John Stuart Mill
The Majesty of Reason
Yet no one whose opinion deserves a moment’s consideration can doubt that most of the great positive evils of the world are in themselves removable, and will, if human affairs continue to improve, be in the end reduced within narrow limits. Poverty in any sense implying suffering, may be completely extinguished by the wisdom of society, combined with the good sense and providence of individuals. Even the most intractable of enemies, disease, may be indefinitely reduced in dimensions by good physical and moral education, and proper control of noxious influences; while the progress of science holds out a promise for the future of still more direct conquests over this detestable foe… All the great sources, in short, of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.
—J.S.Mill, Utilitarianism
It would no doubt have shocked those two remarkable Utilitarians, both religious sceptics—Jeremy Bentham and James Mill—if they had been told that the latter’s brilliant son, John Stuart Mill, was being brought up like one of those Old Testament youths ultimately to be dedicated to the priesthood, or to a prophet’s mission. In this instance, the dedication would be to the gospel of “Philosophical Radicalism,” or “Utilitarianism.”
When John Stuart Mill was born in 1806, Jeremy Bentham was already fifty-five years old and renowned throughout England and the Continent for his works on legislation, and as the founder of a new political party challenging both Whigs and Tories. James Mill was then thirty-three, no less well endowed in mind, but much less so in worldly fortunes. Jeremy Bentham was rich and generous, and James Mill was lucky to have him as a patron. Between them grew up a strong and devoted friendship, now more firmly cemented by the presence of that remarkable boy—“a successor worthy of both of us,” as James Mill wrote to Bentham when, in a humorous letter full of sincere conviction, he bequeathed young John to Bentham’s keeping in case of his own prior death.1
John was indeed a prodigy. As is often noted, he began the study of Greek at the age of three. In a letter written to Bentham’s brother when he was thirteen, he boasted that by the time he was eight he had read “Thucydides, Anacreon, and I believe the Electra of Sophocles, the Phoenissae of Euripides, and the Plutus and the Clouds of Aristophanes.”2 And how much more!
The story is well known, and since the publication of Mill’s Autobiography in 1873, has been the subject of extensive commentary and analysis. It casts a sharp light not only on the psychic life of one individual, but on the overall problems of Victorian childhood, education, family and parental relations.
An outsider looking in on the Mill household, or present at one of Jeremy Bentham’s many social gatherings, could not but have been convinced that here was a young boy living in an ideal environment and destined for great happiness. In Mr. James Mill’s study he might have spied young John construing Greek grammar, or imbibing the elements of Political Economy, Logic, and Psychology, while the elder Mill was preoccupied in preparing his monumental history of India or composing an article for the Edinburgh Review. Or, if he was a visitor at Ford Abbey, Bentham’s country estate, he would find young John in the company of such eminent worthies as the political economist David Ricardo; Sir Samuel Romilly, law reformer; Francis Place, the famous master-tailor and philosophical radical—all minds of extraordinary keenness and daring. Here too was young John, almost an equal among equals, equipped to understand, to enquire, even to argue. It is not recorded that John’s mother was ever present at these high colloquies; if anywhere in the vicinity, she was ever in the background—ever, with her husband’s assistance, procreative—mother, eventually, of eight more children, and caretaker of the busy household. The marriage was not a happy one. Mrs. Mill, who had brought her husband some substance, rarely enjoyed his company, and in her son’s Autobiography scarcely figures as an influence in his life except in somewhat condescending remarks of the mature man, with whatever fondness he might once have had for her barely remembered.
Had he been less of a genius, devoid of his own internal creative and moral strength in the ever-monitory and directing presence and influence of his two towering mentors Bentham and James Mill, the “crisis” John Mill was destined to undergo at the age of twenty might have proved utterly disastrous for his growth. Child prodigies are sufficiently problematic in their own right; the pressures of ambitious though well-meaning elders are scarcely unmixed blessings. John had not one, but two solicitous fathers. And though one may admire James Mill’s patience, perseverance, and the unremittent concern he bestowed upon his son while himself one of the busiest of men, his attentions were fixed only on the development of his son’s intellect—to the subtler and more essential needs of the young man he was utterly blind. John was to be, his mentors felt, the shining heir and apostle of Utilitarianism. And the young man proved highly responsive.
He was ready for an all-encompassing philosophy of life, and in Bentham he felt he had found the key. Like Keats encountering a copy of Chapman’s Elizabethan translation of Homer, he fell upon Bentham’s Traité de Legislation:
The reading of this book was an event in my life; one of the turning points of my mental history.
The principle of the “greatest happiness for the greatest number” was a revelation.
(It) burst on me with all the force of novelty… The feeling rushed upon me that all previous moralists were superseded, and that here indeed was the commencement of a new era… When I laid down the last volume of the Traité, I was a different being. The principle of utility, understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary portions of my knowledge. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one (and the best) sense of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward aim of a life. And I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be made in the condition of mankind by that doctrine.3
He accepted his father’s creed, with its two central tenets: representative government and complete freedom of discussion. Human nature could be changed, and the most effective instrument to that end was education.
At the age of fourteen, John Stuart Mill was privileged to spend half a year in France with the redoubtable Sir Samuel Bentham, Jeremy’s brother—man of the world, naval architect and engineer, brigadier-general in the service of Russia, and former Commissioner of the British navy. Here was a man with the aura of new worlds. The Bentham family lived in the south of France, and John Mill saw Provence, the Pyrenees, and Toulouse. He attended the University of Montpellier. He came in contact with a new civilization. The boy, hitherto so repressed, came to life and blossomed forth: he botanized; he learned to write a fluent French. Years later in a letter to Auguste Comte, he called it “The six happiest months of my youth”—“Les six mois les plus heureux de ma jeunesse, ceux de l’hiver 1820-1821.”4 He also obtained his first sight of Paris. Here he met the eminent political economist J.-B. Say, and at the latter’s house caught a glimpse of the impoverished but celebrated Count Saint-Simon. France was to prove of seminal influence in John Mill’s intellectual development.
When John Mill was seventeen, his father, since 1809 assistant examiner in the East India Company, obtained for him a junior clerkship in the same office. Like his father, he was in due time to rise to the important office of Examiner.
His duties at the India Office were none too onerous, allowing him time for many other activities and projects. His biographer thus summarized his life in the single year 1825:
… When he was nineteen, John Mill set out to edit Bentham, founded the Debating Society, discussed Political Economy three hours a week at Grote’s house in Thread-needle Street, wound up the Utilitarian Society, contributed major articles to the Westminster Review, went for long country walks with Graham and Roebuck, carried out his mounting duties at the India House with conspicuous success, and continued to be solely responsible for the education of his brothers and sisters.5
At the same time he was studying German with Sarah Austin, wife of the prominent juridical philosopher John Austin.
A year later he broke down…
Mill’s account of his mental crisis of 1826 is, along with John Henry Newman’s Apologia, one of the most famous contributions to Victorian autobiography. What John Mill’s crisis revealed, aside from many other important elements, was the struggle of a young and original mind to free itself from an authority that he felt threatened to cripple him mentally and emotionally. He sensed the presence of a serious malady in his personality that none of the high-minded values and goals set by his elders—neither their lofty ethic of service to mankind through a rational education, nor his own education—was in a position to cure. Such crises, which arise frequently in the lives of gifted young people, are aggravated by an absence of confidence in or communication with one’s peers or elders. In the case of John Mill, the situation was compounded by the presence of a highly endowed and powerful father, and the absence of a mother. James Mill was planning an imposing work on human psychology, but he had apparently overlooked the psychological nature and needs of the still unformed human being sitting beside him, whose emotional demands could no longer be satisfied by abstract theories, questions, and purely rational answers. To put it plainly, John Mill wanted someone to love and to love him. His own deep feelings found no outlet or corresponding understanding. Crucial passages in an early draft of his Autobiography, rejected or modified in the published version, throw a sharp light not only on this particular case, but on the generality of Victorian family life and its problems. This is what John Mill wrote:
Personally I believe my father to have had much greater capacities of feeling than were ever developed in him. He resembled almost all Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, & by the absence of demonstration, starving the feelings themselves. In an atmosphere of tenderness & affection he would have been tender & affectionate; but his ill assorted marriage & his asperities of temper disabled him from making such an atmosphere… It must be mentioned… that my father’s children neither loved him, nor, with any warmth of affection, any one else. I do not mean that things were worse in this respect than they are in most English families; in which genuine affection is altogether exceptional; what is usually found being more or less of an attachment of mere habit, like that to inanimate objects, & a few conventional proprieties of phrase & demonstration. I believe there is less personal affection in England than in any other country of which I know anything… That rarity in England, a really warm hearted mother, would in the first place have made my father a totally different being, & in the second would have made the children grow up loving & being loved. But my mother with the very best intentions, only knew how to pass her time in drudging for them… I thus grew up in the absence of love & in the presence of fear… Without knowing or believing that I was reserved, I grew up with an instinct of closeness.
