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uneducated than when educated! (p. 172.) We never met with a more diabolical piece of sophistry. What! the poorer classes are to be fed on lies, because those false and mischievous theories will render them more formidable to society. The upper classes in this country have certainly not shown themselves to be hostile or indifferent to the education of the people. Their voluntary efforts have covered the country with schools in the last thirty years, and with schools, thank God, in which the philosophy of Mr. Mill is not taught, but, on the contrary, a faith diametrically opposed to it. What education would he have given them? What has he ever done to promote their education in any one respect which would make the peasant and the artisan a better and a happier man? It is manifest that the incentive of the education he would bestow on them would be, not the love of the lower classes, but the hatred of the upper, and the result would be to sacrifice all classes alike by propagating doctrines which aim at the subversion of all property, religion, and law.

It is worthy of remark that Mill and most of his school, while professing an intense concern for the future welfare of mankind, and an equal hatred for the upper ranks of society as it now exists, never conceal their want of sympathy, and indeed absolute scorn,' of the uncultivated herd who now compose 'the labouring masses, and of the immense majority of their employers.' With these views, which in fact condemn all the existing forms of society, both high and low, to annihilation, including in one common fate both property and labour, it may well be supposed that these enthusiasts 'regarded all existing institutions and social arrangements as merely pro'visional' (p. 234); but we are nowhere informed what is to be substituted for them. Mill assures us, and we believe him, that in these things his own intellect was entirely mastered by that of his strange ally.

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Those parts of my writings, and especially of the Political Economy, which contemplate possibilities in the future such as, when affirmed by socialists, have in general been fiercely denied by political economists, would, but for her, either have been absent, or the suggestions would have been made much more timidly and in a more qualified form.'

Mrs. Mill (as she had then become) died at Avignon in 1858. There is something pathetic in the language in which he describes his loss.

'I bought a cottage as close as possible to the place where she is buried, and there her daughter (my fellow-sufferer and now my chief

comfort) and I, live constantly during a great portion of the year. My objects in life are solely those which were hers; my pursuits and occupations those in which she shared, or sympathised, and which are indissolubly associated with her. Her memory is to me a religion, and her approbation the standard by which, summing up as it does all worthiness, I endeavour to regulate my life.'

But even here how strange and dreadful is the effect of Mill's views of the nature of man! How few men can stand by the grave of one whom they have adored, without a belief that all is not ended, and that something still survives to perpetuate the consciousness of love! Mill gives expression to no such thought. Her memory, he says, was to him a religion, but this feeling concentrated itself strangely enough, like that of the Chinese Buddhists, entirely on her material remains. The spot in which she was buried, the room in which she died, the furniture she had touched, were hallowed to him by their associations. He worshipped them as the relics of a saint; but he appears to have conceived nothing beyond them. Yet to anyone who takes a lofty view, whether in a religious or a philosophical sense, of the nature of his own mind, of his own duties, of his own affections-thinking of man as of a being of large discourse, looking before and after-how impossible it is to limit his own destinies, or the destinies of human souls, to a span of imperfect life and to a grave! Even Mr. Buckle rose to a far nobler conception of the immortality of the soul, but it was when he returned from the burial of his mother. To Mill, grief, the most poignant, seems to have been without hope and without consolation. Yet that is the conclusion to which his teaching would reduce the world. It is the last test of incompatibility between materialism and a philosophy which 'teaches' (to use the words of Burns) of a God that made all things, of man's immaterial and immortal nature, and of a ' world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave.'

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It would be out of place, and far exceed the limits of this article, to attempt on this occasion to survey Mr. Mill's vast literary performances; and we confess that of all his works the volume now before us has for us the deepest interest. But in justice to him, it must be said that his Treatise on Logic' is a work of the highest merit, which deserves to hold a permanent rank in literature. It is a masterly scientific work, free to a great extent from the errors and fluctuations of opinion which disfigure so many of his dissertations. Mill himself attached the utmost value to the logic of the schools, as tending to form exact thinkers, not to be imposed upon by loose and ambiguous terms. He placed this art, in which he excelled, far above the boasted influence of mathematics. It may be so.

Yet it is impossible to dismiss from the mind the reflection, that here was a man who professed to have carried to the furthest perfection the art of reasoning and the scientific pursuit of truth, who nevertheless arrived on many subjects at convictions the most repugnant to the great principles of society, of morals, of religion, of domestic life-who was the slave of a multitude of fanciful passions and delusions-and the wreck of what he once promised to become.

