1863
572.
TO ALEXANDER BAIN
B[lackheath] P[ark] Jan. 7. 1863
Dear Bain—
I have been here now for about a month & as it is a long time since I either wrote to you or heard from you I think it is time to send you a bulletin from myself & to ask for one from you.
I have done a good deal of work on Hamilton at Avignon & some here, though in both places I have had & shall have for some time longer, exceptional occupations which make me rather slow in getting on: My plan has been to go deliberately through the whole writings of Hamilton, writing down in the form of notes, the substance of what I as yet find to say on each point. This will make it comparatively easy to write the book when I have finished the preparatory work. The only point which I have yet developed at any length is the formation of the idea of externality, & consequently of matter, & this, I think I have brought out more fully & clearly than had ever been done before, though my theory does not differ essentially from yours or from Grote’s, as indeed from our premises there can be but one theory. But I have grappled with the details of the subject in a manner which I have nowhere yet seen. I mean in this book to do what the nature & scope of the Logic forbade me to do there, to face the ultimate metaphysical difficulties of every question on which I touch.
By the way, is it not surprising that Hamilton shd have believed & made the world believe, that he held the doctrine of the relativity of human knowledge? As held by him the doctrine is little better than a play upon the word knowledge, since he maintains that a great mass of Belief, differing from Knowledge in the mode but not in the certainty of conviction, may philosophically & ought morally to be entertained respecting the attributes of the Unknowable. Nor is even this all, for he does not hold to the doctrine of unknowability even in his own sense; but thinks that the primary qualities of matter are given in Consciousness as attributes of Things in Themselves: I used to wonder at the catena of authorities he brought to prove that almost all philosophers have thought as he did; but I ought to have known that he was more likely to be right in his erudition than in his philosophy, & I now find him so, for his own doctrine amounts to no more than what was thought by the writers whom he quotes. His speculations on the point seem to me of no philosophic value except as refutations of Schelling & Hegel, while the use they can be practically put to is shown in Mansel’s detestable, to me absolutely loathsome book. We are taught there, from Hamilton’s premises, that as we cannot know what God is in himself, nothing that we are told concerning him is in the smallest degree incredible because it is monstrous to the human reason or conscience; & that because we cannot know what Absolute Goodness is, we are at liberty & in some cases are bound to believe that it is not the perfection of human goodness but the direct contrary of it. It is true that these conclusions are very illogically drawn from Hamilton’s & Mansel’s own premises; these being, that we do not know God as he is in himself, but know him as we do other things, in his relation to us; in other words, phenomenally; which places him in exactly the same category, as an object of thought, with our human fellow creatures, & with Matter; which also we do not know as they are in themselves. God, in fact, is a subject of knowledge insofar as thinkable at all, namely as a subject of phenomenal experience, & as such is amenable to the canons of phenomenal credibility; & if any proposition concerning Man or Matter may & ought to be rejected because it violates those canons, so for the same reason may any proposition concerning God.
Having been so much disappointed by Hamilton’s conception of the relativity of human knowledge I shd like to look again at Ferrier to see if his is any better. I think you have my copy of the Institutes of Metaphysic; if so, & if you are not at present needing it, I shd be obliged by your sending it, but this need not be done for the next two or three weeks, for I have enough in hand to occupy me during that time.
In Herbert Spencer’s “first principles” I do find a much better conception of the doctrine of relativity though if he holds to it in its proper sense he must give up much which he has said in his Principles of Psychology. The book is a remarkable one in many respects & its wide reaching systematisation of so many heterogeneous elements is very imposing. But was there ever so strange a notion (for a man who sees so much) as that the doctrine of the Conservation of Force is a priori & a law of Consciousness? He expresses himself almost as if he thought that there is no objective standard of truth at all, which is in one sense true, but not in the obvious sense; inasmuch as each person’s phenomenal experience is to him a standard relatively objective, & the correction of error consists to each mind in bringing its ideas & their relations into nearer accordance with what are or would be in the given circumstances, its sensations or impressions & their relations. Of course Grote meant nothing at variance with this, but the omission to state it explicitly seems to me both an imperfection in the theory & a great stumbling block to its reception & on my pointing it out he at once said that he would supply the defect.
We have just returned from a visit to Grote during which I had an opportunity of reading some of his MS. I chose the Theætetus as falling in with the subject of my present thoughts & I was delighted to find how good it is. He has triumphed wonderfully over the difficulty of rendering the thoughts or semi-thoughts of Plato & of those on whom Plato commented, with the language of modern philosophy; the view of Plato himself which goes through it will, I think, be recognized as original & striking; & his own thoughts on the matters discussed are good & well stated. I found however an oversight which you also must have perceived in reading it, viz. that his mode of defending the Protagorean maxim is very open to misconception.
I do not know if I have told you how great an admirer you have in my translator Mr Gomperz. (I call him my translator because his translation of the Logic is nearly finished.) He is the most clearheaded German I have ever yet known or known of. He is coming to London some time in this winter & I am sorry the time of year will prevent me from bringing you & him together unless indeed he shd travel northward, in which case I am sure he will wish to be introduced to you.
With our kind regards to Mrs Bain
573.
TO MRS. HENRY HUTH
Jan. 7. 1863
Dear Madam
The plan which has occurred to you for the home education of your sons is excellent, provided that you can succeed in finding any person of the calibre you require, who would be willing and able to exercise the general superintendence which you contemplate. That, however, is the difficulty; and it is one in regard to which I am not able to give the smallest suggestion.
Whether, however, you are able to realize your wishes in this respect or not, I think I should recommend as what would be ultimately desirable, to send your sons to one or other of the two old Universities. Twenty years ago these were about the last places which I should have recommended in any parallel case; but they are not very much changed, and free enquiry and speculation on the deepest and highest questions, instead of being crushed or deadened, are now more rife there than almost anywhere else in England. And the places not only afford great facilities for study, but a strong stimulus to it, by the competition for honours. If Oxford should be chosen, Balliol College, where they would be under Jowett, would be preferable, not only on account of his liberal tone of thought, but also of his remarkable success in training pupils in the studies of the place. I mention this because I believe it is necessary to apply a long time (even years) beforehand, in order to be admitted to the College.
If you decide to look forward to one of the Universities, what is to be done in the meanwhile will naturally be considerably influenced by that decision. There is little difficulty, I believe, in finding persons well qualified to prepare youths for the matriculation examinations. Meanwhile, both for that purpose and for general cultivation, your sons might probably with advantage attend some of the classes at University College, London; and if they are still of an age for school, and you are not able to do better for them at home, the London University School is, I should think, one of the least objectionable which could be found. Mr Key is a good scholar, a man of considerable ability, and free from the ordinary prejudices of schoolmasters, at least those of an ecclesiastical kind.
As you have allowed me to read Mr Buckle’s impressions respecting your sons, I cannot help saying that I hope you will not be in the smallest degree discouraged by his having thought one of them naturally slow, since he also testifies to his being painstaking. Not only in the pursuits of ordinary life, but in those of intellect, much more depends on labour and perseverance than on quickness: the last is even often a snare, since those who can do with ease, much that to others requires labour, often get into the habit of not doing at all, anything which they cannot do with ease; a habit as fatal to real and great eminence as hopeless stupidity would be.
I am Dear Madam
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
574.
TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES
Jan. 9. 1863
Dear Sir
Many thanks for your note. I shall avail myself of every occasion that offers for making known to Americans how powerful and warm a supporter their cause has in Mr Goldwin Smith.
Since I wrote last, I have seen the article in the Spectator on a negro army and I think as highly of it as you do. That paper (which I had not seen for a long time) pleased me so much both by its opinions and its ability that I have commenced taking it in.
I thought your reply to the Saturday Review very good and effective, and I agree in substance with the view you take of the interest of the slaveholders, quoad the renewal of the slave trade. The true parallel case is that which you put, when you compare their position to that of the owners of existing machines, in relation to an improvement in machinery. But I think, both in the one case and in the other, their interest in keeping up the value of their existing stock might, conceivably, preponderate over their interest in cheapening the means of future production. Obviously it does so if they are going to sell their slaves, or machinery. Even if they are not, their present credit, or means of borrowing is increased by the high price of their stock. If neither of these things is of importance to them, still other and new producers starting with cheaper slaves or machinery, would be able to undersell them, and by lowering the price of the produce, diminish the annual returns to their capital in the full ratio of the diminution in the pecuniary value of the capital itself. They could not transfer part of their capital elsewhere, for they have lost part of the capital itself. What would, I think, prevent their interests from suffering on the whole, is the vastness of the market, which is capable of absorbing a greatly increased quantity of produce. By working their slaves harder, they could at once recover at least a part of their loss: when the slaves were worn out by overwork, and replaced by a cheaper article, the loss would cease altogether; and both before and afterwards they would be in the situation of manufacturers [in] a very brisk and thriving trade, who almost always gain more by increasing the total production, than they lose by the depreciation, or in many cases even by the total sacrifice of superseded machinery.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
575.
TO HENRY PITMAN
13 January, 1863
I am sorry to hear that so useful a publication as the Co-operator has to complain of want of encouragement.
A vehicle for Co-operative news and an organ for discussing the many important practical questions which arise in the progress of Co-operation, is very much wanted; and its discontinuance would be much to be regretted. I have paid £1 . . . for the extension fund.
576.
TO HENRY REEVE
Jan. 15. 1860
Dear Sir
In going through Mr Austin’s Lectures, I find that one important Lecture, numbered as the 40th, is wanting, and that an appeal is made to any of Mr Austin’s pupils who possess notes of it, to supply them.
I made and wrote out rather full notes of the whole course, and though the series is not complete—having been lent to various persons, by some of whom it was returned imperfect—I find on reference that the missing lecture (No. 46 in my numeration) is among those I have left. I shall be very happy if the notes can be made useful to supply, in however imperfect a manner, the hiatus.
All the other notes are equally at Mrs Austin’s disposal, if she should wish to examine them in case the developments they contain of the memoranda which it appears that Mr Austin often made for extemporaneous exposition, should include passages worth subjoining to the Lectures in an Appendix or otherwise. In looking for the missing lecture, my eye fell upon a criticism on the Code Napoleon, which is not in the printed sheets, and which seems to me exceedingly well worth preserving.
I am
yrs very truly
J. S. Mill
Henry Reeve Esq.
577.
TO HENRY REEVE
Jan. 17. 1863
Dear Sir
I have sent to your address by the Parcels Delivery Company, the whole of the notes. The Lectures of which no notes remain, are Nos 17 to 24, and 61. I have put separate from the rest No 46 (corresponding to the missing No 40 in the printed sheets) together with the one immediately preceding it, which contains the remarks on the Prussian and French Codes, and which, though one of the most important Lectures of the whole course, is also totally absent from the printed series.
I am
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
578.
TO AN UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT
Jan. 17. 1863
Dear Sir
I shall not be able to attend the meeting, but if I have an opportunity, I will endeavour to place the tickets you sent advantageously to the cause.
I read with great pleasure the report of your interview with Mr Adams, and am particularly glad that in his judgment, public opinion in this country is improving on the subject of the struggle in America. My own impression on the point coincides with his.
I am Dear Sir
yours faithfully
J. S. Mill
579.
TO SAMUEL BAILEY
B[lackheath] P[ark] Jan. 21, 1863
Dear Sir—
Allow me to thank you very sincerely for the gift of your last two works. The one on Shakespeare was very pleasant reading & many of the conjectural emendations seemed to me happy, while in other cases I fancied that a good deal might be said for the received text. But it is almost an impertinence in me to make any observations on a subject on which my opinion is so little worth consideration.
The new volume of your Letters is, I think, at least equal to either of its predecessors. Like everything I have read of yours, it is both instructive & interesting, & if, as might be expected on such a subject, I sometimes differ from you, it is always as from a thinker, & from one whose canons of thought are not fundamentally different from my own. You may probably anticipate what are our principal points of difference. I am not able to see how it is possible that the mind shd directly perceive that one event produces another or how the idea of producing could be suggested without repeated experience of the sequence of one event upon the other. Neither can I see how a fact can be known to be necessary by direct perception or how necessity can be in any way a direct subject of human apprehension. Apart from these points & minor ones connected with them I agree with you in essentials on almost [all] the topics discussed. In several instances you have done, & done well, what I have been long wishing to see done. This is particularly true of your remarks on Comte’s depreciation of psychology: & on the improper assimilation by Comte & others, of physical to moral laws, an assimilation dictated by their desire to attach the idea of religious obligation to a prudential regard for the warnings of physical science.
In the discussion on Personal Identity you have (I think for the very first time) chosen the right starting point for the inquiry by considering first what makes me the same person to the apprehension of others while psychologists have usually started from the far more complex question, what makes me the same person to my own apprehension. You have in fact commenced the examination of personal identity by considering what it is which constitutes identity in the other & simpler cases in which it is predicated; & by thus for the first time applying to the question the only philosophical method of investigation you have as might be expected, arrived at much better results.
On the subject of Language I of course agree in your principal thesis. The origin & history of a word are not the appropriate evidence of its present meaning. But have you not a little underrated the worth of this kind of knowledge in its bearing on the great questions of metaphysics? The most keenly contested questions in psychology are those which relate to the origin of certain of our mental notions; & is not light often thrown on this by the origin of the corresponding words? A certain school of psychologists are always contending that such & such notions must be part of the original furniture of the mind, on the ground that there have always been names for them; & we know how strong is the tendency to suppose that whatever has got a name, has a real existence, not as a particular mode of contemplating things which when looked at for other purposes are known by other names, but as an independent entity. It seems to me very pertinent in opposition to this notion, to shew (if it can be shewn) that, for instance, all abstract names were originally concrete, & that all the more general words of relation were once nouns or verbs.
The part of your book which treats of “Moral Sentiments” I value even more than all the rest. Several important points of what we agree in holding as the true theory I have not seen so well brought out anywhere else. I am the more interested by what you have done because I have myself been led into a very similar vein of thought & have published it in a series of three papers which unless you are a habitual reader of Fraser’s Magazine, you are not likely to have heard of. If I reprint them separately as I am thinking of doing I will beg your acceptance of a copy. In the last of these papers (December 1861) I derive most of the peculiar characters of the moral sentiment from the element of vindictiveness which enters into it. Our modes of developing the idea are different but not conflicting.
I am Dear Sir
580.
TO THOMAS HARE
Jan. 26. 1863.
Dear Sir
I presume Mr Holden has sent to you, as either he or someone else has sent to me, the Sydney paper containing the debate in the Lower House on the bill respecting the Legislative council. If you have seen it, you must indeed have been delighted. The second reading carried, and a large majority of the speakers on both sides (including the head of a late ministry ) strong supporters of your system, with full understanding of it! How encouraging this is as to the reception it will obtain here, when people once give their minds to it as a question of the day. If we could obtain as good a debate as that for it in the House of Commons, it would not be far from being carried.
I inclose a letter I have received from the Foreign Minister (I believe) of the Sandwich Islands, announcing his intention to bring forward there a proposal for the representation of minorities. Surely this is as great a wonder as anything in our time, marked out as it is from all former times by the universality of discussion and progress all over the world. Please return the letter. I am
yrs very truly
J. S. Mill
581.
TO JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY
B[lackheath] P[ark] Jan. 26. 1863
Dear Sir.
You can imagine better than I can tell you how much your letter interested me. I am obliged to you for the information respecting the first settlers in New England. I did not know that there were so many people of family among them though I knew there were some and I was quite aware that the place which the refuse went to was Virginia. All the popular literature of the century following shews that colony to have been the one regarded as the Botany Bay of that time. But my argument did not turn upon this nor was I thinking of race or blood but of habits & principles. New England as I understand it, was essentially a middle class colony: the puritans of the higher classes who took part in its foundation were persons whose sympathies went in a different channel from that of class or rank. The southern colonies on the contrary were founded on aristocratic principles, several of them by aristocratic men as such, & we know that the greatest of them, Virginia, retained aristocratic institutions till Jefferson succeeded in abolishing them.
Concerning the Alabama, most people of sense in this country, I believe, are reserving their opinion until they hear what the Govt has to say for itself. My own first impression was, that the Govt was not bound nor even permitted by international rules to prevent the equipment of such a vessel, provided it allows exactly similar liberty to the other combatant. But it is plain this notion was wrong since the Govt has shewn, by issuing an order which arrived too late, that it considered itself bound to stop the Alabama. What explanation it can give of the delay will be known when Parlt meets; & what it ought to do now, in consequence of its previous default, a person must be better acquainted than I am with international law to be able to judge. But I expect to have a tolerably decided opinion on the subject after it has been discussed.