Modern psychology will scarcely have trouble in translating his father’s role into that of the superego:
I was so much accustomed to expect to be told what to do, either in the form of direct command or of rebuke for not doing it, that I acquired a habit of leaving my responsibility as a moral agent to rest on my father, my conscience never speaking to me except by his voice… The things I ought not to do were mostly provided by his precepts, rigorously enforced whenever violated, but the things I ought to do I hardly ever did of my own mere motion, but waited till he told me to do them…6
He reached a point of depression in which he could not extract an iota of happiness from contemplating the realization of his social hopes for beneficent changes in institutions. “The whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down… I seemed to have nothing left to live for.”7
Like Coleridge in another context, Mill came to the conclusion that the desiccation of his emotional life was due to the habit of “analysis,” with its “tendency to wear away the feelings.” Like Coleridge, John Mill experienced what might be called a “death of the heart,” due, each of them believed, to the inability to “feel.” One need scarcely observe that such simplifications scarcely go to the root of the problem.
And then suddenly, in John Mill’s case, came the release. One day, he broke down in tears on reading in the Frenchman Marmontel’s Memoirs how the young boy felt on the death of his father. “The oppression that all feeling was dead within me,” Mill wrote later, “was gone.” The re-education of his heart and mind now commenced. Of course, the processes by which Mill attained to this salvation are veiled for us, as they must have been for him, for he was himself probably unaware of the secret movements within his own being, the processes of growth that, working subtly, began revealing to him the central needs of which he was being deprived—contact with others, release of repressed feelings, love. What happened in the end was that the apparent dichotomy of mind and feeling was resolved, and as the feelings were released, his very mental processes enlarged. Poetry and music came to his aid. Wordsworth, in particular, showed him how Nature, Feeling, Thought, and human sympathies, could all be reconciled; that high emotion could also be rational, and high reason could be bound up with feelings; that the greatest art was not in fact a disseverance of Emotion and Reason, but a creative fusion of both. The poets now supplied that “culture of feelings” which Mill had been seeking, by presenting him not with “mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty.”8 He reached out for aesthetic satisfactions of which he had been hitherto deprived; for many of the Utilitarians, Bentham among them, looked with suspiction on poetry as “fiction,” a feeder of illusions. John Mill now enjoyed the music of the Romantic composer Carl Maria von Weber; he discovered a kindred spirit in the poet Coleridge, and must have relished and been saddened by the latter’s poem, “Dejection, an Ode,” in which Coleridge tried to explain his own—never to be conquered— poetic sterility, also attributing it to his passion for philosophy:
And haply by abstruse research to steal
From my own nature all the natural man—
Till that which suits a part infects the whole,
And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.
Of course poetry and music could only be gateways to greater discoveries for Mill (such as Coleridge was never destined to find), namely, emotional fulfilment through the love of a woman. Soon he was to enter into a relationship that would prove epochal for himself, his mind and his emotional life, and set him on the road to greater intellectual creativeness with a concomitant sense of a new freedom.
* * *
Of course there could be no total break with the past. But there was a reassessment intellectually of his mentors, Bentham and James Mill, in the light of his new probings and experiences. He was now prepared to reconstruct the “ruined fabric of happiness” on the basis of his newborn convictions, to bring the past and present into some sort of harmony. In that spirit, he wrote,
If I am asked, what system of political philosophy I substituted for that which, as a philosophy, I had abandoned, I answer, No system: only a conviction that the true system was something more complex and many-sided than I had previously had any idea of, and that its office was to supply, not a set of model institutions, but principles from which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be deduced.9
He now believed that he had freed himself from the incubus of the Necessitarian philosophy, the notion that he was the “helpless slave of antecedent circumstances,” and that the character of a person was formed by agencies beyond his control and powers. In the past, he had been sure that human beings were formed by outside circumstances, and such belief had, during the period of his severe depression, exercised a paralyzing effect upon him. But now,
I saw that though our character is formed by circumstances, our own desires can do much to shape those circumstances… that we have real power over the formation of our own character; that our will, by influencing some of our circumstances, can modify our future habits or capabilities of willing.
By 1828 Mill was, as he put it, no longer a “well-equipped ship and rudder, but no sail.” Now he was ready to launch forth upon new seas of experience. He had not abandoned his radical political principles. “I was as much as ever a Radical and Democrat for Europe, and especially for England.” But he had acquired the “sail,” and could now, with assurance, chart a secure course…
He sought out new shores, new sources for the enlargement of his mind. German thought—with the possible exception of Goethe—was to remain a closed land, immunized as he was by Utilitarianism against all sorts of transcendentalism. The philosophical revolution that had produced Hegel and the post-Hegelian thinkers remained his terra incognita. It was almost natural that France should prove the most attractive terrain, with its revolutionary spirit still very much alive and at that moment approaching an explosive realization. England, too, with its high excitement attendant upon the reform agitations, and its new “radicalism,” seemed ready for profound changes. It was at one of the meetings of the so-called Debating Society, in which Mill was a leading figure, that a young Frenchman, Gustave d’Eichthal, a fervent Saint-Simonian, became deeply impressed with young John Mill both as speaker and thinker, and sensing a potential convert, on his return to France sent him several numbers of the Producteur and a copy of an early work by Auguste Comte, the Système de politique positive. If one adds to these the book by Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, which Mill was to read in 1835, we have practically an abstract of the French influence that was to determine a great part of his thinking during the succeeding years.
He was fascinated with the Saint-Simonians and their doctrine. A new vision of history rose before him. “Progress,” in which he, like the other Utilitarians, had always believed, now acquired a more precise meaning. He was particularly struck by the Saint-Simonian success in presenting a “connected view of the natural order of human progress,” with its division of history into “organic” and “critical” periods. He now saw his own times as a “critical” period, a “period of criticism and negation” in which there was an erosion of old convictions, “except the conviction that the old was false.” His faith in the future was greatly strengthened, “a future which shall unite the best qualities of the organic periods: unchecked liberty of thought, unbounded freedom of individual action, in all modes not hurtful to others,”
but also, convictions as to what is right and wrong, useful and pernicious, deeply engraven on the feelings by early education and general unanimity of sentiment, and so firmly grounded in reason and in the true exigencies of life, that they shall not, like all former and present creeds, religious, ethical, political require to be periodically thrown off and replaced by others.10
There was for him also a kind of exhilarating shock in the Saint-Simonian critique of private property and the laws of inheritance. For “security” and “property” were the keystones of Utilitarian social doctrine, in so far as they pertained to the interests of the manufacturing and commercial classes, though property of the landed aristocracy was excluded from their protective sanctities as being “unearned”—not the product of their labor. Above all, Mill was struck by the boldness with which the Saint-Simonians approached the subjects of woman and family, proclaiming “the perfect equality of men and women”—in his view “an entirely new order of things in regard to their relations with one another.”
He was also deeply exercised over and absorbed by Auguste Comte’s doctrine of historical development, the so-called law of the “three stages” of human history. For Comte believed that he had found the “fundamental law, to which human intelligence in its diverse spheres of activity was subject”—the law that “every one of our principal conceptions, every branch of knowledge, passes through three different theoretical stages: the theological, or fictive; the metaphysical, or the abstract; the scientific, or the positive stage.”
It was this last stage that more than any of the others impressed Mill. For in this “positive” or “scientific” stage, which was still to come, the human mind was seen as once and for all abandoning the attempt to achieve absolute knowledge, and the fruitless aim of seeking to discover the origin or destination of the universe. By means of reason and observation it will discover the laws of nature and man, the lois naturelles invariables—the “natural and invariable laws” governing the world—and these will be reduced to the smallest possible number.
And Comte proclaimed,
Now that the human mind has established celestial physics, terrestrial physics, whether mechanical or chemical; organic physics—vegetable, or animal—it behooves him now to conclude the system of scientific observation by establishing social physics.11
In other words, establishing “Sociology.” Human beings were shaped by history and society. The law of “progress” will enable us to predict future events…
John Mill’s widening view of history did not prevent him from even more sharply criticizing contemporary English society. He moderated d’Eichthal’s effervescent enthusiasm for the productive and industrial as well as commercial contributions of the British and warned him of the evil inherent in them and only too rampant among the general population—the tendency or “disposition to sacrifice every thing to accumulation.” He took issue with the Saint-Simonian design to place the business of government in the hands of the industriels, the savants, and artists.
