bowood, where he saw the best society and where he met Miss Caroline Fox (daughter of the second Lord Holland), to whom he afterwards made a proposal of marriage.
In 1785 Bentham started, by way of Italy and Constantinople, on a visit to his brother, Samuel Bentham, a naval engineer, holding the rank of colonel in the Russian service; and it was in Russia that he wrote his Defence of Usury.