I write to you in much better spirits than I have been in since I saw you. In the first place things are now going in an encouraging manner in the West. Murfreesboro is an important as well as glorious achievement & from the the general aspects of things I feel great confidence that you will take Vicksburg & cut off Arkansas & Texas which then by your naval superiority will soon be yours. Then I exult in (what from observation of the politics of that state I was quite prepared for, though not for the unanimity with which it seems to have been done) the passing over of Missouri from slavery to freedom: a fact which ought to cover with shame, if they were capable of it, the wretched creatures who treated Mr Lincoln’s second proclamation as waste paper & who described the son of John Quincy Adams as laughing in his sleeve when he professed to care for the freedom of the negro! But I am now also in very good heart about the progress of opinion here. When I returned I already found things better than I expected. Friends of mine who are heartily with your cause, who are much in society & who speak in the gloomiest terms of what the general feeling was a twelvemonth ago, already thought that a change had commenced. And I heard every now & then that some person of intellect & influence whom I did not know before to be with you was with you very decidedly. You must have read one of the most powerful & most thorough pieces of writing in your defence that has yet appeared, under the signature Anglo Saxon in the Daily News. That letter is by Goldwin Smith, & though it is not signed with his name he is willing (as I am authorized to say) that it shd be known. Again Dr Whewell, one from whom I shd not have expected so much, feels, I am told, so strongly on your side that people complain of his being rude to them on the subject & he will not suffer the Times to be in his house. These, you may say, are but individual cases. But a decided movement in your favour has begun among the public since it has been evident that your Govt is really in earnest about getting rid of slavery. I have always said that it was ignorance, not ill will, which made the majority of the English public go wrong about this great matter. Difficult as it may well be for you to comprehend it, the English public were so ignorant of all the antecedents of the quarrel that they really believed what they were told, that slavery was not the ground, scarcely even the pretext, of the war. But now when the public acts of your Govt have shewn that now at least it aims at entire slave emancipation, that your victory means that & your failure means the extinction of all present hope of it, many feel very differently. When you entered decidedly into this course, your detractors abused you more violently for doing it than they had before for not doing it, & the Times & Saturday Review began favouring us with the very arguments & almost in the very language which we used to hear from the W. India slaveholders to prove slavery perfectly consistent with the Bible & with Xtianity. This was too much; it overshot the mark. The Anti Slavery feeling is now thoroughly rousing itself. Liverpool has led the way by a splendid meeting of which the Times suppressed all mention, thus adding according to its custom to the political dishonesty a pecuniary fraud upon its subscribers. But you must have seen a report of this meeting; you must have seen how Spence did his utmost, & how he was met; & that the object was not merely a single demonstration but the appointment of a Committee to organize an action on the public mind. There are none like the Liverpool people for making an organization of that sort succeed if once they put their hands to it. The day when I read this I read in the same day’s newspaper, two speeches by cabinet ministers: one by Milner Gibson as thoroughly & openly with you as was consistent with the position of a cabinet minister; the other by the D. of Argyll was a simple anti slavery speech, denouncing the proslavery declaration of the Southern bishops, but his delivering such a speech at that time & place has but one meaning. I do not know if you have seen Cairnes’ Lecture or whether you are aware that it has been taken up & largely circulated by religious societies & is at its fourth edition. A new & enlarged edition of his great book is on the point of publication & will I have no doubt be very widely read & powerfully influential.
Foreigners ought not to regard the Times as representing the British nation. Of course a paper which is so largely read & bought & so much thought of as the Times is, must have a certain amount of suitability to the people that buy it. But the line it takes on any particular question is much more a mere matter of accident than is supposed. It is sometimes better than the public & sometimes worse. It was better—on Competitive Examinations & on the revised Educational Code —in each case owing to the accidental position of a particular man who happened to write in it—both which men I could name to you. I am just as fully persuaded as if I could name the man, that the attitude it has long held respecting slavery, & now on the American question, is equally owing to the accidental interests or sympathies of some one person connected with the paper. The Sat. Review again is understood to be the property of the bitterest Tory enemy America has, Beresford Hope. Unfortunately these papers, through the influence they obtain in other ways & in the case of the Times very much in consequence of the prevailing notion that it speaks the opinion of all England, are able to exercise great power in perverting the opinion of England whenever the public are sufficiently ignorant of facts to be misled. That when once engaged in a wrong line, writers like those of the Times go from worse to worse, & at last stick at nothing in the way of perverse & even dishonest misrepresentation, is but natural to party writers everywhere; natural to those who go on day after day working themselves up to write strongly in a matter to which they have committed themselves, & breathing an atmosphere inflamed by themselves; natural moreover to demagogism both here & in America, & natural above all to anonymous demagogism, which risking no personal infamy by any amount of tergiversation never minds to what lengths it goes, because it can always creep out in time, & turn round at the very moment when the tide turns.
Among the many lessons which have been impressed on me by what is now going on, one is, a strong sense of the Solidarité (to borrow a phrase for which our language has no short equivalent) of the whole of a nation with every one of its members: for it is painfully apparent that your country & mine habitually judge of one another from their worst specimens. You say that if England were like Cairnes & me, there would be no alienation; & neither would there if America were like you. But (I need not use soft words to you, who I am sure detest these things as much as I do) the low tricks & fulsome mob-flattery of your public men, & the bullying tone & pettifogging practice of your different Cabinets (southern men chiefly I am aware) towards foreign nations, have deeply disgusted a great number of our very best people, & all the more so because it is the likeness of what we may be coming to ourselves. You must admit too that the present crisis, while it has called forth a heroism & constancy in your people which cannot be too much admired & to which even your enemies in this country do justice, has also exhibited on the same scale of magnitude all the defects of your state of society, the incompetency & mismanagement arising from the fatal belief of your public that anybody is fit for anything, & the gigantic pecuniary corruption which seems universally acknowledged to have taken place & indeed without it one cannot conceive how you can have got through the enormous sums you have spent. All this, & what seems to most of us entire financial recklessness (though for myself I do not pretend to see how you could have done anything else in the way of finance) are telling against you here—you can hardly imagine how much. But all this may be, & I have great hope that it will be, wiped out by the conduct which you have it in your power to adopt as a nation. If you persevere until you have subdued the South or at all events all west of the Mississippi; if having done this you set free the slaves with compensation to loyal owners & (according to the advice of Mr Paterson in his admirable speech at Liverpool), settle the freed slaves as free proprietors on the unoccupied land; if you pay honestly the interest on your vast national debt, & take measures for redeeming it, including the debt without interest which is constituted by your inconvertible paper currency; if you do these things, the United States will stand very far higher in the general opinion of England than they have stood at any time since the war of independence. If, in addition to this, you have men among you of a calibre to use the high spirit which this struggle has raised, & the grave reflexions to which it gives rise, as means of moving public opinion in favour of correcting what is bad & strengthening what is weak in your institutions & modes of feeling & thought, the war will prove to have been a permanent blessing to your country such as we never dared hope for, & a source of inestimable improvement to the prospects of the human race in other ways besides the great one of extinguishing slavery.
If you are really going to do these things, you need not mind being misunderstood—you can afford to wait.
582.
TO JOSEPH NAPIER
Jan. 27, 1863
Dear Sir—
I have at your suggestion reread the second chapter of the second part of the Analogy & the result is somewhat different from what you seemed to expect. I am afraid I must admit that Butler’s authority is against me & that he either overlooked, or did not admit the distinction which I endeavoured to draw between two kinds of improbability, improbability before the fact & improbability of an alleged fact. For though as you say he does not deny that there is a certain small antecedent presumption against a miracle, he looks upon this as being exactly the same sort of presumption which there is against any common event (of the conditions of which we have no special antecedent knowledge) before it has happened. Now in my view it is a totally different sort of presumption—one which constitutes, as far as it goes, a ground of disbelief, which the other & universal presumption does not even in the smallest degree. In proof of this: let there be a million tickets in some repository, numbered & placed indiscriminately. Of these I take out one. The antecedent presumption against its being No 72 is a million to one; but when I have selected a ticket & it is affirmed to be No 72 the antecedent presumption does not render this in the smallest degree incredible, because, instead of its being unlikely that an event with a million to one against it could happen it was certain that such an event would happen, & it is certain that such an event did happen when I took out the ticket, whether it was No 72 or not.
Now (without further purpose distinguishing miracles from any other kind of extraordinary event) it seems to me clear that against any extraordinary event there exists not a slight addition to this entirely unimportant kind of improbability, but an improbability generically different from it. And Butler surely must have thought so since he would not have credited a statement that [illegible word] has on only a small fraction more of evidence than that on which he could have believed an ordinary man who said that he rose one morning with a headach[e]. But though he must have habitually acted on this view of the subject I am afraid he forgot it in his argument.
583.
TO JOHN WILSON
31 January, 1863
Although I am much too occupied to be able to accept your invitation to be present at the Soirée of the Liverpool Co-operative Provident Association, I am glad of the opportunity you have offered me to express, as I have done in my published writings, my warmest sympathy with the Co-operative Cause. Of all the agencies which are at work to elevate those who labour with their hands, in physical condition, in social dignity and in those moral and intellectual qualities on which both the others are ultimately dependent, there is none so promising as the present Co-operative movement. Though I foresaw, when it was only a project, its great advantages, its success has thus far exceeded my most sanguine expectations, and every year adds strength to my conviction of the salutary influence it is likely to exercise over the destinies of this and other countries.
584.
TO GEORGE FINLAY
Feb. 2. 1863
My dear Mr. Finlay—
Many thanks for your letter which was both interesting and encouraging. I now write in high spirits on the subject of Greece as today’s newspapers for the first time state positively & authentically that the Duke of Saxe Coburg consents to be a candidate. I earnestly hope that the Greeks will not throw away the opportunity of getting a king who would bring them every possible advantage they could have had from Prince Alfred, with the addition of being a man of mature age and tried principles. It seems to me that they have drawn the one solitary prize in the lottery & that his election & acceptance would be the very happiest event which the chances of politics could have turned up for Greece. I had never ventured to hope for anything so good as a prince who is more liberal & constitutional than his German subjects understand or care for & who is looked to by the liberals in Germany at large as a possible head of the future German Empire. If he is elected, it will be his object to make Greece a great country by making her a free & prosperous one to begin with, & all the best European thought will have a greater chance of access to her than to any crowned head in Europe except his uncle Leopold.
I was very happy to learn from you that there is a real desire in the Assembly for moderate establishments & a great retrenchment of expenditure. This is good not only in itself, but because it implies putting a restriction on the evils of centralization & functionarism. But the land tax or rather a land tax will be wanted nevertheless, for a time at least, if they intend to be honest to their creditors.
Mr Grote was extremely interested by the plans & inscriptions you sent to him through me. He did not know the existence in the character. . . .
585.
TO ROBERT CRICHTON WYLLIE
Feb. 3. 1863
Sir—
I have had the honour of receiving your letter & the printed slips which you have been kind enough to send. These I have read with the attention due to any work of Dr Rae & they appear to me quite worthy of his intellect and acquirements. The picture which he draws of the dangers that menace the interesting community of which you are one of the rulers, is most formidable. Of the remedies which he proposes, I cannot be a competent judge, but as far as my means of judgment extend he seems to be right in much, perhaps even in all, that he proposes.
The other paper will I think place Dr Rae very high among ethnologists & philologists. After having reached by independent investigation the highest generalization previously made, viz., that all languages have grown by development from a few hundred words, Dr Rae seems to have supplied the first probable explanation of the manner in which their primitive words may themselves have originated. If this hypothesis is made out, it is the keystone of the science of philology: it is a priori extremely probable, & the facts he brings forward establish a strong case of verification a posteriori. I hope that Dr Max Müller has been put in possession of this important speculation.
It must be of great value to your country to have such a man as Dr Rae settled among you.
It is very gratifying to me that you are disposed to carry the principle of representation of minorities into practical operation. That such should be the questions agitated in a country which three quarters of a century ago was in the savage state, is surely one of the most remarkable signs of the very hopeful times in which we live.
586.
TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES
Feb. 7. 1863
Dear Sir
Mr Curtis’ letter gives one a very favorable impression of his own sentiments, though in some respects a painful one of those of his countrymen. Perhaps, however, it is no worse than was to be expected, and the worse it is the more searching and the more prolific of good is the present crisis likely to be. The danger of American democracy was stagnation—a general settling into a dead level of low morality and feeling. The strenuous antagonism now springing up in the better Americans against the tone of mind of the worse, is the most hopeful feature of the present struggle, and the battle against the devil could not be fought on a more advantageous field than that of slavery.
I was delighted, as you were, with the Exeter Hall meeting, and the Liverpool meeting which preceded it was even better. Leeds, Bradford, Bristol, and other places have also roused themselves and there is to be another meeting at Manchester on the receipt of Lincoln’s answer to the Manchester address. There is, besides, a latent feeling on the right side in many quarters, which will assert itself in time. For instance; I have it under the hand of the Duke of Argyll that he agrees entirely with my two articles—and I had yesterday a conversation with Sir Stafford Northcote and the Mayor of Liverpool, and was surprised and pleased to find how nearly right they both are on the subject. When our whole strength comes to shew itself, it will be seen to be very great. It is fear of the Times that makes public men keep silence. Perhaps they do not overrate the power of the Times, but they ridiculously exaggerate the danger to themselves of braving it. The Times has been very often defeated; but as it is never wrong without a great number of people to keep it in countenance, it never suffers any permanent loss of influence. It has passed unhurt through much severer blows than any it has had lately. It lost no credit by its sudden turn round on Bernard’s trial, the very day after he was acquitted—as strong a case as the sharp turn in 1834 from ultra Whiggism to Peel Toryism. Such things would have ruined a writer who gave his name; but anonymous journalism can dare anything with impunity.
I was glad that the noble spirit of the Lancashire operatives found an exponent in Bazley, when he said in seconding the address, that the work-people do not want cotton made by slaves.
I am Dear Sir
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
587.
TO ALEXANDER BAIN
Feb. 13. 1863
Dear Bain—
I thought Ferrier’s book quite sui generis when I first read it, & I think so more than ever after reading it again. His system is one of pure scepticism very skilfully clothed in dogmatic language. To find the meaning of any of his propositions one is obliged to invert it—to turn it as it were bottom upward, and discover the purely negative underside, of which the side turned towards the spectator is but the superficial outcome, and which negative underside contains all the reality there is in the proposition. For example, matter, according to him is the variable element in cognition. But he avers that neither the world at large, nor thinkers, when they discussed the subject of matter, ever imagined that they were affirming or denying the existence of a variable element in cognition. Consequently the entire purport of Ferrier’s proposition is, that if matter is not this, “there is nothing else for it to be” (to use an expression of his own). Again, the whole of his doctrine of the Absolute may be thus expressed: Unless the Absolute is what I say it is, that is, unless a toothache, regarded as my toothache, is the Absolute there is no Absolute. This strikes me as very cool, in a thinker whose doctrines are of this character, to class other people as sceptics, & present his own system as the first & only real safeguard against scepticism. The truth is, it outdoes in scepticism almost all the systems so called, inasmuch as it abolishes noumena. According to it there are no “things in themselves”; they have no locus standi anywhere, not even in Herbert Spencer’s region of the Unknowable. To this doctrine I have little to object, but I do object in toto to the mode in which it is arrived at. For the only legitimate mode of arriving at it is by the psychology of which he thinks he can never speak too scornfully, viz. by pointing out the genesis through ascertained laws of the mind, of the belief that people have that they do perceive, or have evidence of things in themselves. Until this is done, this next to universal belief is primâ facie evidence of its own truth, just as the impressions of the senses are. All such attempts however he repudiates, rebuking philosophers in general for commencing their study of the mind with the origin of an idea & not seeing the very obvious truth (which it will be one of the purposes of what I write on Hamilton to enforce) that since we cannot observe the first moments of human consciousness, a theory of the genesis of our notions is an indispensable condition of ascertaining what those are which we possess originally. Despising this instrument of investigation which he does not know how to use, he arrives at all his conclusions, without one single exception that I remember—certainly at all those which he declares to be of primary importance—either by deduction from arbitrary definitions or by reasoning in a circle. How, for example, does he prove the doctrine which he considers it his greatest feat to have established, the principal proposition of the Agnoiology? By arguing that as Ignorance is a defect, there can be no ignorance but of things which might possibly be known. He erects the accidental dyslogistic connotation of a word into the chief constituent of its meaning, & from this definition of his own concludes that there are no other things to be ignorant of, & not (which is the only valid conclusion) that if there are we may be ignorant of them without blame. His general mode of settling the questions which divide philosophers is to transfer the names of the things, real or unreal, which they contend about to things the reality of which nobody ever thought of contesting; after which, as there are no names left for the things which people do contest, the conclusion is quietly slid into that there are no such things. I do not in the least dispute that if this negative conclusion be true, there is much to be said for transferring the existing words with all their associations from nonentities to the realities which are the proper objects for those associations; & what makes me to a certain extent tolerant of the book is that I think philosophy will most likely ultimately use the words in something like his sense of them, so that his system serves a mode of stating a connected set of opinions grounded in truth, which connected statement he mistakes for deducing them from one another. But the fact that there is nothing else for the words to mean has to be proved first; which cannot be done by begging it in the definitions of the terms. What, again, can be a more glaring paralogism than that by which he establishes his grand proposition that certain supposed laws of our cognitions are necessary laws of all cognition existing, possible or imaginary, finite or infinite? It all rests upon a double meaning of the word Contradictory. He lays down as a principle that what is contradictory cannot be known, not merely by our intelligence but by any intelligence. He gets this admitted by presenting it as if it meant that our intelligence cannot believe that a thing is & also that it is not. So presented, the reader is not willing to admit that the impossibility does not arise from the limitation of our intelligence, but is a law of all intelligence. But when the time comes for drawing the consequences of the admission, the Contradictory is found to be that which contradicts not itself, but “the necessary laws of cognition,” & from that time forward anything which we cannot, as the author expresses it, “conceive to be conceivable” is placed, on that ground, among things unknowable by any, even infinite, intelligence, though it may not involve any self-contradiction at all. Thus, the proposition that the human capacities of conception (in their second power at least) are a measure of the possibilities of universal intelligence steals in as a demonstrated truth without having been once faced.
Then how strangely absurd are his representations of other writers, above all his romance about Plato. There has been plenty of nonsense written about Plato’s Ideas, but I did not expect to be told that what Plato means by them (though he failed to express his meaning distinctly) was the Ego! This wonderful conclusion seems to be reached by the following syllogism. The Ego is (according to my system) the universal element in cognition; therefore Plato’s Ideas were the Ego. How Plato would have stared at this interpretation of what he conceived as the very opposite pole, the point furthest removed from (& raised above) the Ego, of all the elements which enter into the generation of Knowledge!
In spite of all this, however, & of the flourishing of trumpets which accompanies every fresh paralogism or disguised assumption, one cannot help being struck in almost every page with the ability of the writer, though I cannot think that it lies in the direction of metaphysical speculation. And the book, like all books by persons of talent on difficult subjects of thought, helps more or less to clear up one’s own ideas.
I have not left myself room for saying much on other subjects but I have not much to say. I am reprinting the Utilitarianism & will send it to you as soon as published. I have just received Lyell’s new book but have not yet read any of it. Littré writes that he will very shortly publish his life of Comte which I expect will be interesting & I shall perhaps make it an occasion for writing something about Comte, though I do not like being diverted from Hamilton. I have heard nothing very lately about Grote. His new eight-volume edition is out.