I do not know, he wrote to d’Eichthal, how it may be in France, but I know that in England these three are the very classes of persons you would pick out as the most remarkable for a narrow & bigoted understanding, & a sordid & contracted disposition as respects all things wider than their business or families.12
Yet amid the excitement over his new intellectual discoveries, he could not forbear complaining of his sense of loneliness, which he felt to be his “future lot.” He lacked, he said, the presence of someone who would give him the “feeling of being engaged in the pursuit of a common object and mutually cheering one another on, and helping one another in an arduous task… There is now no human being (with whom I can associate on terms of equality) who acknowledges a common object with me…”13
Two events occurred in the following year which were to change his feelings radically. In the summer of 1830 he met Mrs. Harriet Taylor. In July of the same year a revolution broke out in France. These two events, though outwardly seemingly unrelated, were to make another stage in John Mill’s Bildung. His Wanderjahre would be over…
* * *
It was apparent even before July 1830 that things were moving toward an explosion. Spain was in upheaval, and her plight found ardent sympathy in many an English heart. A number of Englishmen conceived a fantastic plan for launching an invasion of that country in support of Spain’s insurgent patriots. Among these supporters and sympathizers were John Sterling, friend of Carlyle and John Mill, and young Alfred Tennyson. Under the leadership of the Spaniard Torrijos and the Irishman Boyd, an army of fifty was recruited, which soon set out. Forewarned by spies, the Spanish authorities captured the would-be invaders at Malaga and executed their leaders, Torrijos and Boyd among them. One can well imagine the dismay of their English supporters.
But very soon the news from France served to alleviate their grief. English liberals greeted reports of the July Revolution with joy. And a number of them, including John Mill, John Graham, and Roebuck, journeyed to France to share in the triumphs. Early in August they were in Paris, where they were received by Lafayette. They were amazed by the discipline displayed by the populace, especially the working classes, and Mill extolled their “simplicity of character” and their deep conviction of the “morality and lawfulness of their resistance.” From Paris he wrote,
The inconceivable purity and singleness of purpose, almost amounting to naiveté… has given me a greater love for them than I thought myself capable of feeling for so large a collection of human beings, and the more exhilarating views which it opens of human nature will have a beneficial effect on the whole of my future life.14
Mill was present at the opera when the newly inducted Citizen-King. Louis-Philippe, greeted his fellow citizens. He met with the Saint-Simonians Enfantin and Bazard, and was introduced into the Society of Aide-Toi. But he soon became disenchanted with the course the new French leadership was taking and complained that there was “not a Radical among them except Dupont de l’Eure,” nothing but place-hunters; and that even Thiers manifested nothing but “weakness and pusillanimity.”15In the Examiner he began publishing three letters on “The State of the Public Mind and Affairs at Paris,” unsigned. On January 6, 1831 appeared the first of his articles on “The Spirit of the Age,” also unsigned. It was this series that caught the attention and interest of Thomas Carlyle and initiated a new friendship that proved of significant influence in the life of John Mill.
The influence of France on Mill cannot be overestimated. Whatever the vicissitudes of that country’s fortunes or his own particular estimates of her politics and social philosophies, France remained the center of his interests and left a permanent mark on his outlook. Not even the presence of Carlyle and the latter’s German preoccupations could divert him from France.
The pace of Mill’s radicalization was now accelerated. The rejection of the Reform Bill by the House of Lords on October 8 roused him to fury. He was particularly incensed by the overwhelming opposition of the Bishops, only two of whom favored the Bill. “You may consider,” Mill wrote to John Sterling in the same month, “the fate of the Church as sealed.” He foresaw a populace aroused against the recalcitrant Peers, ready to call a national convention by universal suffrage.
If there were but a few dozens of persons safe (whom you & I could select) to be missionaries of the great truths in which alone there is any well-being for mankind individually or collectively, I should not care though a revolution were to exterminate every person in Great Britain and Ireland who has £500 a year.16
And in the Examiner he wrote that in order that “man may achieve his destiny… there must be a moral and social revolution, which shall, indeed, take away no man’s lives or property, but which shall leave no man a fraction of unearned distinction or unearned importance.”17
The phrase “Spirit of the Age,” seemed to echo Carlyle’s “Signs of the Times”— both an echo of the German Zeitgeist. Carlyle found much in Mill’s articles to sympathize with: the indictment of the times, the sense that these were in a “transitional” stage, the need of an adequate new leadership. Mill was writing, “The superior capacity of the higher ranks for the exercise of worldly power is now a broken spell.” The times called for a new leadership, for which the men of “wealth” were altogether unfitted. How was an ill-informed mass of the people filled with so much “fallacious and visionary” ideas to be guided, and by whom? Naturally, what was needed was a new heroism—a heroic élite!
It is, therefore, one of the necessary conditions of humanity [so Mill had written] that the majority must either have wrong opinions, or no fixed opinions, or must place the degree of reliance warranted by reason, in the authority of those who have made moral and social philosophy their peculiar study.18
It is as if the fiery radicalism of John Mill, expressed in his private letters, were giving way to a public elitist philosophy that tried to fuse Coleridge’s now conservative call for a rule by a “clerisy”—a new church leadership—and secularize it; along with a dose of Saint-Simonianism and Comtism, with its call for a ruling hierarchy of brain and science.
Carlyle liked Mill, for here was an intelligence that compensated him, with its admiration and capacities, for the isolation that had been his lot in Scotland and which he felt even now in London. Mrs. Carlyle liked him too. He was, in Carlyle’s words, “slender, rather tall and elegant… with small Roman-nosed face, two small earnestly-smiling eyes; modest, remarkably gifted with precision of utterance, enthusiastic, yet lucid, calm… The youth,” Carlyle continued, “walked home with me almost to the door; seemed to profess, almost as plainly as modesty would allow, that he had been converted by the head of the Mystic School, to whom personally he testified very hearty-looking regard.” As the self-proclaimed “head of the Mystic School,” Carlyle felt highly flattered. Mill, too, was flattered—but respectful, even reverential. It was a happy occasion for both, brought about by Mrs. Sarah Austin, writer and translator, and wife of a famous jurist. The young man had found a new teacher; the older man (for some time to come), a devoted disciple…
* * *
May 1834, Thomas Carlyle writing about John Stuart Mill:
Mrs. Austin had a tragical story of his having fallen desperately in love with some young philosophic beauty (yet with the innocence of two sucking doves), and being lost to all his friends and himself, and what not; but I traced nothing of this in poor Mill; and even incline to think that what truth there is or was in the adventure may have done him good.19
July 22, 1834:
Our most interesting new friend is a Mrs. Taylor, who came here for the first time yesterday, and stayed long. She is a living romance heroine, of the clearest insight, of the royalest volition, very interesting, of questionable destiny, not above twenty-five. Jane is to go and pass a day with her soon, being greatly taken with her.20
January 12, 1835. Jane Welsh Carlyle to Dr. John Carlyle:
There is a Mrs. Taylor whom I could really love, if it were safe and she were willing; but she is a dangerous looking woman and engrossed with a dangerous passion, and no useful relation can spring up between us.21
In 1834, Harriet Taylor was twenty-seven years old, eight years married, and the mother of two sons and a daughter. She had been brought up a Unitarian, and her husband John Taylor was one of the pillars of the London Unitarian community, with its remarkable minister William Johnson Fox. Carlyle thought the husband “an innocent dull good young man.” But he was also somewhat out of the ordinary run of men, for being well to do (partner in the wholesale druggist firm of David Taylor & Sons), he was also a convinced liberal, a member of the Reform Club, and probably one of the supporters of the University of London. Political exiles from abroad found his and Harriet’s home a haven. She was eighteen when she married, he eleven years older. In the summer of 1830 (possibly the fall) William James Fox, editor of the Unitarian journal the Monthly Repository, brought John Stuart Mill to the Taylor establishment. John Mill and Harriet Taylor fell in love. Romantic fiction demands tragedy as an ending, for there is no doubt that like Paolo and Francesca they read books together and talked philosophy, morality, Utilitarianism, and other things young people talk of. Whatever strong winds that blew them about succeeded only in bringing them into each other’s arms. The love drama of Mill and Harriet, filled as it was to be with moments of sadness and difficulties, found a happy consummation after some years in marriage and continued love, a happiness marred only by her premature death….