Of Mr. Mill's writings on Political Economy, it may suffice to say that he speaks of them himself ast mere temporary contributions to an unsettled science. Each edition varied from that which preceded it, and although he was educated in the strict school of Ricardo and the elder Mill, who on this subject was as sound as he was enlightened, John Mill lived to preach heresies which would have made his instructors stand aghast. His father had sought to construct society on what he considered to be the selfish principle of human nature: the son aimed at a radical reform of human nature itself, when men were to care far more for the interests of the community than those of the individual. In short, as he distinctly proclaims in this volume, the doctrines of his later writings on Political Economy were truly socialist. justice to James Mill (the father) we must say that with all his radicalism, we are convinced that he would have suffered any penalty, rather than have inculcated doctrines so pernicious to society and so fundamentally opposed to all the true principles of economical science.

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By one of those generous impulses which do honour to the British people, it was suddenly proposed and resolved, to return Mr. John Mill to the House of Commons for Westminster in the Parliament of 1865. He was known to the Liberal party as a great thinker and writer--he had spent great part of his life in Westminster--and there was a noble desire to raise the character of the representatives by electing a man of high intellectual powers. He was returned on his own conditions, that is, free of expense as far as his own pocket was concerned, and free to neglect altogether the local affairs of his constituents. We question if there were a dozen of his supporters who really knew what his opinions were and what his conduct in Parliament was likely to be. Thus then at nearly sixty years of age he found himself, for the first time, in actual contact with English political life. He was listened to at first by the House of Commons with curiosity and respect, for his speaking bore the marks of thought and care; but we doubt whether he really contributed any material strength to the party with which he acted. Upon himself, the

effect was far more striking. Nothing could exceed the passionate interest with which he followed the debates, even when he did not take part in them. Early and late, he was in his place. The recluse of twenty years, whom nothing could draw into society, plunged eagerly into the seething atmosphere of the House of Commons; and the pale cheek of the student was flushed with the enthusiasm or the resentment of the impetuous politician. He became intensely sensitive to criticism and to opposition, and showed signs of vanity or self-confidence, which he had not before betrayed. The truth is that, although late in love, and late in politics, the ardent nature of the man did at last break forth, and hurried him much farther than any one could have imagined. The result of his speeches and Parliamentary labours is described by himself in this volume with entire complacency, though not very correctly.* But the electors of Westminster took a different view of it, and therefore at the first election, after the Reform Bill of 1867 which he had helped to carry, they preferred to elect a gentleman of opposite politics and of very inferior intellectual pretensions. Contrary to ordinary experience, Mill's passions certainly became more intemperate and intolerant as he advanced in life, and we should be inclined to say that he was a much wiser man at five and twenty than at five and sixty.

Nevertheless, such as he was, and such as he represents himself in this book to be, without disguise, John Stuart Mill has undoubtedly made a very considerable impression on his age. His books are read, in popular editions, to a degree which is really astonishing, for works treating of the most difficult and abstruse subjects in a singularly hard, though lucid style: and it is an interesting subject of inquiry what will be their ultimate effect. Will they be thrown aside like the writings of Godwin and Tom Paine in the last century, or will they survive to kindle a conflagration in society like the "Contrat Social' and the Emile"? We incline to think that although Mill laid himself out from his earliest years to be a regenerator of society, he has not accomplished his object, and that his writings will not accomplish it after his death. In truth if the whole work of his life be examined, it will be found to be eminently destructive but not to contain one practical constructive idea. He may have helped to blow up some old buildings and sweep away some rubbish, but he has not added

* He states, however, that by far the most important, perhaps the only really important, public service he performed in Parliament was to move an amendment to the Reform Bill for the admission of women to the suffrage, which was of course rejected (p. 304).

one atom or one contrivance to the real efficient mechanism of society and good government in this country: and if he had been invested with absolute power, the world would have obtained. at his hands nothing but checks to population and agrarian laws. The French Encyclopédistes of the 18th century encountered all the abuses of pre-revolutionary France, and they had a great destructive work to do: Mill and his friends have only headed an irregular corps in the victorious army of liberal reform. They have sometimes done good service as skirmishers, for which we feel indebted to them; but they may rely upon it, they would not have effected any real good at all if they had not had the main body of the Whig party behind them. We deplore the influence of Mill on philosophy, properly so called, for it has contributed to the reaction against all we hold to be spiritual truth, and to the strong materialist tendency of modern science, by teaching that all knowledge is derived exclusively from the senses, and that all character is formed by circumstances. To him religion was a dream; morals, a code of utility; law, as administered in this country, a farrago of obsolete technicalities; society in England insipid, and most of the objects of life contemptible. We cannot, therefore, suppose that any large number of our countrymen in the next generation, any more than in the present, will be eager to adopt so unattractive and negative a creed. And if anything can deter them from it, it will be the record of his own life. But with all his errors and failures, there were in him the elements of a noble nature-a genuine love of truth, an invincible courage and perseverance in pursuit of it, a cordial desire for the improvement and enlightenment of mankind, and latent gifts of imagination and sensibility which would have made him a better and a happier man if they had not been crushed by a cruel education, a false philosophy, and an evil fate.

VOL. CXXXIX. NO, CCLXXXIII.

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