Your paper on the Methods of Debate must have given many valuable ideas to those whom it was addressed to. There is a point in the appended note that I shd like, at some time or other to discuss with you. It strikes me that the principle on which the chances are estimated on the [?subject] of Alexander differs in one respect from the true principle.
588.
TO MAX KYLLMANN
B[lackheath] P[ark] Feb. 15. 1863.
Dear Sir—
I wish there were somebody like you in every great town in the country, for as soon as you see that anything is true & important you exert yourself to get it acknowledged. The beginning you have made with the operatives on the subject of Mr Hare’s plan is most valuable. They are more open to conviction than any other class, being the only class not prejudiced in favour of existing institutions in general. And they have the strongest interest in adopting this plan, since while it gives more complete expression & fuller effect than anything else can do to the democratic principle, it also completely removes the strongest & best founded of the objections which are sincerely felt to that principle, considered as a practical one. When difficulties can be removed not by compromising a principle but by carrying it still more completely out, the advantage is well worth gaining.
I should strongly advise keeping the demonstration respecting the grievances of the working classes as distinct as possible from the movement relating to America. It is good generalship in politics as it is in war not to bring all your enemies upon you at once, but to divide them, and fall upon each division apart from the rest. Bad principles are but too ready to league with each other as it is, without being provoked to it by each receiving a slap in the face at the same moment from the same hands. And you cannot well afford to alienate those who would agree with you as to one of the two objects proposed but not on the other. For the same reason it seems to me desirable that the question of the suffrage shd be kept apart from the other things complained of & shd be made the subject of a distinct demonstration by itself. The changes in the law that have made cooperation possible would not have been obtained so soon if the demand for them had usually been coupled with the question of the suffrage.
Thanks for your information about the Haslingden movement. Before I received your letter, one of the circulars had found its way to me & I shall the first time I go to town pay a subscription in the manner directed. I will also send a subscription to Mr Bradlaugh.
The Anthropological Society I hear of for the first time from your letter. I shd suppose from the publications it announces that its objects must be very much the same as those of the Ethnological Socty which already existed. The names mentioned are all new to me except two: Capt. Burton, whom I know as other people do from his books more as an enterprising traveller than as a man of science, & Mr Luke Burke, who I shd think answers to your requisition of willingness to carry out premises to all their consequences, but the little I have seen of his speculations does not give me any confidence in his soundness as a scientific thinker. It is possible that some of the others may be distinguished names, for I am very little acquainted with the present state of this class of studies.
Mr Lincoln’s answer is excellent—quite beyond my expectation.
589.
TO JOHN PLUMMER
Feb. 20, 1863
Dear Sir
I thank you for your letter, and for the book and newspaper you sent. Your friend’s paper in the Coventry Herald is of real promise. There is a clearness and discrimination in his mode of expressing his thoughts which augurs well for their quality. I will read Mr Chorley’s book as soon as I have time and shall be very glad to see you and him if you are able and disposed to come so far.
I am glad to hear that you are now chiefly employed in writing. Perhaps hitherto your influence with the operatives may have been all the greater for your remaining a factory workman, but henceforward, even if it were not a matter of necessity, you can certainly do more good by devoting yourself to such valuable writing as yours is. I am
Dear Sir
very sincerely yours
J. S. Mill
Mr John Plummer
590.
TO AN UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT
Feb. 21 [1863]
Dear Sir,—
Although I am prevented by pressing occupations from accepting your invitation to join you in celebrating the glorious memory of Washington, and the great work of liberation in which he took so important a part, I am thankful for the opportunity afforded me of associating myself, if only by letter, with the principles and purposes which are identified with that illustrious name.
The prospects of the human race are so deeply interested in the success of the great experiment which is working itself out in the United States, that the lovers of freedom and progress in other countries feel whatever injures, and still more whatever dishonours, America as a personal calamity. Foremost among all things which injure and dishonour a country stands the personal slavery of human beings. Rather than consent to the further extension of this scourge, the American people have voluntarily incurred all their present sacrifices; and because what was originally a war against slavery has grown into a war for its extinction, my hopes for the future welfare and greatness of the American Republic were never so high as in this, to superficial appearance, the darkest hour in its history.
I have the honour to be, dear sir, very faithfully yours,
J. S. Mill
591.
TO CHARLES A. CUMMINGS
B[lackheath] P[ark] Feb. 23. 1863
Dear Sir—
I duly received your letter of Feb. 2 & I thank you for the favour you have done me by sending me the Christian Examiner of January.
My object in writing is not solely to make my warm acknowledgments for your kindly & generous estimate of my writings but also to set my country right with you in one point & myself in another. You are under some misapprehension in thinking that the writings which you honour with such high praise, have been neglected in England in comparison with my longer treatises. They have been much more widely read than ever those were, & have given me what I had not before, popular influence. I was regarded till then as a writer on special scientific subjects & had been little heard of by the miscellaneous public. I am in a very different position now.
For the other misapprehension I am probably myself accountable & I only advert to it because if it were well founded, there would be less sympathy between my feelings & yours than there really is. I do not, as you seem to think, take a gloomy view of human prospects. Few persons look forward to the future career of humanity with more brilliant hopes than I do. I see, however, many perils ahead, which unless successfully avoided could blast these prospects, & I am more specially in a position to give warning of them since being in strong sympathy with the general tendencies of which we are all feeling the effects, I am more likely to be listened to than those who may be suspected of disliking them. You think from American experience that I have overrated the magnitude of some of the dangers. I am perhaps of all Englishmen the one who would most rejoice at finding that I had done so & who most warmly welcomes every indication which favours such a conclusion. But whatever may be their amount, the dangers are real, & unless constantly kept in view, will tend to increase; & neither human nature nor experience justify the belief that mankind will be sufficiently on their guard against evils arising from their own shortcomings shared by those around them. In order that political principles, requiring the occasional sacrifice of immediate inclinations, should be habitually present to the minds of a whole people, it is generally indispensable that these principles shd be embodied in institutions. I think it therefore essential that the principle that superior education is entitled to superior political might, shd be in some way constitutionally recognised. I suggested plural voting as a mode of doing this: if there be any better mode, I am ready to transfer my advocacy to that. But I attach far more importance to Mr Hare’s system of election, which it gives me the greatest pleasure to see that you appreciate as I do. It would be worthy of America to inaugurate an improvement which is at once a more complete application than has ever been made of the democratic principle, & at the same time its greatest safeguard. With the system of representation of all instead of majorities only & of the whole people instead of only the male sex, America would afford to the world the first example in history of true democratic equality.
I omitted to say that I was not the founder of the W. R. though I was one of its writers from the commencement. At a much later period of my life I was for several years its proprietor & chief conductor.
592.
TO HENRY SAMUEL CHAPMAN
Feb. 24. 1863.
Dear Chapman
I am very much obliged to you for the information in your letters and for the newspapers and newspaper articles which you kindly sent, relating to the proceedings in the Legislature of New South Wales. I was not wholly uninformed on the subject, Mr Holden having opened a communication with me and also with Mr Hare: but your information has generally been both earlier and fuller than his. I was delighted with the debate on the second reading of the bill. The fact that so many of the speakers had so thorough and intelligent an appreciation of Mr Hare’s plan, is a most satisfactory proof that its advantages will be felt in other legislative assemblies when once they can be induced to look upon it as one of the questions of the day. At present few engaged in practical politics have begun to concern themselves about it. But those few are an increasing body, and by the time the question of the suffrage is again practically raised, it will not be possible to keep this question out of the discussion. The plan is making its way into America. The Christian Examiner, formerly the organ of Channing, and still representing the best minds of New England, takes it up very favourably in the number for January, and advises testing it by application to State elections.
I had noticed the change for the worse in the Melbourne correspondence of the Times. I used to read those letters with great interest while they rested on your authority, because I knew that matters would be regarded and judged on principles not very different from my own. They cannot have the same interest to me now, even if they were to be depended on as to facts, which you tell me they are not.
Buckle is, as you truly say, a great loss, and one which we are not likely to see replaced. Notwithstanding the undue breadth of many of his conclusions, and the want of a proper balance in his mind, he was performing a most valuable function in popularizing many important ideas, and stimulating the desire to apply general principles to the explanation and prediction of social facts. He has left, I am told, a great deal of manuscript, much of it in a state approaching to completion.
If I possessed photographic cards, I would with great pleasure send you one, but I have not adopted that fashion, and am not likely to adopt it; and I have refused so many applications for photographs of myself (some of them from persons whom I should have much liked to oblige) that I could not now with any consistency, comply with any.
I shall be very glad to see your son when he is in town. I cannot have that pleasure at Easter, as I shall not be at home, but in the long vacation I shall hope to see him.
Ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
593.
TO WILLIAM JAMES LINTON
Feb. 25 [1863]
Sir
My time is so fully occupied that I am quite unable to attend the meeting on Friday or to take any part in the proposed movement in favour of Poland. I heartily sympathize in its object, and shall be very glad if the general feeling can be manifested in an imposing manner.
I am Sir
yours faithfully
J. S. Mill
W. J. Linton Esq.
594.
TO HERBERT SPENCER
Feb. 25. 1863.
Dear Sir
I am obliged to you for your letter, and if the sheet is not struck off (which I fear it is) I will add to the note in which you are mentioned, what is necessary to prevent the misapprehension you desire to guard against.
Your explanation narrows the ground on which we differ, though it does not remove our difference; for, while I agree with you in discountenancing a purely empirical mode of judging of the tendencies of human actions and would, on that subject as on all others, endeavour to reach the widest and most general principles attainable, I cannot admit that any of these principles are necessary, or that the practical conclusions which can be drawn from them are even (absolutely) universal.
As I am writing I cannot refrain from saying that your “First Principles” appears to me a striking exposition of a consistent and imposing system of thought; of which, though I dissent from much, I agree in more.
I hope your health is much better than it was some time ago.
I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
595.
TO HERBERT SPENCER
Feb. 28. 1863.
Dear Sir—
I send you the leaf of my reprint containing the passage in which you are mentioned. I wish to be permitted to say that the corrected statement of your opinion derived from yourself, but I do not feel at liberty to say so without your permission.
I have thought it best to leave the note as it stood, & make the correction in an additional paragraph. But if you can suggest any alteration in the first mention of the note which would save me from seeming still to ascribe to you an opinion which you do not hold, I shall be happy to adopt it.
I am happy to hear that your health is so considerably improved.
596.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK
March 9, 1863
Dear Chadwick
I send a paper on the Polish question, in the form of a letter to the Editor. If you like you can alter the form to that of an article from a correspondent; but on the whole probably it is better as it is. I have signed it with my initials, and have no objection to being known as the author.
I also inclose an article by my daughter on Greek politics, which is at your service if you like it. It is entirely her own, but I quite agree in all of it.
I will look out passages from the book on the Alps, and send you references to them.
Proofs would be agreeable if there is time and it is not inconvenient.
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
597.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK
March 10 [1863]
Dear Chadwick
I have returned the proof, corrected, to the Editor.
I have no objection to being named in your leader, but I wish only my initials to be put to the letter itself; and I would rather that, in your first sentence, my name was introduced more indirectly. You might say “we feel thankful to a correspondent, whose initials sufficiently indicate his name” or some such words, and you might then go on mentioning me by name as at present.
I would rather you did not add the sentence proposed in your letter, because I do not wish to be understood as having peculiar sources of information. Herzen’s and Ogareff’s writings are open to all the world, and the notification by the Insurrectionary Committee to which my letter refers was mentioned by the correspondents of some of the English newspapers.
Many thanks for your offer of separate slips, but I do not care to have any.
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
598.
TO MR. JONES
March 13. [1863]
Mr Mill requests Mr Jones to make up a parcel for him of such books on the accompanying list as he is able to send by the end of next week.
These are independent of Kinglake’s Crimean War, which Mr Mill wishes for as soon as it can be had, and which will be returned within a fortnight from the present time.
The “Inquiry into the Theories of History” if not already sent, may be dispensed with. If sent, this also will be returned in a short time.
Several other books in Mr Mill’s possession are sent in the present parcel.
599.
TO [JOHN WILLIAM PARKER?]
March 14, 1863
Dear Sir
I have sent the cover which I have selected.
Please add to the list of those who are to receive copies, Professor Cliffe Leslie, 1, York Street, Belfast.
I am
yrs very truly
J. S. Mill
600.
TO JOHN CHAPMAN
March 16. 1863
Dear Sir
M. Littré has nearly ready for publication a life of M. Comte, which would afford a very good occasion for a general estimate of M. Comte and of his philosophy. If you would like to have such an article from me, I would undertake it. I cannot exactly say how soon it could be ready, as I have more than one thing in hand which I should like to finish before commencing it. But I would promise it as early as is possible without a very inconvenient interruption of other things. I am
Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
601.
TO THEODOR GOMPERZ
March 22, 1863
Dear Sir,
I thank you very much for your note, and look forward to talking over the subject of it with you, when you come, which I hope will be very soon.—I need hardly say that a translation by you of anything I write, will be, in every sense of the word, an authorized translation. —Your idea supplementary to the remarks on the sense of dignity, is well worth following out, and it would give me great satisfaction, if you would write something on the subject, and publish it with the translation.—I am, yours very truly,
J. St. Mill.
602.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK
March 24. [1863]
Dear Chadwick
The wine can be had in as few dozens as you please, and I will with pleasure take out, when we leave for Avignon on Saturday next, any order you like to give.
My daughter thinks that you can select passages from Senior better than she can. She sends by this post, several scraps about America that she has copied out from books which she has been reading; and will make extracts from Prince Dolgoroukov’s book on Russia if we get it, as we expect to do, to take with us to Avignon. She also sends a short article, of no pretension, on one of the points we talked of, the other day—the effect of the cheap press in keeping things right in Lancashire —in case you think it is worth putting in your paper. I am,
Dear Chadwick
yrs very truly
J. S. Mill
603.
TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES
March 25. 1863
Dear Sir
I am much obliged to you for your note, and for the papers you sent. The letter of the Daily News correspondent is good and satisfactory. All recent information seems to confirm the statement that there is a renewal of excitement in favour of the war and that the bulk of the Democratic party now share it. It is impossible not to participate in your doubts as to the success of the North in effecting a complete reunion; but if it could be effected, I am not convinced by your letter that there need be any sacrifice of the principles of free government.
You will have observed Forster’s notice for Friday on the subject of the war ships fitting out for the Confederates. I have long been wondering why he did not make this move sooner. There is to be a meeting of Trades Unionists tomorrow in favour of the North, at St James’s Hall, at which Bright will preside. They have sent me an admission, and if I can, I intend to go.
It will be a disgrace to Cambridge if Macleod gets the Professorship. Fawcett’s qualifications I shall be better able to judge of after the publication of his book. But at any rate I am very glad that there is a candidate of whom you are able to speak so highly as you do of Mr Courtney.
Honorary members of the P. E. Club can and do bring forward questions, and I will hand in yours (which are excellent) on Friday. I regret that you are not to be there, the more as I leave for Avignon on Saturday, but expect to be back for the June meeting and hope I may still see you this summer.—I will return your Daily News today or tomorrow. When at Avignon I shall have it sent to me regularly. The Spectator I shall regret to lose, but I believe it is not admitted into France. I am
yrs very truly
J. S. Mill
604.
TO HENRY FAWCETT
April 2. 1863
Dear Mr Fawcett
Mr Kyllmann’s office at Manchester is at 28 Brazennose Street; his lodgings are at 35 Ducie Street, Oxford Road. Mr Kyllmann will be very glad to see you, and hopes that he may be of some service to you, if you come to or through Manchester.
The work of Ogareff which I told you of, is entitled Essai sur la Situation Russe, and is published by Trübner, in Paternoster Row.
I have brought your book with me here, and hope to have time to read it before I return to England. I am
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
605.
TO HENRY SOLLY
April 6. 1863
Dear Sir—
I am obliged to you for your letter, and am glad of the information it gives respecting the Working Men’s Club & Institute Union of which I previously knew very little. I have no doubt that in so far as these clubs take the place of the public house, they will be very useful, but I confess to some uncertainty whether they are a movement sufficiently in advance to meet the demands of the present time. I am doubtful whether an organised movement & subscriptions for the purpose of making the men of the working classes more comfortable away from the women & children, is the thing wanted now, so much as an effort on a large scale to improve their dwellings, & bring cooperative arrangements for comfort & mental improvement home to all of them without distinction of sex or age. I do not say this to discourage you, nor with any fear of its doing so, but to account for my not taking so warm an interest in the scheme as you seem to expect that I should do. I think your plan likely to do good, but that there are others likely to be still more useful.
606.
TO WILLIAM THOMAS THORNTON
April 17. 1863
Dear Thornton—
The wine merchant yesterday dispatched to you a packing case containing six dozen of the Chateauneuf wine which you drank at Blackheath. According to the rate of speed of the French railways in the transport of goods you may expect to receive it some time between a fortnight & a month hence. I have paid for the wine & all expenses here & I inclose the receipted bill. The duty & charges of carriage you will have to pay on delivery.
It was pleasant to receive a letter from you dated Marlow. I know not only the country but the house, & remember well its view over that beautiful valley. I am glad that I have carried you with me to so great an extent on the subject of Utilitarianism. What you say respecting the supposed case of Iphigenia does not at all contradict my opinion, as I never contended that the feeling of justice originates in a consideration of general utility, though I think it is that consideration which gives it its binding, & properly moral, character, and you yourself seem to think that in such a case as the one you suppose, the feeling of justice ought to yield to general utility. More than this no utilitarian can possibly ask. But I am inclined to think that such a case cannot possibly arise, or that the feeling of justice (except where, being divided against itself, it can be appealed on both sides) never need come into conflict with the dictates of utility. The case of Iphigenia was one of supposed religious duty, which where it intervenes, takes away the conflict, by removing the sense of moral wrong from the sacrifice. The nearest approach to it that occurs to me within the purely social or political sphere is the case of a people required by a powerful enemy under penalty of extermination to surrender some distinguished citizen, say the Carthaginians in the case of Hannibal. Now in such a case as this I think there can be no doubt that the morality of utility requires that the people should fight to the last rather than comply with the demand: not only because of the special tie between the community & each of its members, & between the community & a benefactor who in the case supposed is demanded as a victim precisely because of the greatness of his services—but also for a more general reason—namely the reason which makes it right that a people inferior in strength should fight to the death against the attempt of a foreign despot to reduce it to slavery. For such iniquitous attempts, even by powers strong enough to succeed in them, are very much discouraged by the prospects of meeting with a desperate though unsuccessful resistance. The weak may not be able finally to withstand the strong if these persist in their tyranny, but they can make the tyranny cost the tyrant something, & that is much better than letting him indulge it gratis.
