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1865 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVI - The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill 1849-1873 Part III [1865]Edition used:The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVI - The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill 1849-1873 Part III, ed. Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972).
Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.
About Liberty Fund:Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals. Copyright information:The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press. Fair use statement:This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit. 1865741.TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES1
Jan. 5. 1865 Dear SirI have been too long in acknowledging the receipt of the very interesting things you last sent; but I was working against time on another subject, and had unwillingly to put by your last notes unread until this morning. I thank you most heartily for them. They are a complete Essay on the state and prospects of Ireland,2 and are so entirely satisfactory that they leave me nothing to think of except how to make the most use of them. For my new edition I must confine myself chiefly to the general results; but if I find it advantageous to transcribe certain paragraphs entire, will you allow me to name their real author?3 The article is a valuable supplement to the notes. The letter in the Gardener’s Chronicle4 I was already acquainted with, having read it in I forget what newspaper. I beg you to offer my sincere thanks to Mr Pim5 for the books he so kindly sent, which I shall immediately read. His letter, inclosed in yours, is full of good sense. Respecting the rate of profits in the United States, we must hope to learn something through the kind offices of Mr Moran.6 But it is, I imagine, very difficult to ascertain the real average rate of profit, or expectation of profit, in any country. It would, however, be something to have an answer to the more vague question, whether, in the opinion of Mr Ashworth,7 or other persons to whom business in both countries is familiar, the profits of capital in the United States are or are not, higher than in England. Of the two or three points which we differ about, I will only touch upon one—the influence of price on demand. You say, if a tax is taken off beer and laid on tobacco in such a manner that the consumer can still, at the same total cost as before, purchase his usual quantity of both, his tastes being supposed unaltered, he will do so. Does not this assume that his taste for each is a fixed quantity? or at all events that his comparative desire for the two is not affected by their comparative prices. But I apprehend the case to be otherwise. Very often the consumer cannot afford to have as much as he would like of either: and if so, the ratio in which he will share his demand between the two may depend very much on their price. If beer grows cheaper and tobacco dearer, he will be able to increase his beer more, by a smaller sacrifice of his tobacco, than he could have done at the previous prices: and in such circumstances it is surely probable that some will do so. His apportionment of self-denial between his two tastes is likely to be modified, when the obstacle that confined them is in the one case brought nearer, in the other thrown farther off. Now as to the Reader.8 I consented to become a shareholder with the full intention of sending occasional contributions (to which I should be quite willing to put my initials) in case I was satisfied with the editorial arrangements, which I should be, in a very high degree, with regard to any part of them which you might undertake. My satisfaction would be much increased if you were willing, as Mr Spencer wished and hoped, to undertake not merely the political economy department, but political philosophy generally. I could be more useful to the Reader on other branches of that subject than on political economy, on which you would seldom need any hand but your own, and could easily obtain other aid if you accidentally required it. I might give some help too in moral and metaphysical philosophy, but that department will probably be under Spencer’s superintendance, and he and I should, I dare say, often differ. I have heard nothing further of their plans since the first communication made to me. Perhaps they may like to try their wings a little before attempting the higher flight which we have advised, but for which they are not strong enough at present, if the number for December 31 (which as it has been sent to me, I suppose came out under the new management) is a sample of what they can do. When you are fixed in London and ready to take an active part, we shall be likely to have more influence on their proceedings. I take Macmillan, and was much interested by your article,9 which makes more distinct the idea I already had of the contract system in the mining districts. Laing, in his Prize Essay,10 brought it forward many years ago as an example of the cooperative principle. I was glad to see Mr Brace’s letter in the Daily News.11 I have had a visit here from a rather remarkable American, Mr Hazard,12 of Peacetown, Rhode Island. Do you know him, or his writings? If not, I shall have a good deal to tell you about him that will interest you. Ever, Dear Sir, yours trulyJ. S. Mill 742.TO WILLIAM TALLACK1