Harriet Taylor brought the love he had been seeking, and more. Subsequent biographers, psychohistorians and scholars of both sexes, with their retroactive passports into the human unconscious, have cast doubts on the authenticity of John Mill’s numerous attestations of debt to Harriet, and of the extent of the influence she had upon his life and thinking. She was, it is true, no genius. She had beauty and brains— to some admirers of John Mill, already a suspect combination. They find it incredible that a “lesser” woman could not only inspire in such a genius a profound love, but also help in deepening his thought, help in extending his emotional as well as his intellectual horizon.22
She helped to free him. Harriet Taylor came from a Unitarian environment, and the Unitarians had a long and painful history in their struggle for the emancipation of the human mind. Of the dissenting Protestant sects, they were far to the left in their theology, denying the divinity of Christ and insisting on the “unipersonality” of the Godhead. Among their ancestors were innumerable martyrs burned in England during the sixteenth century. At the time of the French Revolution they were among its most articulate defenders in England, and one of them, Richard Price, delivered the inflammatory sermon that spurred Edmund Burke to the composition of his celebrated retort, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Joseph Priestley was one of them; and young Coleridge and young Southey, in the heyday of their Pantisocratic radicalism, held Unitarian views, some of which Coleridge expressed in his sermons. Eventually the Unitarians won a measure of tolerance, but they remained faithful to their radicalism. Among the outstanding Unitarians of the early nineteenth century, William James Fox was eminent as preacher and writer. It was for him that supporters built a new Finsbury Unitarian chapel. In time he grew more and more radical, politically as well as theologically, and as editor and owner of the Monthly Repository after 1831, assisted by a crew of hardy coadjutors, espoused liberal causes of reform. The emancipation of women—their right to the vote—became one of their most fervent activities. Fox’s views of marriage and divorce went far beyond the most extreme views of his day. In his private life he scandalized society by separating from his wife and establishing a household in the company of the much younger Eliza Flower who, along with her sister Sarah, had been his ward. Undaunted by adverse gossip and public slur (even the London Times did not disdain to glance at “Fox and the Flower”), Fox continued indefatigably as journalist and preacher, lecturing to working men and women, attacking the Corn Laws, supporting the Utilitarians, agitating for compulsory secular education. He was elected to Parliament and died in 1864 at the age of 78. He it was who gave young Robert Browning his first favorable review, in the Monthly Repository, and it was no secret that the poet was in love with Eliza Flower.
It was in such an atmosphere that Harriet Taylor had grown up. She was a rebel in some respects more radical than John Mill. On the subject of woman and marriage they were in agreement. She was more demonstrative than he; militantly against the bondage of conformity, whether religious, political, moral, or social. “What is called the opinion of Society,” she wrote
is… a combination of the many weak, against the few strong; and association of the mentally listless to punish any manifestation of mental independence. The remedy is, to make all strong enough to stand alone; and whoever has once known the pleasure of self-dependence, will be in no danger of relapsing into subserviency.
On the subject of marriage and divorce she was no less explicit:
Women are educated for one single object, to gain their living by marrying—(some poor souls get it without the churchgoing. It’s the same way—they do not seem to be a bit worse than their honoured sisters.) To be married is the object of their existence and that object being gained they do really cease to exist as to anything worth calling life or any useful purpose. One observes very few marriages where there is any real sympathy or enjoyment or companionship between the parties… Would not the best plan be divorce which could be attained by any without any reason assigned, and at small expence, but which could only be pronounced after a long period?… In the present system of habits & opinions, girls enter into what is called a contract perfectly ignorant of the conditions of it, and that they should be so is considered absolutely essential to their fitness for it!23
What role George Sand played in the diffusion of like ideas is hard to gauge; but beginning with 1833, her name and her works became bywords for a daring feminism, and in the following decade she was the most widely read, lauded and stigmatized French writer in England. Jane Carlyle read her works, much to the disgruntlement of her husband (who did not spare objurgations); as did Elizabeth Barrett and many others, like George Eliot, G. H. Lewes, and throughout his life her most devoted admirer, Matthew Arnold.
John Mill was now emboldened to defy the world, to “part company”—as he put it—“with the opinion of the world.” And she, being a woman, knew fully to what gossip and malicious imputations she would be exposed—and not least, to what severe social ostracism. Today it is hard to believe that they kept to a covenant and avoided sexual relations so long as John Taylor was alive. She became free in 1849, and they were married in 1851. But during their long “courtship” the world whispered, mocked, and did not believe; though the husband behaved with dignity, he was derided as a cuckold, and she objurgated as a wanton. Carlyle commiserated with John Mill, who, as he believed, was “far above all that”—by which he meant all those Unitarian goings-on, “with their strange conceptions of ‘duty’,” “and all of them indignant at marriage.”24
The reluctance to consider Harriet Taylor (now Harriet Mill) a thinking being extended even to doubts as to her authorship of an important article in the Westminster Review of 1851 on “The Enfranchisement of Women.” Here, Harriet indicated how the demoralization of woman in an unhappy marriage demoralizes the man too—how her status of inferiority makes for an inferiority in him; how both partners become “servile-minded.” “There is no inherent reason or necessity,” she wrote, “that all women should voluntarily choose to devote their lives to one animal function and its consequences.” Women must obtain admission to all social privileges; they do not ask for some sort of “sentimental priesthood.”25 If, as some assert, Mill guided the pen, is it too far-fetched to assume that an intelligent woman, brought up in a Unitarian environment whose journal, the Monthly Repository, was among the first to do full justice to the works of George Sand, could also have some radical thoughts on the woman question? Or that she might even have guided the mind and thought of John Mill? At any rate, it is doubtful whether Mill could have written the most important manifesto on the rights of woman—his own The Subjection of Women, published some eighteen years later—with the same fervor and clarity, absent Harriet’s prior essay, or her influence.
In some respects, her social views outdistanced his—as on the question of Socialism. She incited him to a closer study of the subject which, though it never proved exhaustive, was sufficient to move him to significant changes in later editions of his Principles of Political Economy, to the great distress of a number of his admirers.
Must we then distrust Mill himself in his assessment of her valuable contributions to his development as a full human being? That in the hopes and labors, which they both shared, for the “radical amendment” of human life, she supplied the double stimulus of a critical mind that balanced in the “region of ultimate aims, the constituents of the highest ideal of human life, with that of the immediately useful and practically attainable”? That it was to her he owed his “wise scepticism”?26 Must we then believe that in the high tribute he paid his deceased wife in his Autobiography he was deceiving both himself and all others?
* * *
Gladstone called him the “Saint of Rationalism.” With even greater justice might he be called the “Paladin of Liberalism.” To assimilate the many doctrines into one whole; to reconcile opposites; to mediate between them and effectually produce new moderating doctrine—this was no easy task. He was too much a child of his century not to crave some infallible system. Like so many Victorians, he was himself full of contradictions; and these are as important for an understanding of the man and his age as his actual positive contributions. The questions he asked but could not always satisfactorily answer were, under other circumstances and in other forms of social organization, destined to bedevil the next century as well.
Like all creative intellects he was at pains to free himself, at the proper moment, from his teachers, while at the same time striving to retain what was best in them and assimilate it into his maturing thought. Thus he sought to amalgamate within himself the best of Bentham and of the Utilitarian doctrine (while abandoning the less valid or satisfying elements), as well as the aesthetic and emotional content of Wordsworth and Coleridge, seeking a balance between Reason and Feeling, and a place for poetry; to steer a judicious course through the doctrines of the Saint-Simonians and the Comteans in confronting the new world of industry and capital, as well as that of the vast mass of the laboring, now seemingly more than ever embattled. And there also loomed the whole problem of Democracy. What was it? Portent, terror, prophecy, or promise?
Thus liberalism moved between Scylla and Charybdis—terrfying predicaments. Anarchy and Order, Equality and Liberty, Society and the Individual, the Mass and the One, Progress and Poverty, Art and Science, Reason and Feeling, the Elite and the People, Laissez-faire and Control, Woman and Man, Private Property and Socialism, Freedom and Necessity—where in all these opposites to find reconcilement?