I think such a case as that of Hannibal comes within these reasons, & indeed is a mere case of the same principle.
607.
TO THEODOR GOMPERZ
S[aint] V[éran] April 23, 1863
Dear Sir—
Your letter of the 18th only reached me yesterday evening on our return from an absence of nearly a week.
Come by all means if you like, though I should not for an instant have thought of proposing it to you. I do not invite my friends to this place, unless in very rare cases when I happen to have an interval of leisure—because it is impossible for me when here, to give them the time I shd wish to give, or shew them the attention to which they are entitled. The greater part of all my intellectual work is done in the virtual solitude in which we live here, & the time which is not taken up in writing (in which at present both of us are occupied) we spend in wandering alone about the mountains and wilds of this part of France, gathering the health & spirits which are necessary to render life in England endurable to us. If, knowing this, you still like to come, I can only say that I shall be glad to see what I can of you; & I should not have said so much if you had not expressed yourself as if your motive for coming to Avignon was chiefly to see us & I shd very much regret that you shd either be disappointed or think us unfriendly in case you shd see less of us than you expect.
I am much gratified by what you say about Mr Grote, & am glad that you have seen enough of him to appreciate him so fully. I had no doubt that he would be interested by your Herculanean investigations, which I am glad to hear are going on favourably.
608.
TO JOHN PLUMMER
April 23. 1863.
Dear Sir
I am sorry that your visit to London should have been during one of my frequent absences, and no less so that your note could not receive an answer in time. As I expect to return in June, I hope to be more fortunate in the course of the summer. I am
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
609.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK
April 24. 1863.
Dear Chadwick
Your letter was put into my hand just as we were starting for an excursion to Mirabeau and among the lower Alps of Provence. We have just returned, and I send by this post an article on Greece by my daughter, if you should still think it suitable. She is now occupying herself in translating extracts from some exceedingly interesting articles in the late numbers of the Revue des Deux Mondes on the present state of Turkey, which she will forward before long.
I have to ask you to excuse me to Mrs Chadwick for having so long delayed an answer to her letter about the wine, but the delay has been caused by my not having been able to get the facts from the wine merchant before now. I now find that the same wine you tasted at Blackheath will cost 75 francs (£3) for a cask containing 50 litres, or about six dozen; the cask will be about 18 francs extra, and the cost of journey and duty amounts to about eight shillings a dozen. I have since we arrived here, tasted a different quality of wine, which I think good, and even prefer to the other, and of which I mean to lay in a small stock myself—which is considerably cheaper. The Chateauneuf you tasted at Blackheath is of the vintage of 1858; this of which I now speak is also Chateauneuf, but of 1861, and grown by a different proprietor. It is less dry and rough and approaches more to the quality of Burgundy. It is only 50 francs (£2) the 50 litre cask; the other expenses being of course the same. I believe it would be excellent wine for keeping, and very good in two years time. If you should like to have either of these, I shall be very glad to order and forward it for you. If you prefer to have the wine in bottles, I do not think the additional cost would be much, as the wine here is all charged by the litre measure, and the bottles cost scarcely more than the cask.
I quite agree with you about the great importance of the principle of Scholefield’s bill, and I was glad to see that it appeared to be received more favourably than most of the former extensions of the principle of limited responsibility. It is a good sign that the Saturday Review supports it, which, on such subjects, in general servilely follows Lord Overstone. I will watch the progress of the bill, and if I see need, I will send you something about it, but it seems to me that you have yourself treated it extremely well. I am
Dear Chadwick
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
610.
TO T. E. CLIFFE LESLIE
May 4. 1863
Dear Sir
It is my full intention to be present at the June meeting of the P[olitical] E[conomy] Club & your letter gives me additional reason for doing so. I am glad your question is to come on then instead of in July.
It does not seem to me that taskwork even if it could be made universal would destroy the partial opposition of interests between employers & employed. There would still remain the question of the rate of payment & the employers & workmen, supposing them both to be entirely selfish, could not have the same wishes as to that point. Nothing that I can imagine except cooperation would entirely take away the antagonism. But in order to do so, it is not necessary that cooperation should be universal. If it was only very frequent, a labourer who remained in the employment of an individual & who received from him as much (for labour of the same efficiency) as he could earn under cooperation, would see that he had no reason to complain. The employer’s profits would then be a mere consequence of increased efficiency in the instruments of production, occasioned by private ownership of them. The capitalist would only take from the workmen what he first gave them.
Not to mention that cooperation in the form of participation of the labourers in the profits, would be perfectly compatible with individual ownership & would go much nearer to producing identity of interest than taskwork would.
Hoping to see you in a month’s time, I am
611.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK
May 6. 1863
Dear Chadwick
I send you by this post an article on Servia by my daughter. You will see she avails herself of your permission to undertake the Eastern question. If however there should be a debate of any consequence on Servia in the H. of Commons in the meantime, this article would not be fit for insertion without alteration, and she would be glad in that case either to alter it or to write another in its place, if you think the subject likely to interest your readers.
yrs very truly
J. S. Mill
612.
TO THEODOR GOMPERZ
Saint Véran, Avignon, May 9, 1863
I did not for an instant make any of the suppositions which you deprecate, in reference to your first note. What I did fear, was that you were perhaps a little hurt at my not having met with greater warmth the intimation of your project of coming to Avignon. I should extremely regret if this were the case, and I do not think it would be so, if you were fully aware of the great esteem and respect I have for you and of the sincerity of my wish to cultivate your friendship. I hope the additional letter you promise will set me at ease on this subject.—I am much pleased, though not at all surprised, at the feelings you express towards Mr. Grote.—I am glad that you will see something of Oxford. The two old universities are a feature in English national life which foreigners seldom see enough of to possess the key to many of the peculiarities of character of the lettered classes of England, compared with those of other countries. I suppose you will see Professor Max Müller, who has been there long enough to understand the place, and will be able to assist you with many explanations. I hope your visit will enable you to make good progress with your Herculanean labours.
613.
TO HENRY FAWCETT
May 17. 1863.
Dear Mr Fawcett
I inclose a testimonial, which renders it needless for me to express any otherwise the high opinion I have of your book and the great pleasure I had in reading it. Through the whole volume I did not find more than a few half sentences here and there which appeared to me defective in point of Political Economy, and even there I found, by things you said elsewhere, that you were in no error on the points involved. Some of the modes you have employed of shortening and simplifying the exposition seem to me happy; others are perhaps discussable. In particular, that of going at once to money prices, without first discussing the general laws of exchange value, answers very well in the simpler questions, but you were not able to adhere to it when you came to international values and in consequence that part of the book has not all the clearness which you have generally succeeded so well in attaining: the natural difficulties of that intricate question being increased by requiring the readers to adopt the statement by barter, for which nothing preceding has prepared them. I think, too (as Ricardo thought) that it is of importance to cultivate in learners the habit of arguing questions at first on the supposition of barter, in order to adjourn the difficulties which arise from the wrong and confused associations which cling to the idea of money. All this however can be better discussed between us viva voce.
I should have liked to hear the discussion on Cooperation. I suppose what your opponents questioned was merely the probability of its success in the more difficult kinds of industrial enterprise. Of such a doubt one can only say, Solvitur (or Solvetur) ambulando. The thing is practicable or not, according to the intellectual and moral qualities of those who attempt it. Doubtless many will attempt it and fail, but some, and in the end, many, will succeed. It is not necessary that all should. The success of cooperation on any large scale, will establish a practical minimum of wages, and will strike at the root of the opposition of apparent interest between employers and labourers, since whatever profit the capitalist can obtain in the face of cooperation, must be a mere equivalent for the advantage the enterprise derives from his capital, skill, and unity of management. I have put this view of the case before Leslie in answering a letter from him on the subject.
Roebuck’s and Horsman’s speeches were well calculated to provoke a reaction and I am glad that you think they have done so. I am afraid however that Horsman’s will do much harm in the United States. The news from America is encouraging. The North seems to be, for the first time, in possession of the whole Mississippi, and cutting off the supplies from Texas must tell on the weakest point of the Slaveholders’ Confederacy. (One should never use any other designation for it than this, the one adopted by the Emancipation Society of Manchester). But the best thing of all is that the North does not seem to be in the least discouraged. If only their patience and determination hold out, they must yet succeed. I am
Yours very truly
J. S. Mill
614.
TO HENRY FAWCETT
Testimonial to Henry Fawcett.
Having been asked by Mr. Fawcett to express my opinion respecting his qualifications for the office of Professor of Political Economy, I have no hesitation in saying that I think them of a very high order. Mr. Fawcett’s “Manual of Political Economy”, a book to which justice is hardly done by so unambitious a title, shews a really scientific knowledge of the subject, both in its principles and in their applications; the exposition is clear and precise, and many of the illustrations of the more difficult points are original, and go into the heart of the subject. The objection which might possibly have arisen from Mr. Fawcett’s inability to read his Lectures is obviated by his great practice and readiness in extemporaneous speaking. Altogether I think that the selection of Mr. Fawcett to fill the Chair of Political Economy in the University of Cambridge would be creditable to the University, and beneficial to the purposes of the Professorship.
J. Stuart Mill
May 17, 1863
615.
TO LOUIS BLANC
le 18 mai 1863.
Mon cher Monsieur Louis Blanc
Votre lettre, quoique portant la date du 2 mai, ne m’est parvenue que depuis trois jours. M. Parker ne m’a jamais rien dit de l’intention qu’on lui suppose. Cependant, le bruit dont parle M. Trübner ne m’est pas inconnu, m’ayant été porté par un autre libraire qui désirait devenir mon éditeur, et à qui je donnai un acceuil assez favorable, sans pourtant me lier par aucune promesse. Si le cas arrivait, et que j’eusse à choisir un nouvel éditeur votre recommandation de M. Trübner et votre amitié pour lui seraient pour moi un grand motif de préférence. Ceci n’est pas un vain compliment, mais l’effet de la véritable estime que j’ai depuis longtemps pour vous.
Nous serons de retour à Blackheath au mois de Juin, et ce serait un vrai plaisir pour moi de vous revoir. Si vous me faites le plaisir de venir me voir, je vous engage à m’écrire un mot la veille d’assez bonne heure pour que j’aie le temps de vous avertir si je suis empêché d’être chez moi le jour que vous aurez choisi. Je voudrais vous éviter l’ennui de faire inutilement une si longue course.
616.
TO THEODOR GOMPERZ
Blackheath, June 6 [1863].
We have just returned and shall be very glad to see you.—Will you do us the pleasure of dining with us to-morrow, when I hope to be able to introduce you to Professor Bain, who is in London for a short time. Ever yours truly,
J. St. Mill.
617.
TO THEODOR GOMPERZ
[June 11, 1863]
M. Louis Blanc . . . has fixed to dine with us on Sunday (at five). We shall therefore hope to see you and Mr. Wessel on Sunday . . .
Very truly yours
J. St. Mill.
618.
TO THEODOR GOMPERZ
Blackheath, June 16, 1863.
Be assured that I shall never refuse to hear anything you may wish to communicate, either about yourself or any other subject. Whatever you desire to say, it is for yourself to judge of the necessity of saying it. As to there being any need of justifying, of excusing, or explaining anything to us, there is not the smallest shadow of anything of the kind. I am not aware of your having been maligned by anyone —certainly not to us. Nobody has ever said of you, in our hearing or to our knowledge, so much as an uncomplimentary word. And if anyone had, it would not have produced a particle of effect on either of us. We know enough of you to judge for ourselves, and our esteem and respect could be of very little worth, if it could be lessened either by anybody’s tittle-tattle, or by such small matters as those you mention in your letter, even if we perceived them. So that if this is all, you may be perfectly at ease.—But some expressions in your letter make me fear that this is not all, and that you wish to say something quite unexpected on our part, the answer to which no conviction, however strong, of our regard and friendship could make other than painful to you. If I rightly understand the wishes you speak of —which I sincerely hope I do not—, it does not rest with me to say anything, but that I should never willingly be the smallest obstacle to them. But you seem to ask my opinion, and if I give it sincerely, I have no choice but to say—painful as it is to say it—that I do not think you have any chance. If there were any unfavourable impression respecting you, that might be altered. But there is not the smallest particle of it,—but an unchangeable high opinion of you and the most genuine friendly feeling.—If your letter did not mean what I suppose, I must trust to your kindness to forgive the misunderstanding. But if it did, do not for a moment suppose that I am unwilling to hear anything you wish to say. If you think fit to carry the matter farther, either by speech or writing,—even if only for the relief of your own feelings—, you will have my truest sympathy, as you have my sincere friendship and esteem.—We hope to see you and your friend to-morrow, and I hope, nothing that has passed will make any difference in your feelings towards us, who remain unchanged to you, and that you will not allow it to affect in any degree our future intercourse.
I am yours very sincerely
J. St. Mill.
619.
TO HARRIET GROTE
June 16. 1863
Dear Mrs Grote
I am extremely obliged to you for Dr Schlesinger’s note. When it came, I was on the point of writing to tell you and Mr Grote the same good news about Gomperz. I have seen him twice, the last time for a whole evening, and he was, to all appearance, quite himself again. Dr Schlesinger’s expectation of his immediately returning to Vienna has not been fulfilled. He is not now with Dr Schlesinger, but is at the Victoria Hotel, Euston Square, with a friend named Wessel who has joined him from Vienna. What his intentions are about staying or going, I do not at present know.—Pray thank Mr Grote for his note and the kind trouble he took about the luggage.
I am
Dear Mrs Grote
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
620.
TO F. W. JONES
[Summer? 1863]
I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your communication dated the 18th inst. and to express my thanks to the Society for having done me the honour to elect me an honorary member. The subject of a Wholesale Agency which is occupying the attention of the Society is one of great importance, and I hope it will be found practical to establish such an agency, both as a great means of saving expense, and as a valuable extension of the Co-operative principle. It is the enormous number of mere distributors who are not producers that really eat up the produce of labour, much more than the mere profits of Capital, which, in a great majority of cases, are not more than a reasonable equivalent for the industry which created the capital and the frugality which prevents it from being squandered. The direction in which I look for the greatest improvement in Social economy, is the suppression of the vast number of middlemen who share among themselves so large a proportion of the produce of the country, while the service they render though indispensable, might be as well and better performed by a tenth part of their number.
621.
TO AN UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT
Blackheath, July 2, 1863
Madam—
I beg to acknowledge the receipt of your note, dated June the 30th, which has just reached me. It will not be in my power to attend the meeting of the society, but I highly applaud its intention of proposing a test for the education of women—a proposition which I hope goes the length of affording them the same advantages in respect to examinations for certificates and degrees which are open to men. If these are useful and necessary means of rendering education efficient in the case of men, they must be equally so in the case of women, and will certainly be adopted as soon as the latter object is as seriously desired as the former.—I am, &c.,
J. S. Mill
622.
TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES
July 3. 1863
Dear Sir
Many thanks for your very interesting letter. I am sorry that I shall not see you at the Club this evening. If it is not inconvenient to you will you come on Sunday next (5th) and dine with us at six? My friend Professor Bain is coming, and would, I am sure, like much to see you; and I cannot ask you to come in the morning, as I may perhaps be out. I am the more desirous that you should come on Sunday, because I have an engagement of some standing, which will take me out of town on Monday by an early train, and I shall certainly not return till Thursday evening. If you cannot come next Sunday, can you the Sunday after? but if you leave town before then, I must arrange to return by Friday or Saturday, and so should be glad to know what your plans are. If you address a line here saying on which of these days you will come, it will be forwarded to me. Come to dinner if possible, otherwise at any hour of the day that suits you.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
623.
TO THEODOR GOMPERZ
July 5. 1863
Dear Sir—
I have been intending to write to you almost from the time when you left, but delayed, partly because I thought I might hear from you & partly because I was expecting an opportunity of seeing Mr Grote, who would certainly have wished to send you a friendly message. I have been disappointed however & shall not be able to see him for more than a week & will therefore no longer delay writing to you, though I have nothing particular to say except to express our earnest hope that your health is by this time completely restored, & our unalterable feelings of friendship and regard.
Our life which has been more than usually broken in upon during the last month owing to the presence of several persons in London whom I highly value, or to whom attentions were due from me which I have few opportunities of paying—is now about to relapse into its usual wholesome tranquillity; & I have been enabled to have a few days work at my book on Hamilton with which I now mean to persevere steadily. I have always found that real intellectual work is to me all that Cicero in his oration pro Archia says of literature—when one wants healthy excitement, an outlet for energy, active pleasure, or consolation, nothing else affords it in the same degree. It would give me great comfort to see you reaping the same benefits from the same cause. Your clear, firm intellect & your great store of acquired knowledge qualify you to take a high position not only as a scholar but as a writer & thinker, & I know nothing to prevent your doing so unless you allow yourself to be discouraged by too great dissatisfaction with what you produce. That you must be dissatisfied is inevitable, for nobody ever does anything of much value unless his standard of excellence is much above his present powers of execution. But if one gives way to discouragement this disparity is always increasing, for self-culture raises one’s standard always higher & higher, so that unless one keeps one’s powers of execution in such full exercise as makes them also grow pari passu, one is driven to absolute despair. Ever since I have had eight or ten years of intellectual activity to look back upon I have often said to myself, If my judgment were what it is now, & my powers of execution only what they were a few years ago, I shd perhaps never have had the heart to do anything. I have gone on chiefly because my standard though always far above myself never seemed at an absolutely unattainable distance, and I have generally found that however discontented I might be with the best that I could do, others who had not by dwelling on the subject formed the same high idea of what there was to be done, did not perceive a tenth part of the shortcomings which I myself saw, & that what was not good enough for me was often sufficient to be very useful to them. And I feel certain that you will find exactly the same.