Jan. 18. 1865 SirYour letter and its inclosures have been forwarded to me here. I am glad of the appointment of a Commission to enquire into the effects of capital punishment.2 I confess, however, that I have a very strong opinion against its total abolition, being persuaded that the liability to it (whatever may be the case with the sight of it) has a greater deterring effect, at a less expense of real suffering, than any other penalty which would be adequate to the worst kind of offences. If examined, therefore, I should not be a witness on the “right side.” I am Sir yours very faithfullyJ. S. Mill William Tallack Esq. 743.TO AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN1
Jan. 22. 1865 Dear SirI have been so much occupied with pressing work, that I have only quite recently had time to go through the “Double Algebra.”2 I have found it everything that from what I already knew of your speculations I expected it to be. Either you are the first (not excepting Peacock)3 who has pointed out the true rationale of algebra as an universal calculus, or I was not capable formerly of understanding the true theory when I had it before me, and have become capable now. Which of these suppositions is the true one, you best know. The fact in regard to myself is, that everything which I had a glimmering of, I now seem to myself to see as clear as day, while you have also led me into regions of which I had not even a glimmering, and have shewn me how I may have an equally clear comprehension of the whole of these by taking sufficient pains to follow you through the details. Why is what you have done, not known and recognized as the great contribution to philosophy which it is? I suppose because so few mathematicians are psychologists, and so few psychologists are mathematicians. I take blame to myself for not having known your speculations two years ago, as I might have been helping to spread the knowledge of them. I am Dear Sir |
| W. T. Thornton Esq. | £2 |
| Miss Helen Taylor | £2 |
| and myself | £10 |
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
R. H. Hutton Esq.
794.
TO THOMAS BAYLEY POTTER1
Blackheath Park, April 7, 1865.
Dear Sir,—
Though I have good reason for sympathising in your personal disinclination to go into Parliament, having the same feeling myself, I cannot help being very glad, on public grounds, that there is a prospect of your being elected for Rochdale.2 And if this takes place, in spite of your professing opinions in advance of the general state of opinions among reformers, there will be the more reason for satisfaction.
I have no objection whatever to the publication of my letter.3 Its association with the last thing Mr. Cobden ever wrote will give it a melancholy interest.
I am, dear Sir, yours truly
J. S. Mill
795.
TO HERBERT SPENCER1
- Blackheath Park
April 9, 1865
Dear Sir
I have written to Mr Lubbock2 to express my great satisfaction at his being a candidate, and the pleasure it would give me to be of any use to him. One of whom you express so high an opinion must be a very desirable member of the advanced liberal party in Parliament or anywhere.
I leave for Avignon on Tuesday evening, but will endeavour to send something for the Reader occasionally from thence.
Yours very truly
J. S. Mill
Herbert Spencer Esq.
796.
TO JOHN PLUMMER1
- Blackheath
April 10. 1865
Dear Sir
You are in the way of seeing many newspapers and periodicals, and it is probable that during my absence in France articles, connected with the Westminster election or with myself personally, may come under your notice, which I should be glad to see. If such should be the case, would it be very troublesome to you to cut out the articles and send them to me by post? Of course it is a condition that you will allow me to pay all expenses, whether of buying, posting, or anything else. Reviews of my books are not included, as I shall receive them through my publisher.
If you would kindly undertake this for me, I should be greatly obliged.
With our kind remembrances to Mrs Plummer I am
Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
797.
TO JOHN CHAPMAN1
- Blackheath
April 11. 1865
Dear Sir
I thank you very much for having enabled me to correct a proof of the second article on Comte before leaving. I have asked the printers to send a revise to Avignon. I should be much obliged if you would kindly let me have the same number of copies (20) as of the former article, and cause them to be sent to the same persons, with the difference of sending five instead of four to M. Littré, and one to M. Dupont-White, 11 Rue d’Angoulême Saint-Honoré, Paris; leaving only four copies for myself, to be sent here, and not to Avignon. The earlier the separate copies could be got ready, the better I should like it, as some of those who have had copies of the first would be glad to have the second as soon after it as possible. But this, of course, must be entirely subordinate to your arrangements.