There was yet another contradiction that Mill was scarcely aware of, an inner one. He was an important official of the East India Company, one of the most powerful arms of British imperialism. Was he himself caught up in the deftly woven net that constituted the “interests”? What else could account for his affirmation that such dependencies as Ireland and India needed “despotism” to keep them under control? But such aberrations, so far as Ireland was concerned, were only momentary, for in 1848 he attacked Carlyle for advocating the reduction of Ireland “into slavery… will it or not.”27
Gradually he drew away from Carlyle. That which had once attracted him earlier in life—the rhetoric of outrage at an age bound by ties of a “cash-nexus”—grew less and less satisfying as the fuller implications of Carlyle’s former radical transcendentalism crystallized into concrete reactionary formulas. As Mill put it, still tactfully, he found Carlyle’s dicta about “mystery” and “infinitude… in the universe” repeated too often for his taste. This criticism appeared in his predominently favorable review of Carlyle’s French Revolution. Three years later, in 1840, Mill could no longer brook Carlyle’s attacks on Bentham in his lectures on Heroes and Hero-Worship. The 1840s, as we have seen, were the testing-ground of beliefs and adherences. Carlyle’s “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question” in Fraser’s Magazine of 1849, and Mill’s response, “The Negro Question” in the same review, mark the wider points of departure; and the differences became ultimately unreconcilable when a few years later they opposed one another in the case of General Eyre and his alleged atrocities in the West Indies. In his article of 1850, Mill took Carlyle to task for his doctrine that Might is Right.
The author issues his opinions, or rather ordinances, under imposing auspices; no less than those of the “immortal gods”… This so-called “eternal act of Parliament” is no new law, but the old law of the strongest—a law against which the great teachers of mankind have in all ages protested: it is the law of force and cunning; the law that whoever is more than another is “born Lord” of that other, and other being his “servant”… I see nothing divine in this injunction. If “the gods” will this, it is the first duty of human beings to resist such gods… The history of human improvement is the record of a struggle by which inch after inch of ground has been wrung from the maleficent powers, and more and more of human life rescued from the iniquitous dominion of the law of might.28
Earlier differences between the two had been marked by a reproach addressed to Carlyle for speaking of Madame Roland as being almost rather a man than a woman. “Is there really” he asked, “any distinction between the highest masculine and the highest feminine character?” In January 1834, he wrote to Carlyle, “Our differences are indeed of the first importance.” “I have only what appears to you much the same thing as, or even worse than, no God at all, namely a probable God.” “Another of our differences is, that I am still, and am likely to remain, a utilitarian.”29 He also confessed to doubts about the immortality of the soul.
They remained friends, however, for some time to come. But Mill’s deep involvement with Harriet, amid the spoken and unspoken reservations of friends and acquaintances, could not but chill the atmosphere around them. In the fall of 1833, John Taylor agreed to an experimental separation of six months from his wife; she left for Paris, where John Mill joined her in October.
One of the major tasks he set himself was to break down what appeared to him the barriers of English insularity; to bring the English into the general stream of European thought, especially that of France. For France, he claimed, was now producing “not only among the profoundest thinkers, but the clearest and most popular writers of their age.” It had produced Saint-Simon and Comte. And now, in 1835, Mill was trumpeting the extraordinary merits of Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. In the two parts of Tocqueville’s seminal work, published respectively in 1835 and 1840, and immediately translated, Mill found startling counterparts to his own thinking and a rich source of new ideas from which he could draw enrichment for his own later breviaries of liberalism, such as the essays “On Liberty” and “Representative Government.”
Tocqueville was an aristocrat and a Catholic, a man possessed of a penetrating and logical mind much like Mill’s, and like the latter bent on discovering the fundamental laws of human conduct in an age of advancing “democracy.” Unlike Mill, however, Tocqueville was a devout believer. For him history was the revelation of Providence and His intentions. Within these intentions, Tocqueville contended, lay the ultimate triumph of democracy. America was the testing-ground of that new sweeping and irresistible movement. It was therefore most important to determine what was good and what was deleterious within American democracy and the great egalitarian wave; how to advance the good that was in it and eschew that which might prove destructive.
Mill found such an appeal to practical experience and observation, combined with brilliant generalities, extremely fascinating. For both were in search of the laws of history. Though he might differ with the Frenchman on a number of details, Tocqueville’s essential evaluations of the benefits and shortcomings of democracy carried compelling conviction; and the popularity of the book, variously interpreted by Whig and Tory, suggested its importance for contemporaries.
Like Carlyle—but oh! how differently—Tocqueville saw the hand of God at work in advancing democracy in the world. This was an “irresistible revolution”—“the gradual development of the equality of conditions”—a phenomenon manifesting itself “throughout Christendom.”
The gradual development of the equality of conditions is… a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteristics of a Divine decree; it is universal, it is durable, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress. Would it, then, be wise to imagine that a social impulse which dates from so far back can be checked by the efforts of a generation? Is it credible that the democracy which has annihilated the feudal system and vanquished kings will respect the citizen and the capitalist? Will it stop now that it has grown so strong and its adversaries so weak? None can say which way we are going for all terms of comparison are wanting… The attempt to check democracy would be… to resist the will of God; and the nations would… be constrained to make the best of the social lot awarded to them by Providence.30
What is our first duty? he asks. It is to “educate democracy,” and for that, a “new science of politics is indispensable.” It was to profit his own country, where he felt the ideals of the Revolution had remained unfulfilled except in the “material parts of society,” that he had turned his attention to America, where what he called the “great revolution” had already reached its “natural limits.” Here, he said, was the first nation to have escaped the domination of absolute power, and to have established and maintained the sovereignty of the people. The soil of America is “opposed to a territorial aristocracy.”
The government of democracy brings the notion of political rights to the level of the humblest citizens, just as the dissemination of wealth brings the notion of property within the reach of all the members of the community; and I confess that, to my mind, this is one of its greatest advantages.31
Brilliantly, Tocqueville proceeds to enlarge upon the advantages and disadvantages of American democracy. Among the great advantages, he found these: it promotes the welfare of the greatest possible number; it is able to commit faults which it can afterwards remedy; the governed are more enlightened and attentive to their interests— they are vigilant; the interests of the governors do not differ from those of the community at large; there are no complaints against property; there are no paupers; no class of persons that does not exercise the elective franchise; and the lower orders, by participating in public business, become educated in the democratic process. A democratic society concerns itself chiefly, he held, with prosperity, “the greatest degree of enjoyment and the least degree of misery.”
But it fails in many important respects. It is deficient in the selection of exceptional men to govern it, or in finding them out; it exhibits feelings of envy and a propensity to reject the most deserving and distinguished as governors; unlike an aristocratic society it scorns the “embellishments” of manners; it is indifferent to the advancement of the arts and to renown, and does not sufficiently scorn temporal advantages. It is not devoted to the “virtues of heroism.”
But the greatest danger in a democratic society like that of America lies in the unlimited power of the majority, and the “inadequate securities which exist against tyranny.”
The majority possesses a power which is physical and moral at the same time; it acts upon the will as well as upon the actions of men, and it represses not only all contest, but all controversy. I know of no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America.32
In America, in a democratic republic, public opinion is the executioner. Here the dissident is eventually forced into silence by the “slights and persecutions of daily obloquy.” “If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the unlimited authority of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation, and oblige them to have recourse to physical force.”33 He notes with regret that American democracy is exclusively involved in “commercial habits,” not inclined toward cultural pursuits. In trade and manufacture it has certainly exhibited extraordinary progress. What he fears is the emergence of a new “despotism”—the despotism of a degraded egalitarianism, and the governing despotism of a tutelary power which will spare the vast mass “all care of thinking and all the trouble of living,” while providing them with “the petty and paltry pleasures” with which to glut their lives. And the warning is such as to find an echo even today:
… The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided: men are seldom forced to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting; such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd…34
But Tocqueville does not despair. If a state of equality is perhaps “less elevated,” it is more just: “and its justice constitutes its greatness and beauty.” And he concludes the entire work with mighty words:
I am full of apprehensions and hopes. I perceive mighty dangers which it is possible to ward off—mighty evils which may be avoided or alleviated; and I cling with a firmer hold to the belief that for democratic nations to be virtuous and prosperous they require but to will it… The nations of our time cannot prevent the conditions of men from becoming equal; but it depends upon themselves whether the principle of equality is to lead them to servitude or freedom, to knowledge or barbarism, to prosperity or wretchedness.35
To these sentiments, opinions, and general conclusions John Stuart Mill responded with an impassioned heartiness that found expression in two reviews, each dedicated to the individual parts. But an even greater tribute was the one he paid Tocqueville by assimilating and expanding the latter’s ideas in his own most important works.