With compliments to [Mrs?] J. Wertheimstein & kind regards to Mr Wessel, I am
624.
TO HELEN TAYLOR
Tuesday ev’g
[July 7, 1863]
Dearest Lily—
I had a long detention in town on Monday from having omitted to procure the July time table. The train had been changed from 9/45 to 9/15 and when I arrived it had been just five minutes gone. So I had to wait for another train at half past 11 during which I had my hair cut and gave Peppercorn a commission to buy Brighton stock. I arrived here just before two and had only half a day’s walk. That however was pleasant, and we have been out from six in the morning to six in the evening today.
I have decided to return home on Friday instead of Thursday. I found Irvine disposed to stay—and it appears that he took a walk before I came, to a boggy neighbourhood where he found quantities of plants that I want to find, and I cannot in conscience ask him to go there again with me until I have gone with him all the walks he wants to take—which will fully occupy Wednesday & Thursday. So you may expect me, dear, on Friday evening. I will write again on Thursday.
This new disturbance in Greece is vexatious —but I hope it is only the soldiery, who we knew are bad, and that it will be put down.
Your affectionate
J.S.M.
625.
TO LOUIS BLANC
le 13 juillet 1863
Mon cher Monsieur Louis Blanc
M. le professeur Cairnes, l’auteur du livre que sans doute vous connaissez sur l’esclavage américain, doit diner avec nous jeudi à 6 h. et ce serait un grand plaisir pour nous si vous pouviez et vouliez y venir.
votre tout dévoué
J. S. Mill
626.
TO JOHN PLUMMER
July 13, 1863
Dear Sir
I shall be here for the next two months at least, and if you will give me a line two or three days before you come I will take care not to miss you. I am much interested by what you tell me of your proceedings and shall be happy to lend you any books I have that will be likely to be of use. I am
yours very sincerely
J. S. Mill
627.
TO JOHN PLUMMER
July 17. 1863.
Dear Sir
If your arrangements should make it convenient to you to be here at five o’clock p.m. to dine with me on Monday next, it will give me great pleasure. If not, I shall be happy to see you at 12 o’clock as you appoint in your letter.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
628.
TO GUSTAVE D’EICHTHAL
le 18 juillet 1863
Mon cher d’Eichthal
Je vous remercie de votre bon souvenir, et aussi du cadeau de votre livre, bien qu’il ne soit pas encore arrivé. Le sujet dont il traite est comme vous le dites très bien à l’ordre du jour, et je tiens la critique des Evangiles comme encore plus importante au progrès dans ce pays-ci qu’en France. L’échange d’idées avec vous est pour moi une trop vieille habitude pour ne pas la reprendre avec plaisir. Je me suis souvent rappelé les paroles de M. Enfantin lors de la dispersion de la société de Ménilmontant —que l’héritage du Saint-Simonisme allait fournir des pensées et des moyens de combat à toutes les opinions qui divisent l’Europe. Il en a été ainsi, et les anciens Saint-Simoniens ont joué un rôle important et j’ajoute, utile, dans tous les camps. Je me ferai un plaisir d’aller vous voir la première fois que je me trouverai à Paris pour y rester quelques jours. Ordinairement je ne traverse Paris qu’en courant, et sans m’y arrêter même une seule nuit.—Avec des compliments amicaux pour M. votre frère,
je suis toujours, mon cher d’Eichthal,
votre bien dévoué
J. S. Mill
629.
TO JOHN GORHAM PALFREY
B[lackheath] P[ark] July 18, 1863
Dear Sir—
Want of time has prevented me from sooner acknowledging the present of your two works; as it still obliges me to postpone the pleasure I expect to derive from your History of New England. But I will not any longer defer expressing to you my sincere thanks for your having given me the opportunity of reading your two series of papers on the Slave Power. Had but such a book as yours been in the hands of our people at the commencement of the present contest, I think that it would have saved many from disgracing themselves & their country by sympathizing with the atrocious slaveholding conspiracy.
They had a slight though wholly insufficient excuse in their total ignorance of all the antecedents of the question. But now they have contracted the habit of siding with tyrants & the most complete proof that could be laid before them of the character of the tyranny would now make comparatively little impression on them. I feel the warmest sympathy with the tone & spirit of your book & the highest admiration for the band of men, of whom you are one, who founded & led the AntiSlavery party in the U.S. in still worse times than these, and I have found myself often exclaiming as I read your book that the noble Commonwealth of Massachusetts will yet redeem America & the world.
630.
TO GUSTAVE D’EICHTHAL
le 23 juillet 1863
Mon cher d’Eichthal
Le livre que vous avez bien voulu me destiner, m’est parvenu avant votre seconde lettre. Je n’avais pas d’inquiétude sur son arrivée, étant de longtemps accoutumé aux délais de libraires français. Je n’en fis mention dans ma lettre que pour expliquer pourquoi je ne vous disais rien d’un livre que je n’avais pas encore reçu. Maintenant que je le possède, je me promets de le lire avec le plus grand intérêt. Je me souviens que je vous dois déjà la connaissance des écrits si importants de M. Salvador sur la même question, et sur bien d’autres étroitement liées avec elle. Je suis charmé d’avoir une étude de ce sujet, faite de votre point de vue.
Moi aussi j’ai été frappé de l’article du Westminster Review sur le Saint-Simonisme, sans avoir même des soupçons sur la source d’où il provient. Votre confirmation de son exactitude serait très précieuse à l’auteur quel qu’il soit.
Excusez si je n’écris pas davantage, étant actuellement très occupé.
votre très dévoué
J. S. Mill
631.
TO J. STUART STUART-GLENNIE
July 23, 1863
Dear Sir—
Dr Tyndall’s answer to your question must be considered, I shd think, to set at rest all doubt respecting the complete establishment of the law of Conservation of Force so far as regards the mutual convertibility of Heat & Mechanical motion. Though the law is not yet similarly established in any other of its subdivisions, there is good reason to expect that it will be so, & I am quite willing to accept it hypothetically as established.
Supposing this mutual convertibility to be an universal law it will necessarily modify at least in the mode of expression, much of the received physical & metaphysical philosophy; & in endeavouring, even in the present state of the subject, to discover what these modifications ought to be, you are engaged not only in a very useful undertaking, but in one for which the letter you have written to me shews that you have a considerable amount of qualification. I would therefore encourage you to go on, and as the best help I can give you, is to offer such remarks as occur to me on any part of your speculations which you may communicate to me, I will begin doing so with your letter.
With regard to Matter, there has long been a growing tendency in thinkers to regard its particles as mere centres of force—even as local centres arbitrarily assumed to facilitate calculation and not implying the hypothesis of an absolute minimum. I think also that philosophers have long since given up the conception of Inertia in the sense in which you contend against it. No one any longer speaks of a vis inertiae, sufficient of itself to neutralise part of an impelling force. It is quite understood that as much force as is lost by the impinging body is always transferred to the impinged, at least in the form of pressure, & that if this is often imperceptible to the senses it is because a small amount of force is distributed over so great a bulk that the effect on the whole is that of an inappreciable fraction. We may now add as the complement & correction of this doctrine that force which is lost as motion, reappears in some other shape. With respect to Cause I confess I cannot see that the philosophical conception of it is at all altered by the new principle. The existence of force, no doubt, must now be placed as the existence of matter was before, among those facts which having in their nature no beginning are not dependent on any Cause. The existence of a certain quantity of Force, as of a certain quantity of Matter, becomes itself one of the primeval causes. But every change of state, from one manifestation of force to another (as from locomotion to heat or conversely) remains an event, dependent on a certain combination of previous conditions & our conception of Causation is still, in regard to such events, exactly what it was before. Not to mention that the ultimate effects, which follow from these different manifestations—e.g. the locomotion which we see, & the heat which we feel—remain essentially & irrevocably different as they were before. They are shewn indeed to be consequences of the same Primeval Cause, under different sets of collateral conditions, but neither this, nor anything else, can make them identical in themselves; the sensations are different—& do not coexist as the causes do: they are effects dependent as they have always been considered to be upon a law of sequence.
The mutuality of action, of which the range is so greatly extended by the discovery of the Conservation of Force, does not as it seems to me affect the idea of Cause. Even if established as the universal law of all action, it would only shew that all, instead of merely some, Causes are reacted upon by their effects; that there is reciprocal succession between the different links of two series. This phenomenon is always allowed for in the inductive theory of Cause. It is always recognized, for example, in the phenomena of gravitation. The position of every body in the solar system is the joint effect of the position of all the other bodies of the system, and it also itself exerts an influence on the position of each of them. But this is still a case of succession not of coexistence, for only one of these relative positions of all the bodies can exist at a time, & the change from one position to another is effected by motion which is successive. If the position of each body were merely a fact in correlation with the position of every other, all the different positions mutually determining one another, the system would be in equilibrium & all motion would cease. That it does not cease proves that the present position of each body is determining not the present position of every other, but a change in that position. So that even in this example (the most favourable of all to you because gravitation has not been proved to require time for its transmission) you need the old idea of Causation to account for the facts.
I may add that if a different definition is now wanted of Cause & Effect it would be necessary to look out for clearer expressions than “a relation” & the “realization” of that relation, terms which as it seems to me require explanation still more than Cause & Effect do.
I shall always be happy to discuss these matters further with you either by word of mouth or in writing.
632.
TO JOHN PLUMMER
July 26. 1863
Dear Sir
I thank you for sending me some more of your writings. Independently of the value of their matter, I have been struck with the goodness of the composition, which, in self-instructed writers even of great merit, often remains far below the standard of their thoughts. One who has so much both useful and interesting to say, and who can say it so well, is right to seek admittance into some of the higher periodicals. If you like to send your article to McMillan through me, I shall be happy to take charge of it; or, if you send it direct to the editor, and let me know just before, I will write a note to Mr Masson which may perhaps cause it to be earlier attended to.
My daughter thanks you for your present, and will be very happy to see both yourself and Mrs Plummer should you be again in London.
I suppose you have received by this time a parcel from my publisher containing all my writings which you did not already possess, except a small volume of Political Economy essays, which is out of print. The other books which I promised to send you will speedily follow. I am
Dear Sir
very sincerely yours
J. S. Mill
633.
TO THEODOR GOMPERZ
Blackheath, July 29, 1863.
I have delayed writing to you for several days after receiving your letter of July 18, because that letter made me hope that I should before this time receive another which might perhaps explain some part of the first. I wish that anything I could say would relieve the unhappiness of which your letter contains so much proof. In so far as it is caused by the notion that you have in England—at Oxford or anywhere else—enemies who plot against you and delight in making you suffer, I am convinced that you will some day look upon this as the most visionary phantom which morbid nervous excitement could conjure up. Consider the total absence of motive for such malignity, and the extreme improbability that it would be harboured against one the whole of whose character and demeanour inspire the most friendly as well as respectful feelings. But what makes this delusion so painful to us, is the measure it gives of what you are suffering from other causes. The alleviation of that can not, in the nature of the case, come from others, but must come from yourself. There is a remedy for most sufferings. But as far as my experience goes, it is to be found only in resolutely turning the mind to other things. You have noble objects: you have intellect and acquirements, which can be made useful to the world, and public spirit to desire to put them to that use. It is uphill work, at first, to prescribe to yourself as a task, what could be more agreeably and easily done from a genial impulse; but it is what everybody has to do, who accomplishes anything considerable, for nobody can command genial impulses at pleasure. If you would only set yourself in a determined manner to complete any of the literary undertakings you have had in view, forcing yourself to work at it a certain (not too great) number of hours every day till it is finished, you will find that existence will become much more bearable to you even from the first. But this should be done regularly, as men transact official or professional business; and it should not be done to the detriment of the health. The thoughts can be trained to flow in a given channel only by the aid of habit.—You express yourself, as you always do, much too warmly about what you consider as your obligations to me. It is a very small claim on gratitude to give a little of one’s society to a man whom one esteems and likes, and I have not had an opportunity of shewing my regard for you in any other way, except the very easy one of introducing you to Mr. Grote. You say that I have two different languages to you, and that one of them makes you fear that you are destined always to be the subject of the greatest misconceptions. If you mean that I misconceive you, I entreat you, my dear friend, to speak plainly to me, and tell me in what—that I may either clear the matter up by shewing that I do not think of you as you suppose, or if I really do misunderstand you in any respect, that the error may be corrected. Any thing uncomplimentary to you, anything that it could give you pain to know, I am the farthest possible from thinking, and am anxious to know what, in my language to you at any time, can have given you so groundless an idea.—Our health which you inquire about in so kind a manner, is much as usual; but we are not at all easy in our minds, for we are really anxious about you. It would be a great relief to us if we knew that you had exchanged a life of brooding over painful thoughts for a healthful exertion of the active faculties.—Mrs. Grote has many times inquired after you with kind interest, and Mr. Bain regretted your departure, as he had hoped to have some more conversation with you. When I last saw Mr. Grote, he said, he was going to write to you. . . .
634.
TO GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE
July 30. 1863
Dear Sir
I am sorry to have put you to inconvenience by my bad writing. My address when in France is Saint-Véran, Avignon. Avignon, France, is however a sufficient direction.
I have had some thoughts of printing a cheap edition of my Political Economy, but as I cannot do so without my publisher’s consent until the edition now on sale is exhausted, I should be glad of any information you could give me, that might lead him to think his interest would not suffer by it. I am
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
635.
TO JOHN CHAPMAN
Aug. 1. 1863
Dear Sir
My proposal to write on Comte was connected with the Life, with extracts from his Correspondence, which has long been in preparation by M. Littré, and which may now, I believe, be expected very soon, but perhaps not so soon as October. In any case my being able to write the article depends on your being able to wait some time for it, as I have work in hand which requires continuity of thought, and which would suffer very much if I were to break it off and take up a quite different train of ideas. In anything I write for you on such a subject, I desire to do my very best, and to be able to give it my undivided attention. I cannot, therefore, say at present how soon I shall be able to write it, certainly not for the next number. I regret that I am unable to help you at a time when help would be particularly useful to you. Your time and thoughts may well be taken up by so important a medical discovery, which I earnestly hope may prove as beneficial both to the world and to yourself as there is reason to anticipate. I am
Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
636.
TO LOUIS BLANC
le 3 août 1863
Mon cher Monsieur Louis Blanc,
Etes-vous libre quelque jour de la semaine prochaine commençant Lundi le 10 août? En ce cas vous nous feriez beaucoup de plaisir si vous voulez venir diner avec nous. Nous dinons à six heures.
Votre tout dévoué
J. S. Mill
637.
TO HENRY FAWCETT
Aug. 24. 1863
Dear Mr Fawcett
Stephen’s letter contained some very interesting information which I have seen nowhere else; the manifestations in Massachusetts on the setting out of a negro regiment, and still more, the prospect of a more thorough Emancipation Act in Missouri. I showed the letter to Mr Hare, who happened to be here, and then sent it by post to your father as you desired.
Everything now looks encouraging, both for the success of the North, and for the cause of negro emancipation. But nothing that has come from America has so strongly impressed me, as the manifesto of the Committee of negroes to induce their fellow negroes to enlist —so absurdly ridiculed for its highflown language. I was not at all prepared for anything so admirable in tone and feeling. Degraded and looked down upon as these people are said to be, their strongest feelings were not as negroes but as citizens and republicans—what they expected to tell on the negroes of the north and make them give their lives for the cause was not the interests or the wrongs of their race; it was the idea that they were to fight for liberty, and humanity, and civilization, and that the improvement of the world would go back if the North did not prevail. Is not this noble? And not a soul seems to have noticed it. One would think that the most highminded and heroic feelings, impelling to corresponding actions, were the commonest and most natural things in the world, in a despised and downtrodden race. I suppose the truth is, nobody read the manifesto.
We leave for Avignon about the end of the month, and shall not return till February. Let me hear from you sometimes.
Ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
638.
TO LOUIS BLANC
Aug. 25. 1863
Mon cher Monsieur Louis Blanc
Nous partons pour Avignon au commencement de la semaine prochaine, mais avant de partir je vous prie de m’informer quels sont ceux de mes écrits dont je vous ai envoyé des exemplaires, afin que je me donne le plaisir de vous offrir les autres.
Je serais charmé s’ils pouvaient vous donner autant de plaisir que j’ai retiré de la lecture de votre grand ouvrage historique. Une histoire de la Révolution du point de vue socialiste, manquait auparavant, et il en rejaillit mille lumières nouvelles. Je me trouve souvent, à votre égard, dans un désaccord d’opinions, non total, mais partiel, que vous n’aurez pas de peine à concevoir. Mais l’impression toujours dominante est d’estime et d’admiration. Même lorsque je vois les faits autrement que vous, il est très important de reconnaître qu’ils peuvent être vus comme vous les voyez.
votre tout dévoué
J. S. Mill
639.
TO JOSEPHINE VON WERTHEIMSTEIN
le 25 août 1863.