M. Littré will take care that the translation is not published till after the second article has appeared in the Westminster.2
I leave for Avignon this evening.
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
798.
TO HENRY FAWCETT1
- Paris
April 12. 1865
Dear Mr Fawcett
I have sent the few subscriptions I have received to Mr Hughes, whose letter in last Saturday’s Spectator you have perhaps seen.2 Mr Hughes has also collected a few, and intended handing them over to Mr Hutton, the editor of the Spectator, to be published in next Saturday’s paper.3 I think the best thing you could do with yours would be to send it in a note to the editor, so that it might appear in the same list.
The Social Science meeting went off well,4 and was very full. Lord Stanley presided, and brought out Hare’s strength by good questions. The reports which I have seen give no idea at all of what was said, but I was glad to see that the Times reporter stated well and clearly the plan itself. Altogether it will have had a lift upwards by the meeting.
I am
Dear Mr Fawcett
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
799.
TO JAMES BEAL1
- [Avignon]
[April 17, 1865]
Dear Sir—
I beg leave to acknowledge your communication of the 12th inst. informing me that at a meeting of Westminster Electors2 it has been resolved to adopt me as a candidate on the terms of my letter of March 7th & to invite subscriptions to defray the expenses of my election.
On the subject of this Resolution it would not become me to say anything, except what might equally be said by one who had no personal interest in the matter: That if the Electors of Westminster return to Parlt as their representative any one, either myself or another, who has no claim whatever on them except their opinion of his fitness for the trust, & if on that sole ground they elect him without personal solicitation & without expense, they will do what is as eminently honourable to themselves as to the object of their choice, will set an example worthy to be, & likely to be, imitated by other great constituencies—& will signally raise the character of the popular party & advance the cause of Reform.
On this part of the subject, I have only further to express the earnest hope, that in accepting me on the terms of my letter, the Meeting intended to include in their adhesion the principle of an individual appeal by circular to every elector, laying other names before him as well as mine & requesting him to select from among them or from any others the person or persons whom he would wish to be brought forward as candidates.
I am also invited to state, for the more full information of the electors, my opinions on various political questions of general interest. Such a call can only be properly answered by the most complete openness. I hold decided opinions on all the subjects on which my sentiments are asked, & whether those opinions may serve or injure me in the estimation of the electors it is equally incumbent on me to state them plainly.
1. With regard to Reform Bills: I shd vote at once both for Mr. Baines’ bill3 & for Mr. Locke King’s,4 & for measures going far beyond either of them. I would open the suffrage to all grown persons, both men & women, who can read, write, & perform a sum in the rule of three, & who have not, within some small number of years, received parish relief. At the same time, utterly abominating all class ascendancy, I would not vote for giving the suffrage in such a manner that any class, even though it be the most numerous, could swamp all other classes taken together. In the first place, I think that all considerable minorities in the country or in a locality should be represented in proportion to their numbers. What other adjustments of the electoral system to an universal or nearly universal suffrage might prove practically the best adapted to secure to every portion of the community its just share of influence, while preventing any class from acquiring an unjust degree of preponderance either by means of property or of numbers, is a question which may be answered in many different ways & which will require much sifting & public discussion before the best can be selected. In the meanwhile I shd be prepared to support a measure which would give to the labouring classes a clear half of the national representation.
2. I prefer a mixed system of direct & indirect taxation to either alone. If the attempt were made to raise so large a revenue as ours after all due retrenchments would still be exclusively by direct taxation, I do not know of any taxes, in themselves just, which, under such strong pecuniary temptation, would not be successfully evaded. The evasions of the income tax are already a disgrace to the national morality. I would in no case tax any of the necessaries of life; but if even a working man expends in luxuries for himself, & especially in stimulants, what is required by the necessities of his family, I think it perfectly just that he shd be taxed on such expenditure.