To Tocqueville he wrote:
You have accomplished a great achievement; you have changed the face of political philosophy, you have carried on the discussions respecting the tendencies of modern society…. into a region both of height & depth, which no one before you had entered… There is no living man in Europe whom I esteem more highly or of whose friendship I should be more proud than I am of yours…36
The two reviews of Tocqueville’s book appeared in the London and Westminster Review in 1835 and in the Edinburgh Review in 1840. He agreed with the Frenchman on the perils that adhere to democratic institutions, the threats of destruction of individuality, the suppression of minority opinion, and the danger of stagnation and immobility inherent in greater and greater centralization. At the same time he made his readers aware of the limitations of Tocqueville’s analysis, particularly the latter’s overestimation of the character and role of an aristocracy. Whatever the qualities of aristocratic governments of France, Mill insisted that England’s aristocracy failed to reveal characteristics of “prudence and steadiness.” The only steadiness he saw revealed here was the tenacity with which it clung to its own privileges.37 It would be difficult, he wrote, for democracy to exhibit less of a willingness to place itself under the “guidance of the wisest… than has been shown by the English aristocracy in all periods of their history, or less than is shown by them at this moment.” He denied Tocqueville’s contention of the overall extension of the “passion for equality,” particularly so far as England was concerned. Here,
the inequalities of property are apparently greater than in any former period of history. Nearly all the land is parcelled out in great estates, among comparatively few families; and it is not the large but the small properties which are in the process of extinction. An hereditary and titled nobility, more potent by their possessions than by their social precedency, are constitutionally and really one of the great powers in the state… The passion for equality, of which M. de Tocqueville speaks almost as if it were the great moral lever of modern times, is hardly known in this country even by name… Of all countries in a state of progressive commercial civilization, Great Britain is that in which the equalization of conditions has made least progress. The extremes of wealth and poverty are wider apart, and there is a more numerous body of persons at each extreme, than in any other commercial community.38
Actually, Mill asked, does not American society resemble “any thing so much as an exaggeration of our own middle class”? Is not the “competitiveness,” “the treading upon the heels of one another,” as true of British as of American civilization today? The significant contrast between England and America lies solely in the fact that in the former, great fortunes are continually accumulated but “seldom distributed,” whereas in America the transfer of wealth is much more frequent and fluid. Nearly all the moral and social influences, Mill concludes, which Tocqueville enumerates with respect to America are “shown to be in full operation in aristocratic England.” The class that is now truly in power in England at this time is the Middle Class, which is the “arbiter of fortune and success.”
The dangers that inhere in Democracy and Egalitarianism, the “tyranny of the majority” or of the “mass,” can be obviated,
… if the superior spirits would but join with each other in considering the instruction of democracy, and not patching of the old worn-out machinery of the aristocracy, the proper object henceforth of all rational exertion.39
Auguste Comte was another of the forceful influences in the thinking of John Mill. But Mill was never to be a blind disciple and follower. Though profoundly impressed by the positive philosophy, so far as its emphasis on science as a liberating force and on its interpretation of the necessary laws of history and historical development, Mill took issue with the Frenchman on the nature of woman and the role of marriage. Mill began a correspondence with Comte in 1841. Acknowledging his grandes obligations intellectuelles, since 1818, to the French philosopher and his Course of Positive Philosophy, Mill was all for a philosophy that would replace the idea of God with one rooted in humanity. But on the subject of property and marriage, he differed with his French mentor. “While plainly recognizing… the necessity of such fundamental institutions as property and marriage,” he wrote
…, I am inclined to believe that these two institutions may be destined to undergo more serious modifications than you seem to think, although I feel totally unable to foresee what they will be. I have already mentioned to you that the question of divorce is still an open one to me, despite the powerful argument advanced in your fourth volume, and I am guilty of an even more fundamental heresy, for I do not admit, in principle, the necessary subordination of one sex to another.40
Comte countered with the assertion that biology sufficiently established a hierarchy of the sexes, showing that the anatomical and physiological organization of the female in all the animal world constituted a kind of “radical infancy.” Mill began giving ground, and even granted that the smaller brain size in woman made her less capable of continued and prolonged intellectual labors. She was better fitted, he granted, for poetry and for practical life than for science. On the other hand, he added, one must take account of the influence of “circumstances” in making woman what she was. He would not entrust the government of society solely to women, but would society not be better managed if both sexes took part in directing its interests?
Not at all! Comte replied. Women are incapable of abstract thought; they are unable to subdue passion to reason, and hence unfitted for science, philosophy, aesthetics, practical life, industry, the military, commerce; no good as directors or executors, but good enough as persons to be consulted…41
One need not be a psychologist or a psychohistorian to recreate Harriet Taylor’s reactions to the Comtean attitude. She reproached John Mill for his indecisiveness, pointing out the dangers inherent in such views, allegedly based on biology and phrenology.42
More clearly than Mill, she seemed to sense the implication of Comte’s philosophy for the whole hierarchical structure of the Positivist society. All too soon, Comte was to justify both their fears, so that by 1848, John Mill was to state that Auguste Comte’s political writings (apart from his admirable historical views) were “likely to be mischievous rather than useful.”43
How truly “mischievous” Comte’s ideas might appear to the liberal mind can be gauged from the following passage from the Positive Philosophy:
It is only by the positive polity that the revolutionary spirit can be restrained… Under the rule of the positive spirit… all the difficult and delicate questions which now keep up a perpetual irritation in the bosom of society, and which can never be settled while mere political solutions are proposed, will be scientifically estimated, to the great furtherance of social peace. At the same time it will be teaching society that, in the present state of their ideas, no political change can be of supreme importance… Again, the positive spirit tends to consolidate order, by the rational development of a wise resignation to incurable political evils… A true resignation—that is, a permanent disposition to endure, can proceed only from a deep sense of the connection of all kinds of natural phenomena with natural laws… Human nature suffers in its relations with the astronomical world, and the physical, chemical, and biological, as well as the political. How is it that we turbulently resist in the last case, while, in the others we are calm and resigned…44
Yet on the positive side, John Mill acknowledged his debt to Comte (among others) for solidifying his faith in History and the historical process, and in the potential creation of a “Social Physics” which, with the aid of Science, would enable mankind to create a science of society with all the predictive possibilities inherent in the natural sciences. Mankind then would be able to transfer its ideas of Volition from metaphysical and supernatural forces to Man himself. Ceasing to speculate on ultimate causes and concentrating on the immediate problems facing him would enable him to labor toward the amelioration of human conditions. History, Mill boasted, “has been made a science of causes and effects,” affording “the only means of predicting and guiding the future, by unfolding the agencies which have produced and still maintain the Present.”45
* * *
The 1830s were crucial years for Mill. In 1830 he met Harriet Taylor. Jeremy Bentham died in 1832; James Mill, John’s father, in 1836. Saddened as he was at the loss of his two great mentors, he could not escape the feeling that he was at the same time being liberated from the sternness that, throughout these many years of intellectual obligations, had inhibited a full expression of his differences and dissents. He had kept his inner revolution a secret from both; and of his love for Harriet his father knew practically nothing, despite the fact that by the time of his father’s death he had known her for six years! To that tide of intellectual liberation was added the torrent of his released feelings for Harriet. He felt he had grown and that he was now in a position to do justice to both his father’s and Bentham’s contribution without having to hesitate in also expressing reservations. In the same spirit, he could now acknowledge the worth and importance of the Romantic poets and thinkers like Wordsworth and Coleridge.
On one crucial issue he was departing from Bentham. While acknowledging that Bentham liberated English law from feudal shackles by expelling its mystical elements, Mill at the same time rejected his advocacy of the rights to a franchise of the “numerical majority.” In his eyes, Bentham had failed to take note of the actual and potential “despotism of public opinion.”46
Mill defined “radicalism”—it must be remembered that the Utilitarians called themselves “philosophical radicals”—as the “claim of pre-eminence for personal qualities above conventional and accidental advantages.” The “radical,” he wrote,
believing the government of this country to be in the main a selfish oligarchy, carried on for the personal benefit of the ruling classes… [and] not Utopian enough to address himself to the reason of his rulers… endeavours to attain his object by taking away their power.
Mill’s “radicalism” included a time-honored reverence for property and a diehard abhorrence of universal suffrage. He is staggered by the anticipated preponderance and “mass of brutish ignorance… of the barbarians whom Universal Suffrage will let in… of the depraved habits of a large proportion of the well-paid artisans,” no less than by the debased condition of the agricultural laborers. And he does not wonder that the “middle classes, who know all these things…, should tremble at the idea of entrusting political power to such hands.”47
At this point—in 1839—he is still aroused by the failure of the Reform Bill of 1832 which, he saw, instead of weakening the hold the landed oligarchy exercised over the country, had in fact strengthened it. “They are the government,” he wrote. As for the more radical labor theoreticians, he has no more use for them than for the oligarchic cliques.