Madame, pardonnez-moi, de n’avoir fait jusqu’ici aucune réponse directe à la lettre que vous avez bien voulu m’écrire. Je croyais mieux remplir votre désir en écrivant à celui qui est, à si juste titre, l’Objet de notre commune sollicitude. J’écrivis sans délai, mais comme depuis lors je n’ai pas eu de ses nouvelles, je n’ose presque pas lui écrire de nouveau sans avoir préalablement demandé à vous ou à M. Wessel dans quel état d’esprit il se trouve maintenant. En même temps je remplis le devoir de vous assurer directement, à quel point nous partageons votre peine et votre inquiétude. Vous vous êtes servie, Madame, dans votre lettre, d’expressions de reconnaissance très audelà de mon droit. Je serais trop heureux de pouvoir les mériter, mais jusqu’ici je ne vois presque rien que j’aie fait pour lui. S’il y a quelque chose que j’aurais pu faire, c’eût été peut-être de lui donner, par des preuves d’estime, la confiance qui lui manquait en lui-même. Ces preuves d’estime il les a eues, non seulement de moi, mais de M. Grote, et, je le crois sincèrement, de tous ceux qui l’ont connu ici. Cela n’a servi à rien quant à présent, mais il faut croire que cela ne sera pas perdu dans l’avenir. J’ai reconnu en lui, dès le commencement, une haute capacité intellectuelle: cette impression est allée toujours en s’accroissant, tandis-qu’une connaissance plus intime y a ajouté une véritable estime morale. Ce n’est que plus tard que j’ai reconnu chez lui cette extrème sensibilité aux impressions pénibles qui le rend en même temps très susceptible de souffrance et peu accessible aux consolations. En lui écrivant je m’efforce toujours à le décider à en chercher dans les hauts travaux intellectuels dont il est si capable, et dans la carrière utile et honorable qu’il peut remplir dans le monde de l’intelligence comme dans celui des interêts sociaux. Si j’ai quelque pouvoir sur son esprit, je ne me lasserai pas de l’exercer dans ce sens: et, ses autres amis aidant, nous finirons peut-être par réussir. . . . Si [M. Wessel] est encore avec vous, je lui aurai une véritable obligation toutes les fois qu’il voudra bien nous donner des nouvelles de son ami. . . .
640.
TO JOHN PLUMMER
Aug. 28. 1863
Dear Sir
I have received your article, and after reading it have sent it to Mr Masson with a strong recommendation of it and of its author.
Though it is not a striking article, it is a very good one, and not only such as I think he would do well to print but calculated to make him wish to try what other things you can write which would suit him.
My daughter (Miss Taylor) thanks you for the volume of poems, and desires to be remembered to Mrs Plummer.
Letters will not find me here beyond Monday morning after which they had better be directed to my publisher with “to be forwarded” written on the cover.
I am Dear Sir
yours very sincerely
J. S. Mill
641.
TO HARRIET GROTE
- Hotel Windsor
- Rue de Rivoli [Paris]
Sept. 2. [1863]
Dear Mrs Grote
We deferred our departure from England till yesterday in the hope of your being in Paris today, but I have inquired for you at the Hotel Meurice and find you have not arrived, and as we are expected at Avignon tomorrow morning we have missed the sight of you for this time.
We took Daisy to Savile Row and duly delivered him there on Monday. He is out in very fine flower at present. It cost both Helen and me an effort not to make use of your kind permission to take him with us to Avignon, but prudence prevailed, on account of the absence of any fence capable of restraining his wandering propensities. He is a most beautiful and amiable dog and his pleasant ways have been a great source of enjoyment to us.
Helen thanks you for your letter, and hopes you have continued to enjoy your excursion. She is very sorry to have missed seeing you here.
I hope Mr Grote is quite well. I enjoyed his visit, two or three days before he left London. I need not say how glad we should always be to hear from either of you. I am
Dear Mrs Grote
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
642.
TO JOHN CHAPMAN
Sept. 6. 1863
Dear Sir
On arriving here, three days ago, I found M. Littré’s volume on Comte, which is just published. After reading it, I feel an increased desire to make it the subject of an article for you. But I feel some embarrassment for the following reasons. What I wish to write is an estimate of Comte’s philosophy. But the book suggests much to be said about the man himself, his character and career, the conduct of others in relation to him, and various points in the character of his country and of the age, which some of the incidents of his life illustrate. It, therefore, is worth reviewing merely as a biography, independent of the great philosophical questions raised in it; and as the attempt to combine both points of view in one article would not only run to too great a length, but would almost necessarily spoil both, two articles seem to be required, one of which, though I should not be unwilling, I have no particular wish to write, while I could not possibly set about either before next year. In these circumstances, you would perhaps like to have an article on the biographical aspect of the book without waiting so long for it; and I should myself prefer to be relieved from that part of the task, if you have any other contributor to whom you would not be unwilling to confide it. I am
Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
643.
TO T. E. CLIFFE LESLIE
Sept. 15. 1863.
Dear Sir—
You wished to be informed, of anything worth reading which came out on the gold question. If you have not yet returned to England you may not be aware of Fawcett’s paper read at the British Association, & the newspaper discussion which has followed it, at the rate of two or more long letters in the Times every day —Cairnes, among others, taking part. If you have not yet done so, you will find it worth while to look through a file of the Times, as well as to read Fawcett’s paper which I doubt not he will gladly communicate to you. The Daily News had a fuller report of it than the Times. It seems to me that three important ideas have emerged from the discussion, all tending to explain in their several degrees why the apparent depreciation has been so much less than might have been expected from so great an addition to the quantity of gold in the world. The first is, that the increase must be compared, not with the gold alone which existed before, but with the gold plus the silver, which last is said to be double the value of the gold. This was brought forward by Cairnes. Second: one writer has urged that railways & free trade are rapidly producing an approach to equality of prices all over the world in place of the great inequality that existed before, England being the place where they were, as a rule, highest. This change, if there had been no gold discoveries would have taken place by a fall in some places, & a rise in others: conseqently the operation of the new gold for some time in such places as England, would chiefly consist in preventing a fall; & its only manifest effect might for some time be that of raising prices in the cheap countries to nearly the level of the dear ones. This, which is an original & I think a just, remark, Cairnes notices but rejects, having I think been set against it by a stupid metaphorical way of putting it in a leading article of the Times. The third idea is one I have myself for some time entertained, & it has been taken up by one writer in a newspaper letter. It is this: We are already suffering a much greater depreciation than appears on the surface, because the diminished purchasing power of money is experienced in the form of deteriorated quality rather than of higher price. It is the interest of dealers thus to disguise the progressive rise of prices. There are always things to be had at the prices or something like the prices one has been accustomed to pay, but they are no longer of the same quality. The same purpose is also often effected by giving smaller & smaller measure without change of name.
Of course all these circumstances affect only the rapidity of the depreciation & have nothing to do with determining what it will ultimately amount to, which is a question of permanent cost of production, and as the business gets out of the hands of private diggers into those of quartz crushing companies conducting it on ordinary mercantile principles, gold will ultimately be of the value which will yield to such companies the ordinary rate of companies’ profit.
We propose remaining here till the end of the year or about the meeting of Parliament. I shall be happy to hear from you sometimes in the interval.
644.
TO THEODOR GOMPERZ
Saint Véran, Avignon, Sept. 17, 1863
Let me begin by saying how much I rejoice to hear that you are better both in health and in spirits, and are vigorously at work, with a result satisfactory even to yourself, which is always the most difficult thing to a good writer.—Let me next thank you, which I do sincerely, for telling me frankly what you have in your mind against me. The only way to clear up misunderstandings, is to speak plainly about them, and some of the impressions which seem to have been made upon you are such as, if you had not told them to me, I certainly should never have guessed. I feel as strongly as you do the ludicrousness of your having to ask me what I have seen to make me entertain I know not what mean opinion of you, and I wonder that what you feel to be so ridiculous you should nevertheless have thought to be probable. I may in my turn ask you, what have you seen in me which made it likely that, absolutely without cause, I should have formed an unfavourable opinion of one for whom I have professed, and continue to profess, so much esteem and regard? As to the idea that any intimate friend of mine or any person deriving information from me has spread any reports or communicated any impressions disadvantageous to you, I am sure, since you say it, that you yourself fully believe it, but I tell you with the same frankness you have used to me, that I disbelieve it totally.—Surely, too, I may well be surprised that you should think anything of a bad joke about Vienna, which I have not the smallest recollection of making, but which, I am quite sure, had not the slightest reference to you? I can only have meant, that the next time we went to Vienna, there would perhaps be something new to be seen there.—My letter from Avignon was quite another thing, and knowing as I now do the state of your feelings, I can well understand your being pained by it. But you must recollect that I did not know then what I know now, and it never entered into my head that your object in coming was to say anything particular, which you thought you had not had an opportunity of saying before. I thought that you simply desired to see the place and to see us, and in so doing I neither thought you obtrusive, nor imagined that you expected anything but what your knowledge of our friendship for you perfectly entitled you to expect. But knowing that my time was much occupied, I feared you might be disappointed, and it seemed right to let you know that I could not give you so full and free an invitation to come whenever it might be convenient to you, as I had done in England; and to tell you so, before you had undertaken so long a journey under what might have been a mistaken impression, that I had more leisure for seeing friends here than in England. I thought I was using a freedom which I could not have taken with a mere acquaintance, but which I am even bound to use with a friend. . . .
645.
TO HARRIET ISABELLA MILL
Sept. 17, 1863
Dear Harriet
It is very fortunate that you received the offers you mention in time to save you from the unpleasant and perhaps dangerous voyage to Shetland.
Even had I been at home when your letter arrived, an answer from me could not possibly have reached you in time by return of post. As it happened, I did not receive your letter till after the date you fixed for deciding the question. Perhaps however this is not to be regretted, as it is well that you should decide for yourself on a question of which you have fuller means of judging than anyone else. I sincerely hope that your troubles are over, and that your health will now speedily recover itself.
J.S.M.
646.
TO JOHN CHAPMAN
Sept. 18. 1863
Dear Sir
Since you wish it, I will undertake both articles, provided that on further consideration I think it desirable that the biographical one should be written at all. My doubt arises from the fact that neither Comte nor the French national character appear at all in a favourable light in Littré’s book, and there are so many people disposed to think and say the worst possible of both, that I am not sure of its being desirable that we should add our voices to swell the cry. If I write both articles, the first will be on Littré’s book combined with another biography of Comte by a more thorough disciple, Dr. Robinet; and the second will combine the biography by Littré with his Paroles de Philosophie Positive and with a very well made compendium of Comte’s final doctrines, by Célestin de Blignières. I have not much prospect of being ready for the April number but I will give you the longest notice I am able. I am
Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
647.
TO JOHN APPLETON
S[aint] V[éran] Sept. 24. 1863
Dear Sir—
Though I did not immediately answer your letter of July 18 it was by no means for want of being greatly interested by it. But it so exactly coincides with my own interpretation of passing events as to leave me hardly anything to say. I have just been reading it again, for the third or fourth time since I received it, & I find that we think alike on every point which you touch upon. This cannot but confirm me very much in my way of thinking. But indeed the true nature of all that is going on in America just now is so simple & obvious that to see it as it is requires only that one should not be totally ignorant of American affairs during a few years before the secession. As almost everybody here from the prime minister down to the smallest newspaper writer is thus ignorant, they naturally see, in what is now going on, only what their wishes or their prejudices prepare them to look for.
The general direction of the sympathies of nearly all classes here except the working, & the better part of the literary class, is disgraceful enough to this country. But things are mending a little. The worst enemies of America are becoming convinced that it will not do to let any more Alabamas go out from these islands. It is curious to see the Times daily arguing, in total opposition to its former doctrines, that to allow vessels of war to be in substance, even if not literally, fitted out in this country for a belligerent is wrong as well as inexpedient. The government, as a government, has always been better than the public in all that relates to this contest; & I am persuaded that this country will not give you any serious cause of complaint against its conduct, but only against its inclinations. Some members of the Cabinet too, have been all along warm friends of the cause. The D. of Argyll & Milner-Gibson have not disguised it in their speeches & my opinion is that even Lord Russell is more with the North than against it. The sentiments of the others will, I doubt not, be very greatly modified by your success of which there can now be little doubt, from the gradual but constant progress of the Northern army & the increasing exhaustion of the South, & the dogged pertinacity for which no one originally ventured to give the people of the Free States credit for as much as they have shewn. Complete victory may not yet be very near at hand, but it is a consolation to think that provided the success is complete at last, the longer the war continues the less possibility there is of a compromise preserving slavery, & the more thoroughly the war will have become one of principle, tending to elevate the national character.
The thing I most wish to hear from you now is what you, & men like you are thinking about the mode of settling Southern affairs after the war. I cannot look forward with satisfaction to any settlement but complete emancipation—land given to every negro family either separately or in organized communities under such rules as may be found temporarily necessary—the schoolmaster set to work in every village & the tide of free immigration turned on in those fertile regions from which slavery has hitherto excluded it. If this be done, the gentle & docile character which seems to distinguish the negroes will prevent any mischief on their side, while the proofs they are giving of fighting powers will do more in a year than all other things in a century to make the whites respect them & consent to their being politically & socially equals. Such benefits are more than an equivalent for a far longer & more destructive war than this is likely to prove.
I am in hopes too that this great trial of American institutions which has necessarily brought all that is defective in them to the surface, will have done the work of a whole age in stimulating thought on the most important topics among the people of the Free States. I have long thought that the real ultimate danger of democracy was intellectual stagnation & there is a very good side to anything which has made that impossible for at least a generation to come.
Many thanks for the documents you kindly sent. I have received so many from various quarters in the U. States that I have not yet had time to read half of them. All that I have read are extremely interesting & valuable. I am &c
648.
TO JOHN CHAPMAN
Sept. 25, 1863
Dear Sir
Since I wrote to you I have read the volume on Comte’s life and doctrines by Dr Robinet. The result is, that I think it desirable to abandon the biographical article. There is so bitter a feud between those who followed Comte in the last developments of his opinions and those who only went a certain way with him, among whom was Littré; and the two parties differ so widely in their statements of fact, that there is no chance of getting at the truth: and any remarks founded on mere conjecture would be of course utterly valueless, besides the possibility that they might be unjust to one side or the other. I therefore propose to limit myself to one article, which I will set about as soon as I am free from my present occupations and in which I shall pass slightly over Comte’s personal history and character, and confine myself in the main to an estimate of his doctrines and method. I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
649.
TO GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE
Sept. 25, 1863
Dear Sir
I am much obliged to you for the notes. When I return to England, I will sound Mr Parker on the subject of publishing at once a cheap edition of at least the Political Economy. The other books may perhaps follow.
The British Association documents have not yet reached me, printed matter not being forwarded unless by express directions. But when there are enough of them to make a parcel of, I shall probably order them to be sent, and shall then be enabled to read your papers. I am
yours very faithfully
J. S. Mill
650.
TO JOHN PLUMMER
Oct. 3. 1863
Dear Sir
I am glad to hear so much good news concerning you, and especially that you are to be at Edinburgh and to read papers there, and that you are forming a connexion with the Telegraph, as the large sale of that paper makes it an important vehicle for opinions, besides enabling it, I should hope, to remunerate you liberally. I am glad, too, on all accounts, that you have been asked to write for Mr Chadwick’s paper. I am disappointed that you have not heard (nor I either) from Mr Masson, but I consider it a sign that if he has not yet determined to print your article, at least he has not decided to reject it. I agree with you that Mr Herbert Spencer, in his Social Statics, carries his hostility to government agency beyond reasonable bounds. I attempted to strike a more correct balance between the considerations on both sides in the concluding chapter of my Political Economy. I am glad you have found the books useful. I can often send you reviews and magazines, and you are welcome to the loan of any of my books. If, during my absence, you should want any book which you remember to have seen at my house, let me know, and I will send directions for its being sent or delivered to you. It is a pleasure to lend books when one knows that they [will] be really useful to the borrower.
My daughter begs to be remembered to Mrs Plummer and I am Dear Sir
very sincerely yours
J. S. Mill
651.
TO HENRY SAMUEL CHAPMAN
October 5. 1863
Dear Chapman
I find I have not yet acknowledged your letter of 25th May last. You have probably, however, heard something about me from your son, between whom and me some communications have passed, though I have not yet seen him, as he remained at Cambridge until after I had left England. I shall hope to see him when I return. I heard with regret of your father’s death. A life seldom lasts so long as his unless it has been a pleasant and desirable one, so that one may reasonably be glad of its prolongation and sorry when it comes to an end.
I am much obliged to you for the interesting documents you sent. I duly received, I believe, all of them, and have looked into them as much as time allowed. I was much interested by your account of the kind of new books which are sought after in the colony, and the ardour to get them. Australia seems to go ahead in opinions as well as in industrial occupations. In this country it is quite amusing to see how speculations on religious and other subjects, which have for generations been familiar to instructed people here, and to people of all sorts in the rest of Europe, are just now getting down to the inferior strata of cultivation, and (as a great part of the current literature now springs from those inferior strata) are being written about as startling novelties both by friends and enemies. The consequence, however, is a stir in the middle and lower intellectual regions such as has not been seen for centuries, and the effects of which, in one way or another, cannot fail to be considerable.
Do not direct to Parker any more, as he is retiring from business, but direct to me at Blackheath Park, Kent, from whence letters are regularly sent to me when I am at Saint-Véran.
I am at present writing chiefly on metaphysics; but the forthcoming Edinburgh Review has an article of mine on Austin’s Lectures which may interest you.
I am Dear Chapman
ever yours sincerely
J. S. Mill
652.
TO HENRY FAWCETT
Oct. 14. 1863
Dear Mr Fawcett
I thank you very much for your letter, and for the extract from that of Mr. Stephen. The tidings from America may be considered good. It is a question if Rosecranz’s check is to be regretted, since if the war ends too soon, it may end without the complete emancipation of the slaves; but if it is ended by the aid of 40 or 50,000 negro soldiers, and after another year’s experience of enfranchised negroes growing cotton and sugar for wages not only slavery will be extinguished, but the South will probably settle down into a free country much more easily than is supposed, and the anti negro feeling in the free states will have, in a great measure, disappeared. We shall then have nothing to regret but the exasperation of the Americans against England, which is a great evil to both countries, but the English have brought it upon themselves.—I have read in the Daily News two speeches of yours at Edinburgh: they seemed imperfectly reported, but I thought both of them good. There was also, I am glad to see, a useful discussion on the admission of women to degrees. The most numerous as well as the best speakers seem to have been on the right side. Hastings in particular deserves praise and encouragement. He is very much in earnest on the subject. He told me he had succeeded in getting women included in the Cambridge local examinations. —I am glad you are writing on the gold question. Cairnes’s letters were good, but I think him wrong in rejecting an important remark made in a letter to the Times. It was to this effect. Railways and free trade are producing a comparative equalization of the prices of things in different and distant places. Had there been no gold discoveries, this would have been effected by a rise in the remote out-of-the-way places, and a fall in the great markets. The new gold has caused the equalization to take place almost wholly by a rise of prices in the remote places to something near the level of the great markets; and in effecting this, a great deal of the gold has necessarily been absorbed; just as if the gold had physically spread itself over the lower levels, before reaching the higher. The writer having used this metaphor, Cairnes, disgusted by it, and thinking that the metaphor was the argument, rejected the doctrine contemptuously. —I have not yet seen Cairnes’s pamphlet which you mention. Is it a secret who is the writer of the review of your book in the Saturday Review? It ought to help you with the professorship. —Fitzjames Stephen’s article on America in Fraser begins excellently, and goes off quite poor and weak. He assumes all sorts of bad consequences in case of the subjugation of the South, which the facts that are daily occurring prove to be neither necessary nor probable.—I am glad to hear such a good account of Mr Potter. Kyllmann is a most valuable person and I fully expected you would like him. You could not do better than give him carte blanche to draw upon you for copies of your pamphlet. I understand from Mr Hare that two pamphlets in favour of his plan have been published in America. The stir in the national mind gives a good chance for the opening of all subjects which, like the constitution of the American democracy, have been prematurely closed.—We are here till January, and I hope to hear from you now and then. I am
Dear Mr Fawcett
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
653.