3. Every civilised country is entitled to settle its internal affairs in its own [way], & no other country ought to interfere with its discretion, because one country, even with the best intentions, has no chance of properly understanding the internal affairs of another: but when this indefeasible liberty of an independent country has already been interfered with; when it is kept in subjection by a foreign power, either directly, or by assistance given to its native tyrants, I hold that any nation whatever may rightfully interfere to protect the country against this wrongful interference. I therefore approve the interposition of France in 1859 to free Italy from the Austrian yoke,5 but disapprove the intervention of the same country in 1849 to compel the Pope’s subjects to take back the bad government they had cast off.6 It is not however a necessary consequence that because a thing might rightfully be done, it is always expedient to do it. I would not have voted for a war in behalf either of Poland7 or of Denmark,8 because on any probable view of consequences I shd have expected more evil than good from our doing what, nevertheless, if done would not have been, in my opinion, any violation of international duty.
4. Respecting the disabilities of Dissenters my answer may be brief. There ought to be no disabilities whatever on account of religion.
5. Voting for a member of parlt is a public & political act, which concerns not solely the elector’s individual preferences, but the most important interests of the other electors, of the non-electors, and even of posterity: & my conviction is that in a free country all such acts shd be done in the face & subject to the comments & criticisms of the entire public. I wish that the elector shd feel an honourable shame in voting contrary to his known opinions, & in not being able to give for his vote a reason which he can avow. The publicity which lets in these salutary influences admits also, unfortunately, some noxious ones; & if I believed that these were now the strongest—if I thought that the electors of this country were in such a state of hopeless & slavish dependence on particular landlords, employers, or customers, that the bad influences are more than a match for the good ones, & that there is no other means of removing them, I should be, as I once was, a supporter of the ballot. But the voters are not now in this degraded condition: they need nothing to protect them against electoral intimidation but the spirit & courage to defy it. In an age when the most dependent class of all, the labouring class, is proving itself capable of maintaining by combination an equal struggle with the combined power of the masters, I cannot admit that farmers or shopkeepers, if they stand by one another, need despair of protecting themselves against any abuse now possible of the power of landed or other wealth.
6. As regards retrenchment, it is certain that chiefly through unskilful management great sums of public money are now squandered, for which the country receives no equivalent in the efficiency of its establishments, & that we might have a more useful army & navy than we possess, at a considerably less expense. I expect little improvement in this respect until the increased influence of the smaller taxpayers on the government, through a large extension of the suffrage, shall have produced a stricter control over the details of public expenditure. But I cannot think that it would be right for us to disarm in the presence of the great military despotisms of Europe, which regard our freedom through its influence on the minds of their own subjects, as the greatest danger as well as reproach to themselves, & might be tempted to pick a quarrel with us, even without any prospect of ultimate success, in the mere hope of reviving the national antipathies which so long kept apart the best minds of England & of the Continent.
7. I am decidedly of opinion that landed property shd be subject to the Probate Duty, & that property in settlement should pay succession duty on its full value & not, as at present, only on the value of the life interest.
8. Purchase is the very worst way but one, in which Commissions in the army could possibly be appropriated. The one, which is still worse, is jobbing & favoritism. I would support any mode in which the one evil can be got rid of without replacing it by the other. That there is such a mode I am fully satisfied, & that it would put an end to what is justly called in your letter, the monopoly by certain classes of the posts of emolument.
9. I am entirely opposed to flogging, either in the army or out of it, except for crimes of brutality. In some of those it seems to me a very appropriate punishment.