They believe they are ground down by the capitalist. They believe that his superiority of means, and power of holding out longer than they can, enables him virtually to fix wages. They ascribe the lowness of those wages, not, as is the truth, to the over-competition produced by their own excessive numbers, but to competition itself; that state of things inevitable so long as the two classes exist separate—so long as the distinction is kept up between Capitalist and Labourer. These notions are in fact Owenism… but Owenism does not necessarily, it does not in the mind of its benevolent founder, imply any war against property. What is hoped for is, not violently to subvert, but quietly to supersede the present arrangements for the employment of capital and labour.48
The best course for labor is to put itself in the hands of the middle classes—“the motto of a Radical politician should be: Government by means of the middle for the working classes.”
The 1840s, soon called the “Hungry Forties,” presented a sufficient number of problems to perplex, terrify, harass, and depress the Victorian conscience. There was the hysterical railway boom, the frenzied speculation and building of railway lines— true of Europe no less than of Great Britain—with its eventual collapse. There was the even more serious potato blight, which destroyed the crops not only in Ireland, but also in Great Britain, Belgium, and Germany. The wheat crop had also suffered. Along with these afflictions, the prohibitive Corn Laws still prevailed, to the profit and enjoyment of the landed interests. John Mill was aroused by the torpor and indifference that seemed to dominate British society, and he excoriated the upper classes for their deficient intellect, will, and character.
He even allowed himself a few dangerous ideas. Thus, he wrote in 1847:
In England… I often think that a violent revolution is very much needed, in order to give that general shake-up to the torpid mind of the nation which the French Revolution gave to Continental Europe. England has never had any general break-up of old associations & hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head. After all, what country in Europe can be compared with France in the adaptation of its social state to the benefit of the great mass of its people, freed as they are from any tyranny which comes home to the greater number, with justice easily accessible, & and strongest inducements to personal prudence & forethought? And would this have been the case without the great changes in the state of property which, even supposing good intentions in the Government, could hardly have been produced by anything less than a Revolution?49
Then came the news of the February Revolution in France. Harriet and John rejoiced. A French republic established! He could not contain his enthusiasm:
I am hardly yet out of breath from the reading and thinking about it. Nothing can possibly exceed the importance of it to the world or the immensity of the interests which are at stake on its success… The republicans have succeeded… Communism has now for the first time a deep root, and has spread widely in France, and a large part of the republican strength is more or less imbued with it…. If France succeds in establishing a republic and a reasonable republican government, all the rest of Europe, except England and Russia, will be republicanized in ten years and England itself probably before we die. There never was a time when so great a drama was being played out in one generation….50
He was outraged by John Austin’s expressed horror at what was happening in France, an event which in Mill’s eyes had “broken the fetters of all Europe”; and even more so by Lord Brougham, who had called the Revolution in France the “work of some half-dozen artisans, who met in a printing office…, a handful of armed ruffians, headed by a shoemaker and a sub-editor.”51 Mill was particularly irked by Brougham’s failure to understand that the new government of France was creating productive employment, encouraging cooperative associations, and at the same time protecting private property.
Mill could not pretend to, nor did he claim to, possess a thorough understanding of the vast meaning of the events of 1848. Aside from the overshadowing historical revolutions throughout Europe, 1848 was also, it must be remembered, the year of publication of both Mill’s Principles of Political Economy and Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto. Both works dramatically symbolize the epochal polarization that was taking place in the realm of theory, while the historic events of that and the following years were to inscribe that polarization in blood. Firmly anchored as Mill was in bourgeois political and economic thought, he could not escape the impress of the new events on his own thinking. He recognized that Socialism (or Communism) was on the agenda of history. Subsequent editions of his Political Economy would reveal to what extent he was ready to modify his views in the light of the historic events and changes and under the influence of Harriet Taylor.
He had begun by regarding private enterprise as superior to any other even “in ideal circumstances,” and communal ownership as “too chimerical to be reasoned against.” Nothing was so much in harmony with the requirements of human nature as that mode of distribution of the produce of industry, which allows a share of each individual to depend on that individual’s own energies and exertions. “It is not the subversion of the system of individual property that should be aimed at, but the improvement of it.” He rejected, as he had always done, the right of private property in land, and declared himself for a peasant ownership. In his theory of labor, he was still tied to the so-called wage-fund theory, which held that only a fixed sum of capital was available for labor, that the remedy for labor’s ills lay in family planning, and that no activity by the workers themselves, such as strikes, combinations or legislation by government, would be of any help or use. Under Harriet’s promptings, he was willing to grant that the “poor have come out of leading strings,” that they should be treated as equals, and that their future depended on “the degree in which they could be made rational beings.”
On the whole, Harriet appeared to be more aware of the nature and power of upper-class interests than Mill. In the midst of the disturbances of 1848, when Irish unrest was being savagely repressed and the Habeas Corpus was suspended, she pointed out to him how differently the upper classes reacted to the old bugaboo of “government interference” when it affected their own interests; but how indifferently they reacted when the government invoked repressive legislation against the poor. Harriet was in her way a convert to Socialism, and while she did not succeed in bringing him around to her views, she elicited certain concessions which he made public in the 1852 edition of his Principles of Political Economy.
If, therefore, the choice were to be made between Communism with all its chances, and the present state of society, with all its sufferings and injustices; if the institution of private property necessarily carried with it as a consequence, that the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour—the largest portions to those who have never worked at all… the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life; if this or Communism were the alternative, all the difficulties, great or small, of Communism would be but as dust in the balance. But to make the comparison more applicable, we must compare Communism at its best, with the régime of individual property, not as it is, but as it might be made. The principle of private property has never yet had a fair trial in any country; and less so, perhaps, in this country than in some other.52
He never threw off those fears he harbored of the “tyranny of the majority”—the fears of universal suffrage. If all were to have the vote, he insisted, then there must be provisions for giving some “greater weight” to the suffrage of those of the “more educated”… “the more intrisically valuable” members of society, those “more competent for the general affairs of life.” “A person who cannot read is not as good, for the purpose of human life, as one who can.”53
It did not occur to him that the “educated” voter might himself represent a special “class” interest, even if unconsciously. The experience of the American Civil War in its repercussions in England showed him that at times the lower orders were more capable of noble impulses, of unselfishness, than their social superiors. For in this instance it was the operatives in the British cotton mills who, to their own economic disadvantage, supported the cause of the American North by boycotting Southern cotton, while their upper-class (and presumably more “educated”) masters placed their own interests above all moral considerations—in this case the matter of black slavery.
But John Stuart Mill was not one to put self-interest ahead of moral principles. John Taylor died in 1849, leaving to Harriet a life interest in his entire property. Before marrying Harriet, John Mill made a formal declaration renouncing any rights to such property were they to be married. The marriage took place on April 21, 1851. Their happiness was marred only by their troubled health. Both suffered from consumption, but hers was more advanced. That she was to die in the very year of his retirement, when his pension and the income from his books would have enabled both of them to enjoy the leisure and luxury of joint creation, was indeed tragic. Her death occurred on November 3, 1858 in Avignon, France, and she was buried in the local cemetery of the suburban St.-Véran. There Mill bought a small house, in which he was to spend the greater part of his life. At the Hermitage de Monloisier, his step-daughter Helen took over the cares of the household as well as secretarial duties, proving an invaluable support to Mill for the rest of his life. Though for a time shattered by Harriet’s death, he kept his promise to her to continue what he considered their joint efforts, publishing “On Liberty” in 1859, and “The Subjection of Women” in 1861. In his brief term as a member of Parliament, he moved, during the debate on the Reform Bill in 1867, that the word “man” be replaced by “person.” Though voted down, he at least had the satisfaction that one third of the scant attendance supported him. He was fervent in championing the interests of the North during the American Civil War, and hailed the Emancipation. He died in Avignon on May 7, 1873, and was buried beside Harriet.
Though his longer works, such as the Political Economy and the Logic, would remain academic texts for many years, and in both the Scandinavian countries and Russia (along with his “Utilitarianism”) became breviaries for advanced liberals, it is his Autobiography, and his essays “On Liberty” and “The Subjection of Women,” that have the most profound meaning for our own generations. The Autobiography remains a penetrating, moving psychological document. The two essays are complementary, both concerned with the problems of equality and individuality. Both deal with forms of enslavement and the possibilities of emancipation—and both were to acquire additional importance with the times, as the issues gained wider significance. For they both address the disaster that can befall a society when it rejects or suppresses valuable minority ideas and opinions; and with the tragic loss it risks by repressing the productive capacities of a good portion of its members. Debasement and crippling inhere in such enslavement not only to the enslaved, but to the enslaver as well. Tyranny distills within itself a destructive poison, whether it be that of the social mass or of the individual within a family. Mill attacks the tyranny of custom, when it is raised to the level of the “natural” and achieves the rank of “universality,” becoming a “right.” Such a custom accepts slavery and force as natural phenomena—not jarring “with modern civilization, any more than domestic slavery among the Greeks jarred with their notion as a free people.”