TO WILLIAM THOMAS THORNTON
Oct. 23. 1863
Dear Thornton—
I am glad you are so earnestly engaged on the subject of Cooperation. I shall be very glad if the Edinburgh takes your article, & confident that if it does not the Westminster will. I suppose you will be able to get useful information, or indication of sources of information, from Kyllmann. Plummer also might be very useful to you, & would be delighted to be so. If you were to write to him, Mr. John Plummer, Kettering, is a sufficient address (unless indeed he has removed to Northampton which he talked of doing). He would be glad to send you information, or, when in town for a day which he is sometimes, to call on you.
Have you considered the subject of the taxation of charities? If not, perhaps when you do, you may not agree with Gladstone. I have not hitherto agreed with him, though a little shaken, not by any of Gladstone’s arguments, but by some of Hare’s. Hare is, I suspect, the teacher if not prompter of Gladstone on this subject. My counter arguments are: 1st. That the charities which are not useful, as the majority are not, should be reformed altogether instead of being merely taxed, &c. That anything, really useful to the public or a part of the public, which an individual has thought worth giving a part of his fortune for, deserves so long as its usefulness continues, as much encouragement from the State as is involved in not taxing the income so appropriated. 2nd That of those among whom the funds are distributed, all whose income from that & other sources together exceeds £100 pay their proper quota to the tax already, & those whose income is below £100 have, on the general principle of the tax, the same claim as all other such people to be exempted from it. 3rd You are aware that I would, if I could, exempt savings from income tax, & make the tax on income virtually a tax on expenditure. By this rule, any portion of income should be only taxed if spent on private uses, but should be free from taxation (at least at its origin) when devoted to public ends.
As for the American question, if you had time to read one or two books I could recommend to you, & if you were reading the Daily News every day (as I am whenever L[ouis] N[apoleon]’s post office lets it pass, which it does nearly four times in every week), I think you would soon come over to my opinion. In the pro-Southern English papers which I see the facts favourable to the Northern side of the question are always suppressed, & in the Times & Saturday Review the grossest lies told, in simple recklessness of assertion without knowledge: The D[aily] N[ews] is the only daily paper of which I can say (though the Star which I know less of may deserve the same praise) that what I think the just view is supported with adequate knowledge, & without prejudice, & the facts favourable to it fairly presented. The American correspondent of that paper is an intelligent man, not like that poor gobemouche Mackay, in the Times, who simply retails the stuff he hears from a disreputable clique at New York, almost all of them personally interested in slavery either through commerce or politics, who used to be held up to contempt in the English papers as the worst section of the democracy. Their following consists chiefly of the mob of Irish emigrants. It is with these & their clients in the press & the town council that our journals have allied themselves. Everything high or intellectual or noble-hearted or that used to be friendly to England in the North is heart & soul with the war. But you will soon hear all this from Leslie Stephen better than from me.
654.
TO HENRY FAWCETT
Oct. 31. 1863.
Dear Mr Fawcett
As you are writing on the gold question, I have copied out, and send you, an interesting passage on the enormous absorption of the precious metals by hoarding, since the gold discoveries, in the agricultural parts of Germany, which have absorbed a great deal in that time, through the increased price of their produce occasioned by railways and the opening of the English and French markets. The passage is from an article on the question of Salaries, published in 1857 in a German review, which the translator in the Revue Germanique for October (from which I take it) calls the Revue Trimestrielle Allemande.
I was very glad to see the prominent part you were able successfully to maintain at the Social Science meetings. I suppose the contest for the Professorship will be decided shortly. I am
Dear Mr. Fawcett
vry truly yours
J. S. Mill
655.
TO JOHN PLUMMER
Oct. 31, 1863
Dear Sir
I have received your note, and also one from Mr Masson, in which he says that he likes your article, but cannot publish it for want of room. I do not know if he has expressed to you a willingness to insert anything else: but if you have anything in view, on any subject, that you think suitable for McMillan, you need not, I think, be discouraged, as you will be pretty sure to get it accepted either there or somewhere else.
I am glad to hear that the Quarterly is even tolerably good on Cooperation. My friend Mr Thornton, who is very ardent in the cause, is writing on the subject, and I should not wonder if he were to communicate with you respecting it. Your proceedings at Edinburgh interested me much. I was glad also to hear that you had seen so much of the three persons you mention in your note. They are all of them persons of great knowledge and public spirit and they may be able to help you and you them, to very good purpose, in the pursuit of public objects.
With our kind remembrances to Mrs Plummer I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
656.
TO HENRY CHENEVIX
Nov. 4. 1863.
Dear Sir—
Your communication raises a great many more points than can be properly discussed in a letter, & more than I have time to discuss at all. You have seen in my Logic my opinion on the subject of miracles generally, viz. that no event, however extraordinary, can be proved to be miraculous, & therefore that no such event can prove the existence of a supernatural power; but that to one who already believes in such a power, any miracle, consistent with his theory of the character & purposes of the Power he recognises, is no more incredible than any other extraordinary fact. I cannot say I ever saw any advantage in the theory which supposes miracles to be manifestations of unknown general laws, or in other words, feats of knowledge & skill, not of power. If any one has been endowed by God for the special purpose of working wonders to serve as credentials for a divine message, I see no antecedent reason for supposing that this power would have been given in the form of a knowledge of laws yet undiscovered rather than in that of a power of superseding all laws, while in the former case to work the wonder & keep the knowledge secret, implies a charlatanerie which one would not willingly impute to a person divinely inspired & which is not implied in the other case.
Unless I could pretend to know either that there is no supernatural power or that such Power never works but in one way, I cannot presume to say that Christ may not have worked miracles: & I confess if I could be convinced that he ever said he had done so, it would weigh a great deal with me in favour of the belief. But in my opinion there is not a single miracle in either the Old or New Testament the particular evidence of which is worth a farthing. Those of Christ seem to me exactly on a level with the wonderful stories current about every remarkable man, & repeated in good faith in times when the scientific spirit scarcely existed. We know that in the time & place he lived in, no one thought miracles in the smallest degree incredible; those who rejected his mission did not trouble themselves to dispute his miraculous powers but preferred ascribing them to evil beings. With regard to prophecies, in the sense attached to the word by modern theologians I do not believe that any such ever were made. The splendid religious & patriotic poetry of Isaiah, Jeremiah & others so far as it contains any predictions of future events contains only such as are made by Carlyle or anybody who argues that moral degeneracy in a people must lead to a catastrophe. The catastrophe they specially looked forward to was that which everything shewed to be then imminent, a Babylonian conquest. This again they as Hebrews naturally believed not to be permanent inasmuch as the Babylonians being wicked & idolaters could only be suffered to prevail temporarily over God’s people as instruments for their punishment. The only exception I am aware of to this character of the prophetic writings is the book of Daniel which predicts events in such minute detail down to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes & with such extreme vagueness afterwards that I firmly believe (with Coleridge) that it predicted only what had already happened.
I do not suppose that what I have said will help you much in your difficulties, but it will shew you that I judge of the credibility of alleged miracles from the probabilities of each particular case & the value of the evidence adduced in it & no other principle of judgment seems to me tenable.
657.
TO ANTOINE ÉLISÉE CHERBULIEZ
St. Véran, le 6 novembre 1863
Monsieur—
Si j’ai tant tardé à vous remercier de l’envoi de votre important traité d’Economie Politique, c’est que j’ai dû attendre le moment où un loisir suffisant me permettrait de le lire attentivement et d’en parler avec connaissance de cause. C’est seulement depuis hier que j’ai pu en achever la lecture, et je ne remplis qu’un devoir en vous disant que vous avez fait, à mon sens, l’un des meilleurs ouvrages qui aient encore paru sur l’Economie Politique. Vous en avez saisi toutes les lois générales, même celles qui sont loin d’être encore reconnues par la plupart des économistes, et vous les avez exposées et groupées d’une façon qui en démontrant une vrai originalité d’esprit met souvent ces lois sous plusieurs rapports dans un jour plus ou moins nouveau. Dans la science abstraite je ne me suis jamais trouvé en désaccord avec vous, si ce n’est dans quelques détails peu importants; encore ces divergences apparentes disparaîtraient probablement devant des explications aisées. S’il n’y a pas tout à fait la même unanimité en ce qui se rapporte aux applications, cela est dans l’orde des choses humaines. De même les dissentiments ne tiennent pas à des différences de principes. Le plus saillant d’entre eux se rapporte à la question de l’assistance légale. Les économistes anglais, dont la plupart étaient autrefois très opposés à la taxe des pauvres y sont en général devenus favorables depuis l’enquête qui a amené la réforme de 1834. Ils ont cru connaître que l’assistance bornée au strict nécessaire, et assujettie à des conditions plus désagréables que le travail libre, ne produit plus l’imprévoyance et la démoralisation que vous signalez, à si juste titre, comme effets de l’aumône mal ordonnée: tandis que la charité publique et privée telle qu’elle existe en France, n’étant pas susceptible d’une organisation aussi vigoureuse, me paraît produire tous les mauvais effets qui résultèrent du système anglais lors de sa plus mauvaise administration. J’ajoute qu’il me semble que la haine des pauvres contre les riches est un mal presque inévitable là où les lois ne garantissent pas les pauvres contre l’extrémité du besoin. Le pauvre, en France, malgré l’assistance qu’il reçoit, a toujours devant les yeux la possibilité de mourir de faim, tandis qu’en Angleterre il sait qu’en dernier ressort il est créancier de la propriété jusqu’à concurrence d’une simple subsistance, que tout prolétaire qu’il soit il n’est pas absolument déshérité de sa place au soleil, à quoi j’attribue que malgré la constitution aristocratique de la propriété et de la vie sociale en Angleterre, la classe prolétaire y est rarement ennemie soit de l’institution de la propriété soit même des classes qui en jouissent.
En me félicitant, Monsieur, que la chaire d’Economie Politique dans une des institutions les plus importantes de la Suisse soit remplie par une intelligence aussi forte et aussi éclairée que la vôtre, je vous prie d’agréer l’expression sincère de ma considération la plus distinguée.
658.
TO T. E. CLIFFE LESLIE
Nov. 14. 1863.
Dear Sir—
I have read the papers you sent. I think there is a great deal of valuable matter in them, & I would encourage you on every account to go on with your project. There is very little in them that I at all disagree with—only a sentence here & there. Wherever this is the case I have made a pencil note, or will do so, for I will venture to keep the MS a day or two days longer for the purpose of reading it again. I am not sure that I rightly understood a sentence in one of your letters in which you seemed to speak of sending the paper for the editor’s consideration before completing it. You know the editor & all the elements of the case much better than I can do but I shd think that this would very much diminish the chance of the article’s being accepted. If I were you I would give it the very utmost finish of execution in my power before letting him see it. There are very few editors who would not, on such a subject, care very much more about what an article seems than about what it is. Your paper will be judged by its composition, its mode of laying out the subject, & the degree in which it makes its theory plausible. As to whether the theory is true or not the editor probably is not political economist enough to think himself able to judge, & most likely cares very little.
At present the MS is little more than material for an article. The reader has to make out for himself what you are trying to prove, & what you do prove.
I have read Cairnes’s article a second time & I only think him materially wrong in two things—first, in overlooking & even rejecting the point of view which is the prominent one in your article—the altered distribution of the precious metals which is in progress, & the tendency of prices to rise earliest and most in the more backward & remote countries. This is the great point of originality in your paper. The second mistake which I perceive in him is a much smaller one—it is one of terms only: he says that if prices did not rise at all, but were only prevented from falling this would still be depreciation of the precious metals. I shd not call this depreciation. It is exactly the absorption without depreciation, which is affirmed by some of those whom he attacks.
With respect to the question whether credit in any of its shapes is to be counted on either side in addition to the metals, is not the real state of the case, that the increase of gold would not produce any increase of credit until prices had first risen? As soon as they had risen from the action of the gold alone, larger sums would be required for all purchases, & as the ordinary object of credit is to make purchases, the nominal amount of credit called into operation would (all other things remaining the same) increase exactly in the ratio in which prices had risen. So that the difference in the credit employed before & after would not be a cause but an effect of the different state of prices before & after, & might be struck out of the account on both sides, so far as the consequences of the increase of gold are concerned—only taking care to remember that every fluctuation of credit from other causes would act as a disturbing agency & vitiate the comparison.
If the new gold has, as you suppose, anywhere taken the place of credit—which if a fact, is to me a surprising one—it must be, I think, from some local cause tending to a substitution of money for credit, which would equally have acted if the new gold had never been discovered—& must be classed with hoarding & the other things which cause more gold to be used without lowering its value.
I believe your interpretation of the state of things in India to be perfectly correct. But I do not see that it conflicts with Cairnes’s.
I do not like Courcelle-Seneuil’s Etudes, though his treatise on Pol.Econ. seemed to me very sound & sensible. But I agree with him more than I believe I do with you about the influence of race—which (it is pretty certain) is only the influence of external circumstances transmitted by inheritance & capable of being modified ad libitum or actually reversed by change of circumstances. Those of your remarks which bear on the possibility of a science of society do not seem to me to have the degree of weight you seem to attach to them. But the subject is too long for the end of a letter, or indeed for a letter at all.
If the second reading of your paper suggests any additional remarks worth sending I will write again. If not I will merely post the MS.
659.
TO LOUIS BLANC
le 18 Novembre 1863
Mon cher Monsieur Louis Blanc
Ce serait un grand plaisir pour moi que de faire ce qui pourrait vous être agréable, dans l’affaire de la proposition de M. Trübner comme dans toute autre. Mais je suis empêché, au moins pour quelque temps d’ici, d’accueillir aucune des demandes qui m’ont été faites à ce sujet. Mon éditeur M. Parker étant co-intéressé avec moi quant à plusieurs de mes ouvrages, et jusqu’à un certain point dans tous, j’ai cru devoir ne pas m’opposer à ce qu’il se défît de ses droits de la manière qu’il jugeait lui être la plus avantageuse. Ceci entraîne de ma part des relations au moins temporaires, avec la maison Longman; mais je suis très décidé à ne prendre avec MM Longman aucun engagement qui enchaîne ma liberté à l’égard d’ouvrages ou d’éditions à venir.
Nous sommes en bonne santé tous deux, et vous remercions de votre bon souvenir. Croyez toujours à l’amitié sincère de votre dévoué
J. S. Mill
660.
TO ALEXANDER BAIN
Nov. 22. 1863.
Dear Bain—
I also have been for some time meditating a long letter to you, & the receipt of yours has brought my intention to a crisis.
I am very glad that the Grammar is at last out. I shall receive it probably before my return to England as I shall most likely need to have a parcel sent here from Blackheath in which case all books received there will be put into it. I am the more glad to hear of your progress in revising the Senses for the new edition as I shall soon be in the position of waiting for it. For I have finished my book on Hamilton, as far as regards the first writing; & I shall not commence rewriting until I have your analysis of the Primary Qualities in its most matured form. I have got much help from the first edition from which I have quoted largely, but hope to get still more from the second.
Do you remember the proof which Hamilton thinks he gives, that extension & figure are perceived directly by the eye? If one colour is laid upon part of another so that both are seen, the boundary which divides them must be also seen, & this is a line, i.e. extension. If the one colour is surrounded by the other, the line returns into itself, i.e. forms a figure. I hope you will notice this argument. I shd like to know fully your opinion of it. There is one obvious answer: viz. that the extension & figure thus perceived are different things from the extension & figure perceived by touch & the muscles, & are only identified (or rather connected) with them by experience. This is true but what are this ocular extension & figure? Can we call them mere modifications of colour, or are they colour with the addition of outness, or what? I want a better theory of them than I am able to give.
I will read again Spencer’s Psychology. I remember thinking his account of Extension very good; & I shall be glad not only to profit by it but to have an opportunity of quoting from him something with which I agree. I sometimes regret (considering that he is, & deems himself unsuccessful) that when I have had occasion to speak of him in print it has almost always been to criticize him. He is a considerable thinker though anything but a safe one—& is on the whole an ally, in spite of his Universal Postulate. His speculations on Mathematical axioms I do not now remember, but when I read them I did not attach any importance to them. His notion that we cannot think the annihilation or diminution of force I remember well—& I thought it out-Whewelled Whewell. The conservation of force has hardly yet got to be believed, & already its negation is declared inconceivable. But this is Spencer all over; he throws himself with a certain deliberate impetuosity into the last new theory that chimes with his general way of thinking & treats it as proved as soon as he is able to found a connected exposition of phenomena upon it. This is the way with his doctrine of “Heredity” which however will very likely prove true.
At present my table of contents is as follows: . . . On all these heads I have written chapters which are not unfit to print even now, but I hope to improve all of them very much before I do print them. I am now covering the blank pages with notes for additions & improvements grounded on a third consecutive reading of Hamilton’s philosophical writings from beginning to end. You see if I fail to give a true character of them it will not be for want of being well acquainted with them. I was not prepared for the degree in which this complete acquaintance lowers my estimate of the man & of his speculations. I did not expect to find them a mass of contradictions. There is scarcely a point of importance on which he does not hold conflicting theories, or profess doctrines which suppose one theory while he himself holds another. I think the book will make it very difficult to hold him up as an authority on philosophy hereafter. It almost goes against me to write so complete a demolition of a brother-philosopher after he is dead, not having done it while he was alive—& the more when I consider what a furious retort I shd infallibly have brought upon myself, if he had lived to make it.