10. The differences between employers & workpeople which give rise to strikes, are, it appears to me, a subject which wholly escapes the control of legislation. I see nothing which law can do in the matter except to protect from violation the equal liberty of all to combine or to refrain from combining. After a sufficient trial of each other’s strength, both sides will probably be willing to refer their disputes to arbitration, but even then I do not think that the arbitrators should have power to enforce their decisions by law; because, in such cases as they would usually have to decide, it is impossible to lay down rules of justice & equity which would suit all cases, or would obtain universal assent: & the adjustments must generally be of the nature of compromises, not acting on fixed principles, but each side giving up something for the sake of peace. I do not presume to say that a better rule may not be arrived at in time, but it would be quite premature to act as if it had already been arrived at.
I am, Dear Sir,
very sincerely yours
J. S. Mill
James Beal Esq.
800.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
April 17. 1865
Dear Chadwick
I have received your note dated the 11th. and Mr Beal’s official announcement of the decision of the Meeting.2 The same post which takes this carries my reply to him, of which I inclose a copy.
When I saw them advertising for subscriptions for my election singly, I was alarmed lest they should have abandoned the intention of proposing any other names. Should this unfortunately happen, and should you, thereupon, go forward independently, I beg that you will at once put down my name for a subscription of £50, for which I will send a cheque as soon as your Committee is constituted.
I have suggested to Longman (as you recommended) that he should advertise in the penny papers,3 weekly as well as daily, and have now written again to recommend his not omitting the Morning Advertiser4 —
yrs ever truly,
J. S. Mill
801.
TO JOHN CHAPMAN1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
April 20. 1865
Dear Sir
I shall be very glad to see the article in the Saturday Review,2 as my own copy has been stopped at the French post office; for which reason it will be advisable, if you have not already sent the number, to cut out the article and send it only.
I have always contemplated reprinting the articles on Comte as soon as is consistent with the interest of the Review; and if Mr Trübner3 wishes to be the publisher, no one has so good a claim. We will therefore consider that as settled.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
802.
TO JOSHUA FAYLE1
- Avignon
April 24, 1865
Dear Sir
Owing to my absence from England, I have only this morning received your note, and the same cause makes it impossible for me to comply with the request which the Society2 has done me the honour of making.
I regret the delay which will take place in your receiving my answer, but I hope that my letter,3 published in Friday’s papers, may have made you aware of my absence soon enough to prevent any inconvenience. I am
yours very faithfully
J. S. Mill
Jos. Fayle Esq.
803.
TO WILLIAM E. HICKSON1
- Saint Véran
Avignon
April 24, 1865
Dear Hickson
Your letter, as you are probably by this time aware, did not find me in England.
I did not, I believe, reserve the right of translation as regards the book on Liberty. But I have had two applications from intending translators of it. The first was from my friend Professor Villari of Pisa, author of the Life of Savonarola, and of an enlightened and thoughtful Report on Education in England.2 The second was from Alberto Mario,3 Garibaldi’s Secretary and fellow-combatant, the husband of Madame White Mario. Him I referred to Professor Villari, and as the latter has his time very fully occupied, it is not improbable that he may have given up his project, in favour of Mario. In what state the matter is, I do not know, and I can only suggest, that the gentleman who does me the honour to make a third proposal, should ascertain what are the present intentions of his two predecessors. If they have abandoned their purpose, or desist from it in his favour, I give him the full consent which his politeness induces him to ask, but which he does not, for any legal purpose, require.
Death has indeed been busy lately, and one is continually reminded, if at our age we needed reminding, of our mortality. Cobden4 was perhaps the most perfectly honest man among all English politicians of his time and of anything like his celebrity, for he meant every word that he said. Is the Lucas who has just died,5 the same who wrote so many literary articles in the Times, and who had just started a new Magazine?
I hope you are well, and Mrs. Hickson at least no worse.