The irrational or anti-rational, disguised euphemistically as “instinct,” becomes identified with the “intention of Nature and the ordinance of God.” They become particularly potent elements in any discussion of the “nature” of woman and her position in the family and in society, her “rights” and “duties.”
Mill’s “The Subjection of Women” was (and is) not merely a manifesto, eloquent and moving, of woman’s rights, or an appeal for justice, but in a broader sense a universal manifesto of human rights the world over, embracing all minorities.
The subjection of woman in modern society, Mill holds, is based on the right of the stronger over the weaker. It is also based on a total ignorance of the “nature” of woman, the understanding being obscured by the very character of her relation to man in our present society. Restricted as she is by the common demand of what Mill calls the “hot-house and stove cultivation,” she is bound to remain a secret—her life a secret—the secret of an inferior who cannot afford to be sincere or open toward someone she must “look up to.” And the secret will not be revealed “until women themselves have told all they have to tell”—that is, until they reach a state of equality. Dependent as she is on her husband for her subsistence, woman is doubly a bond-slave by virtue of the law—the marriage contract that not only makes her the property of her spouse, but makes her own property her husband’s—so that “what is mine (the woman is speaking) is yours, but what is yours is not mine.” The morality of submission engenders in the male—in many, many instances—brutality, selfishness, and self-indulgence. Wife and family are considered “belongings.” The family turns into a school of despotism, when it should be a school of virtue and freedom.
By reason of such arrangements, society excludes one half of mankind from occupations and functions which are arrogated as a monopoly by the stronger sex, giving preference to males of lesser mental equipment merely by virtue of their birth as males, in preference to women of indisputably higher intelligence and capacities. In the same way, woman is enjoined from participating in public affairs, from having a voice in the choice of those who are to govern her in the public domain.
So far as women’s capacities are concerned, Mill insists that “it cannot now be known how much of the existing mental differences between men and women is natural, and how much artificial; whether there are any natural differences at all…”54
We do not know whether they could produce a Homer or Aristotle; but we do know that they could produce and have produced a Deborah, or a Joan of Arc. We do know that they have produced remarkable works of fiction—such as those of Madame de Staël and George Sand. [Mill might have added some names closer to home, such as those of the Brontës and Mrs. Gaskell.]
But not the least loss entailed by the exclusion of women from active life in society—aside from the reduction by one half of the “mental faculties available for the higher services of humanity”—is the loss to woman herself, the impoverishment of her own inner and outer life; in fact, her dehumanization, her depersonalization.
There is nothing after disease, indigence and guilt so fatal to the pleasurable enjoyment of life as the want of a worthy outlet for the active faculties.55
And he concludes:
What in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be fulfilled by others, or such as those others do not think worthy of their acceptance… When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification— first in the loss of the most inspiring and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual being.56
In the breadth of his conception, in the sweep of his humanism, Mill was addressing not only his own century, which long remained not even partially persuaded by his argument—but a fortiori also the twentieth. While pleading for the humanization of a whole sex, he was at the same time pleading for the humanization of any minority—whether racial or religious. In his essay “On Liberty” he is no less fervently concerned with the preservation of the human element in the individual within a society dominated by the sway of the majority. He is interested in and concerned with the “interests of a man as a progressive being.” Once more he is pleading the cause of a “minority”—pitted against a society whose general tendency is “to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind,” where, as in England, the middle class acts as a “collective mediocrity.” What is essential in such a society as ours, Mill contends, is the safeguarding of individuality within those portions of the body politic that affect only the individual himself: liberty of conscience, of thought and feeling; the freedom of one’s opinions and the right to their expression. Truth is after all a “question of reconciling and combining opposites.” The incubus of conformity is upon us; we are living in an age of conformity where there is “scarcely any outlet for energy… except business.” We are once more, as in the battle for sexual equality, engaged in the “war of truths,” and the suppression of a potential truth, though it smack of heresy, is bound to debase the oppressor as well.
It is not the minds of heretics that are deteriorated most by the ban placed on all inquiry, which does not end in the orthodox conclusions. The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy.57
In the “present low state of the human mind”—as Mill puts it—no government, whether aristocratic or democratic, can rise above mediocrity, “except as the sovereign Many have let themselves be guided… by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few.”58
The initiation of all wise or noble things comes and must come from individuals; generally at first from some one individual. The honour and glory of the average man is that he is capable of following that initiative…
It is such individuals who may be the bearers of the truth; even if only, at times, of a partial truth. And even if the “received opinion” be the whole truth, such truth, unless challenged, may degenerate into nothing more than a blind prejudice, and the “dogma” become merely a mechanical or formal profession “inefficacious for good.”
Even “eccentricity” is to be commended in an age such as ours, in order to break through the “tyranny of opinion.” “The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contains.”59
Much as he was opposed to the tyranny of the “collective mediocrity” evidenced by the middle classes, Mill was no less critical of government interference in the lives and activities of its citizens—particularly suspicious of a dominant bureaucracy. (Not that he was unaware that “collective mediocrity” and government might not represent identical special interests.) Every extension of the powers of the government, he averred, “causes its influence over hopes and fear to be more widely diffused, and converts, more and more, the active and ambitious part of the public into hangers-on of the government, or some party which aims at becoming the government.”60
And he concludes his essay “On Liberty”:
The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it… A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hand even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of vital power, which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.
Here was one of Victorian England’s most luminous minds struggling with what was to prove the appalling dilemma of Victorian society. He was the apostle of Reason, with whose power he was hopeful of “reconciling opposites”—conflicting interests and ideologies. He was certain that the domination of an oligarchy of the landed interests (which he regarded as “sinister”), which to him represented the real government, had to be or was about to be broken. But here was another oligarchy, no less ominous, but pretty certain of eventual triumph—the thriving capitalism—that was unloosing new problems no less threatening to the “conscience” of the thoughtful bourgeois.
The bourgeois conscience was doubly challenged. Here was the phenomenon of apparent injustices and exactions perpetrated by their own class; here were also the importunities and pressures of the lower orders demanding “justice.” And here also was the threat to the sanctity of their own individualities—assimilation to mass, to mediocrity. The sanctity of an individualism now in danger of being violated, if not extinguished, forced upon them a new struggle for “freedom.” This was their form of “alienation.” The superior moral values which they represented, they imagined, could not only resist the pressures of conformity and mediocrity, but might even serve as the sources of adjudication, arbitration, and mediation among the many conflicting groups and ideas, reconciling these in the name of an even higher morality. Such a superior morality might now serve as a surrogate for religion, which seemed equally vulnerable in the chaos of the new social order.
But triumphant Empire, Commerce, Industry, and Finance found a new secular religion in its own right. It will be remembered that Mill’s “On Liberty” appeared in 1859, the same year as Darwin’s Origin of Species. And that was a significant but fateful coincidence. In Darwin’s evolutionary theory the potential middle class saw the emergence of a god which, even more powerfully than that of Bentham, James Mill, or John Stuart Mill, proved the superterrestrial dogma that laissez-faire was a law of Nature. Here was a new dogma built on solid scientific ground! As Malthus had opened the eyes of Darwin with his “iron law of wages,” so now Malthus and Darwin, combined, presented the capitalist world with a new theology, confirming the rights of Empire, and political, social, and economic expansion and domination, by analogies with such natural phenomena as “the survival of the fittest” and “the struggle for existence.” The God of Competition and the “survival of the strongest” were built into God’s universal process from time immemorial.
The influence of John Stuart Mill gradually diminished with the years. So far as the working classes were concerned, after 1848 they sought new forms of organization, and found social and political theories designed to forge a new consciousness of themselves as a “class.” Here too, John Stuart Mill had nothing to offer them.
Yet the questions and problems he left as a heritage to a tortured Liberalism would not only bedevil the whole of the nineteenth century, but would prove very provocative even to the twentieth. Reconciliation of the demands of Individuality and the Mass, the Individual and the State, the right of Dissent and the supreme Social Good, are problems still unresolved. They are still crucial problems even for those societies whose birth and growth Mill could scarcely have anticipated, where new social forms and relationships, if the future is to be theirs, demand the resolutions of these antinomies, the reconciliation of Equality, Liberty, and Individuality, as well as Criticism and Dissent.