Before the rewriting I mean to read or reread as many books as I have time for, from which I can hope to get suggestions for enriching the book. What is the title of the work of the younger Fichte which you advised me to read? Do you know the psycho-physiological writings of Vogt & Mohlschott, said to be the heads of the new materialist school in Germany?
I have been reading, I may say studying, Tyndall’s Lectures on Heat. The equivalence of a certain quantity of heat & a certain quantity of mechanical power seems to be very completely established. But the theory is still very imperfect, & Tyndall is hardly the man to perfect it. There is a terrible phrase “potential energy” which covers a great dark spot in the subject. How do they resolve such questions as this? By the trifling mechanical motion of applying a match, I light a great heap of coal and disengage an enormous force in the form of heat. Where was the previous equivalent of this? No equivalent amount of mechanical motion existed just before, to be converted into it. Must we seek for the equivalent at a distinct geological period when the force was as they say, stored up in the coal? That is conservation of force with a vengeance, in one sense of the term; but not in the sense in which it is taken in the theory, if I understand it rightly: nor according to the philosophical meaning of force: for in that meaning there is a force where there is no activity, & the conservation of force can only mean that one of the modes of activity only ceases when another takes its place. I say nothing of the purely hypothetical machinery, the interstellar & interatomic ether. I shd like to know your opinion on the whole subject, & how far you consider the new doctrine to authorize a new attitude towards the undulatory theory. Indeed I shd be much obliged if in the two or three years which will elapse before a new ed. of the Logic is called for, you would make a note of such alterations in any part of it as may be required by the progress of science.
Does Dr Clark still continue his studies on the origin of the Gospels? If so, there is a book which he ought to have—Les Evangiles by Gustave d’Eichthal published at Paris by Hachette. Only the first part is yet out, containing the examination of the first three gospels. The author proceeds in the same way as Dr Clark, collating the parallel passages in opposite columns, & many of his conclusions are almost identical: he thinks Matthew’s the genuine history, & his opinion of Mark & Luke is very similar to Dr Clark’s. Only instead of thinking that Mark copied Matthew & Luke, he thinks that Mark copied Matthew, & Luke copied Matthew & Mark. He rejects many passages of Matthew as interpolations made subsequently, & not known to either of the others. Another recent book which would probably interest Dr Clark is called Etudes sur la Bible (Nouveau Testament) par Michel Nicolas. It is a reprint of review articles only one of which I have seen—the one on St John; but in that I thought there was considerable merit. Dr C is probably acquainted with Baur & the Tubingen school, at all events through Mackay.
I only remarked your name once in Littré’s citations from Comte’s letters, & the mention, I think, was very harmless. At the time when he lost his Polytechnic appointment & had to consider what he should do for an income it seems I suggested that he could perhaps write articles for English reviews & offered to translate them for him, adding that probably both you & Lewes would be willing to help him in the same way. In his answer he desired me to thank you & Lewes for the offer, in case either of you had made it. That is all I find on the subject.
I have not made any arrangement with Longmans as yet, wishing to take this opportunity of buying back Parker’s interest in the Logic & P E Essays, the only books of which I did not retrieve the entire copyright. I have made a proposal to Longmans to this effect & am still expecting their answer: In the meantime the transfer of my books to them is only provisional.
With our regards to Mrs Bain
661.
TO THE ADMINISTRATORS OF THE HOSPICES D’AVIGNON
le 23 novembre 1863
Messieurs,
Etant possesseur d’une petite campagne attenant au côté septentrional du chemin vicinal No 1, je désirerais jouir de la cep des saules et autres arbres qui bordent la route de ce côté au voisinage de ma propriété. Si donc il pouvait convenir à votre administration, Messieurs, de me céder ce droit, moyennant la somme annuelle de 25 fr. au benefice des pauvres de la ville, je vous en aurais une véritable obligation. Les arbres en question seraient au nombre de cinquante, à commencer en face du Moulin de la Folie, en suivant le chemin vers l’Est.
Veuillez agréer, Messieurs, l’expression de ma considération la plus distinguée.
J. Stuart Mill
662.
TO WILLIAM RATHBONE, JR.
Nov. 29, 1863
Dear Sir
Nothing can be more true than your observations on the importance of having a definite plan of constitutional reform grounded on intelligible principles, to present to the nation at the time (perhaps not far distant) when the temporary indifference to the subject will have given place to a renewed and possibly an eager interest in it. The ruling classes are singularly shortsighted in not perceiving that they will certainly, in no long time, have to deal with a reaction of this nature. But they have been in a fool’s paradise ever since they succeeded in stifling Lord Russell’s reform bill, and it will require stirring events to raise them from their dream.
I have no doubt that the plan of election which you propose, and which is not very different from that established by the present Prussian Constitution, would be a considerable improvement on our present electoral system; at least if the one-third of the House, which you reserve for the democracy, were elected by universal suffrage. What I do not see is, that the plan rests on any principle of justice or expediency which could, or which should, induce the democracy to accept it in any character but that of a more or less temporary compromise. I have never been able to see any clear ground on which it can be maintained that the State does more, or incurs more cost, for the protection of the class who have independent property, than for that of the class who earn large incomes, and for these than for the great mass of the earners of small incomes; still less that the work and costs incurred for the sake of these three classes are in the proportion of 3, 2, and 1. I do not feel the force of this consideration as a ground even for the apportionment of taxation. As regards representation, I speak with great deference to those who know more of the feelings and modes of thought of the English working classes than I can pretend to do. But I do not think them likely to be persuaded of the justice of any limitation of the suffrage, or inequality in its distribution, grounded theoretically on property. An educational qualification I think they might in principle assent to: at all events the restriction of the suffrage to those who can read, write, and cipher, would probably be approved of by most of those whom it would not exclude. But a property qualification, even as a mere index and presumption of education, would, I think, always remain odious, and would even compromise the principle of educational qualification, if imprudently identified with it.
You are probably aware that the plural voting involved in your plan does not, in my mind, necessarily constitute an objection to it; but I could not, as a matter of principle, defend plural voting in consideration merely of property nor would it, I think, if placed on that footing be looked upon by the working classes as any thing but an invention of the oligarchy to enable them to frustrate the practical effect of universal suffrage in case they found themselves impelled nominally to concede it.
I am very sensible of the great practical difficulties of the subject, and I confess that I have no hope of soon seeing what I think the true principles embodied in a specific plan likely to obtain any very wide acceptance. In the meanwhile I see nothing better to be done than to stand up on all occasions for certain general principles about which I have no doubt—e.g. that of personal representation (Mr Hare’s plan); an educational franchise of some sort; non-exclusion on such irrelevant ground as that of sex, &c: and practically to support by way of a step, any proposal having a chance of being carried, the effect of which would give to the mass of ed. people what so many small minorities possess—a share of influence in the representation.
I am
Dear Sir
very faithfully yours
J. S. Mill
William Rathbone Junr Esq.
663.
TO THE ADMINISTRATORS OF THE HOSPICES D’AVIGNON
30 Nov. 1863
Messieurs
J’ai eu l’honneur de recevoir votre lettre du 27 novembre et je vous prie d’agréer mes remercîments de la complaisance dont vous avez usé en voulant bien accéder à la proposition faite dans ma lettre du 23.
Recevez, Messieurs l’assurance de ma considération la plus distinguée.
J. S. Mill
664.
TO HENRY FAWCETT
Dec. 4. 1863
Dear Mr. Fawcett
It gives me very great pleasure to hear of your election, which you had previously expressed so much doubt about that my hopes were anything but confident. Your success is an excellent sign of the feeling of the University, and the more so since so many warmly supported you who did not agree in your political opinions. I wish that Whewell had been with you, and rather wonder that he was not. I suppose he felt interested for some one of the other candidates. Mayrs (is that his name?) had influential supporters, and Courtney, I believe, has considerable qualifications for the office, but it seems strange that Macleod should have got so many as fourteen votes.
A History of Political Economy is not a kind of book much wanted on its own account, but it would afford an opportunity for interesting discussions of all the contested points, and for placing them in the strong light which results from the comparison of conflicting opinions and from a study of their origin and filiation. Though, therefore, it is a work I should hardly suggest to anyone, yet if any competent political economist with a talent for philosophical controversy feels spontaneously prompted to undertake it, the result is likely to be both useful and interesting to those who care for the subject.
About Cooperation, I recommend to your attention the first article in the Journal des Economistes for last month (November). It is by J. E. Horn, who is somewhat of an authority on commercial subjects, and is not only good in itself, but contains the important information that a revival of Cooperation has begun to take place in France. When I speak of revival, I do not mean that the old Associations had ceased to exist and to flourish, but that the movement for forming new ones, which had been intermitted, has lately recommenced. Are you aware of the form of cooperation which is spreading in Germany, under the leadership of Mr. Schulze-Delitsch, one of the prominent political men of the Progressist party in Prussia—the Societés de Crédit Populaire (I forget the name in German). One of these associations has also been started in Paris, and if it succeeds, others are likely to follow. Knowing that Thornton is writing on Cooperation, I called his attention to these points the last time I wrote to him.
As for me, I have had little time to think on any scientific subject except Metaphysics, on which I am making good progress in the work I am about. I hope to meet you at the February meeting of the Club.
I am Dear Mr. Fawcett
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
665.
TO JOHN PLUMMER
Dec. 5 1863.
Dear Sir
You have no reason to feel at all discouraged by Mr Masson’s non-acceptance of your article. It is no proof at all of want of merit in the article. He probably preferred some other mode of treating the subject, or preferred to have it treated by some other writer.
Mr Thornton writes to me that he has made great use of your account of Cooperation in the Companion to the Almanac, and that he means to write to you shortly; perhaps by this time he has done so.
In the volume of Miscellaneous Essays by Mr Herbert Spencer there is, I believe, a criticism on Comte’s classification of the Sciences. Will you be kind enough, if there is, to return the volume to Blackheath Park, as I have occasion to consult that particular paper and a parcel will probably be sent to me from Blackheath Park in two or three days.
I hope an Edinburgh Review which I sent to you by post from here, arrived safely.
With our kind remembrances to Mrs Plummer, I am
Dear Sir
very sincerely yours
J. S. Mill
666.
TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES
Dec. 16. 1863
Dear Sir
Your letter of September 10 did not miscarry, but arrived safe, which I am sorry to hear was not the case with my answer. I wrote you a long letter dated Sept. 22, which I did not direct to the place from whence yours was dated (Stameen, Drogheda) but, as I confidently believe, to your address in Dublin. I cannot account for its not having reached you, as I have no evidence that my letters are ever stopped at the Post Office. That establishment, as far as my experience goes, confines its rigours to newspapers, or, at most, to printed matter.
I have to thank you for your article in the National Review. I stated in my letter the only material point on which I differ from you. I seem to myself to see a meaning through the mist of an absurd metaphor in the “hydrostatic theory” of the spread of the new gold through the world. I expounded this at some length in my letter, and am vexed that its loss has deprived me, all this time, of the benefit of your remarks. This subject must now be deferred till the next time I write: but I must not omit to thank you for the Bombay dissertations. The young Competition-wallah has shewn a great deal of knowledge and talent; and neither is Sir A. Grant’s paper, which he criticizes, devoid of merit. Will it be sufficient if I bring them with me when I return to England at the end of January, or do you require them sooner?
To come to the subject of your last letter I agree with you in thinking very highly of Mr Loring’s series of papers. It is true, he sometimes, I think, attempts to make out too much; especially when he contends that the sale of ships of war to belligerents even in their own ports, is a violation of neutrality. But, on the whole, his argument is triumphant, and the temperate manner in which he states his very strong conclusions, gives them additional force. As to altering people’s opinions on the general question of the right and wrong in the American contest, I am very much of the way of thinking of Mr Goldwin Smith. People do not want to be convinced. But it is very different with the practical question of neutrality. Nobody, the Tories as little as the Liberals, desires to be at war with America, or to give the United States what, according to international law, is just cause of war. Accordingly even the Times and Saturday Review, base as they are on the main subject, are, on the whole, on our side on the shipbuilding question. I can conceive that a well reasoned discussion like Mr Loring’s might have a decisive effect on a public man who had not quite made up his mind, and might even shake one who had. But how to induce them to read it? It might perhaps be useful to send the pamphlet, with a letter, to some few persons of influence, both friends and such as are open to conviction. If you think it desirable, and if there is nobody willing to do it who is better acquainted with them, I should have no objection to write to the Duke of Argyll and to Mr Gladstone. It is just possible that Mr Vernon Harcourt might make some use of it either in the Times or Saturday Review, but I have no acquaintance with him. Should you know no other channel, I have no doubt that Fawcett would be able and glad to get it recommended to him. The only other thing I can think of is to get, if possible, the Daily News and the Spectator to write about the pamphlet in a manner to give it importance as a discussion of the legal question. I must add that if anything is to be written on the subject, I am not a fit person to write it, as I have never studied international law, and should not like to be caught tripping on some matter of detail.
I am very glad that you have been writing on this subject for Macmillan, and that you have been able to resume your article on Ireland for the Edinburgh. As I receive both publications, I need not avail myself of your kind offer.
Every mail now brings good news from America. Things look more and more promising both for the success of the North, and for the rapid destruction not only of Slavery but (what seemed far more difficult and distant) of the antipathy and contempt of the white American towards the negroes. In the lost letter I gave my reasons for not sharing in your misgivings about the state of things which would follow the complete occupation of the South by the Northern armies. Many signs indicate that the difficulties will settle themselves much more easily and quietly than any one expected. I have been right in all I ventured to prophesy thus far, and I am very confident that I shall prove so in this.
I hope you have quite recovered from your last summer’s indisposition.
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
667.
TO GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE
Dec. 22. 1863
Dear Sir
I am obliged to you for your information about cheap editions. I shall probably have the power shortly to bring out a cheap edition of my Political Economy.
I inclose £5 towards your new project and am
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
668.
TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES
Dec. 26. 1863
Dear Sir
I have written the inclosed notes to accompany the copies of Mr Loring’s pamphlet, which had much better be sent to their destination directly than in the roundabout way via Avignon.
Mr Lincoln appears to me a very favourable specimen of an American public man, and a credit to the nation which elected him, as he seems to be simply honest without any trick or charlatanerie. He is the “rusticus abnormis sapiens” whom America has not taught us to expect to find among her politicians, even when they have commenced life as rail splitters. That which a great man, in his position, would have foreseen and designed from the first, he, without designing it, has in the main executed, through the force of circumstances gradually shaping the conviction of a sincere and upright mind. He is an example how far singleminded honesty will often go, in doing the work and supplying the place of talent. As Solomon, I think, said, and as my father used to say, “The righteousness of the righteous man guideth his steps.”
The Times has made a miserable figure in the Cobden affair, and though Cobden would have served his cause better had he shewn less iritation, he deserves honour in having, for once, brought the slanderer to book, and shewn him that it is not always safe to put forth calumnious inferences from an opponent’s doctrine as the opponent’s own opinions. The incident is every way fortunate, and will have a chance of making people think on both the questions you mention—anonymous journalism and peasant proprietorship—both of them subjects on which it is very difficult to make the English public think at all. In England (unlike Ireland) the agricultural labourer thinks so little about the possession of land as a matter in any way concerning him, that the emigration which will doubtless go on extending itself in both countries will probably, as far as England is concerned, take effect only in a considerable rise of agricultural wages—which it will render inevitable, and which, I incline to believe, the English peasantry will be contented with.
What I wrote in the missing letter respecting the gold question was to this effect. Shortly before the gold discoveries, there had begun to take place, and has been taking place ever since, a great increase of facilities of communication and a great enfranchisement of trade; having for their necessary effect to bring the prices of many commodities, in different parts of the world, far nearer to equality than they had ever been before. Had there been no gold discoveries, this equalization would have taken place, partly indeed by a rise of prices in the more remote and poorer regions of the earth, but partly also, and perhaps still more, by a fall of prices in the great manufacturing countries. The influx of gold had first to make this phenomenon disappear, before its effect would be apparent at all in a rise of English prices. During the interval it would be steadily raising prices in the distant countries and in those which export raw produce. In those regions the gold would cooperate with other causes tending to a rise; in England it would be acting in opposition to causes tending to a fall; consequently there would be little or no rise of prices in England until there had been a rise in the distant markets sufficient to bring about that nearer approximation of prices in the two regions, which corresponds to the increased facilities of trade. This seems to me to be what the promulgator of the “hydrostatic theory” had in his thoughts; and it would account for the rise of general prices in England being in a considerably less ratio than that of the increased quantity of gold in the world. It certainly appears that the rise of prices has been much more marked and considerable in the places where their range had previously been low; especially those in which hoarding does not prevail, but to some extent even where it does.
I am truly glad of the improvement in your health, and am
Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
669.
TO WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE
Dec. 26. 1863
My dear Sir,
The accompanying pamphlet seems to be so well worthy to be read by those who, as English statesmen, have the power of determining the public attitude of this country towards the American belligerents, that I hope you will excuse the liberty I take in inviting your attention to it. There has been much able discussion in this country on the points of international law involved in the shipbuilding question; and through that discussion the opinion which previously existed in this country has been greatly modified, and the Government is now well supported in the course which, to the credit of its justice and firmness, it has in the main adopted. Still, there are many points which may yet have to be discussed with the Government of the United States; and this pamphlet, if you are not already acquainted with it, will shew, more completely than anything else I have seen, the light in which these points appear to an able and instructed American, whose feelings are strongly with the North, but who is moderate and reasonable—and the strength of the arguments by which his case can be supported. I do not profess to agree with him on all his points; but, as far as I am qualified to judge, I do on most of them, and when I do not, it still seems to me that his opinions are such as may naturally, and without any great unreasonableness be shared by his countrymen in general. I am
My dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
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