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
W. E. Hickson Esq.
804.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK1
- Saint Véran. Avignon
April 28. 1865
Dear Chadwick
Dr Lankester2 and the others whom you mention, fancy, I suppose, that they would diminish their chance of carrying one candidate by attempting two; in which opinion they might be right if they were proceeding in the old beaten track, and bringing forward a candidate in the commonplace, stupid way. But on the plan which was proposed, of going to the electors with a list of names, it would not be they, but the electors, who would determine to have two new candidates, and would decide who they should be. The Committee would be taking nothing upon themselves but to carry out the declared wishes of a body of electors requiring only organization. I fear from the apparent hanging back from executing this plan, that they have grown cold on the subject, and finding that they are getting praised for proposing me, and for the other honourable features of the case, the exemption from canvassing, pledges, and expense, they are content with that, and do not seek for more. If it is so, it is a great mistake, and an opportunity lost, independently of the great value to public objects, and even specially to Westminster of making you one of its members. But I still hope for better things. As to your own conduct in exerting yourself for my election exactly as if you had no claims of your own, I cannot praise it more highly than by saying that it is like everything else I have seen of your public conduct.
As to my last letter,3 I expected that it would damage my chance. If it does no worse than you seem to think, I shall reckon it wholly a success. I do not see how I could have refused to answer questions about my opinions, put in the very letter which announced the acceptance of me as a candidate. It can only be a small proportion of the electors who have ever looked into my books. But I do not think my answers to questions will admit of being confounded with pledges, especially as several of them are opposed to the general opinion of those who support me. I hope there are many more Tories who will take your Tory friend’s view of women’s votes.
The glorious news from America is dreadfully dashed by the terrible report about Lincoln.4 The idea of its being true is scarcely endurable—but the cause will not suffer—may even benefit by it, now.
Ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
805.
TO GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE1
- Avignon
April 28 1865
Dear Sir—
I have received your two notes & your pamphlet,2 which I think is one of the best of your writings, & well calculated to stir up the thinking minds among the working classes to larger views of political questions. So far as I am myself concerned, I cannot but be pleased to find you in sympathy with some of the most generally unpopular of my political notions. For my own part, I attach for the present more importance to representation of minorities, and especially to Mr Hare’s plan, combined with opening the suffrage to women, than to the plural voting which, in the form proposed by Mr Buxton, of attaching the plurality of votes directly to property,3 I have always strongly repudiated. But I think what you say of it likely to be very useful by impressing on the working people that it is no degradation to them to consider some people’s votes of more value than others. I would always (as you do) couple with the plurality the condition of it being accessible to any one, however poor, who proves that he can come up to a certain standard of knowledge.
I am
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
G. J. Holyoake Esq.
806.
TO THEODOR GOMPERZ1
Saint Véran, Avignon, April 30 1865
I have delayed thanking you for the first number of your Herculanean series,2 in hopes that I should have been able to say something about the work itself. I have, however, been so busy, that I have not yet had time to do more than read your Preface and Introduction and merely glance at the Greek text. What you say of it, however, proves it to be, at the very least, a highly important and novel contribution to the history of Greek thought, and I look forward with great pleasure to making a real study of it at some not distant time.—But, interesting as such labours are, you are capable of things much more valuable than such mere editorial work. I can not wish that you should leave unfinished what you have so well begun, but I shall be glad when the time comes to which you seemed to be looking forward in your last letter, now some months ago. . . . I hope, before this, you have received the book on Hamilton, and also the first of two articles which I have written on Comte’s philosophy. The second article is in print and I expect to be able to send it to you before it is published in England. I shall be well content if you are half as well pleased with these as you are sure to be with Mr. Grote’s book on Plato. This is nearly all printed, and I have read most of it; and both in point of learning and of thought it comes up to my highest expectations. It can not, I think, fail to produce a great effect in Germany, where the thoroughness of his knowledge of the subject will be much better appreciated than by an unlearned public, which can only take it on trust . . . .
807.
TO WILLIAM LONGMAN1
- S[aint] V[éran]
April 30, 1865
Dear Sir—
I noticed the discrepancy between the price mentioned in the agreement & those advertised,2 but supposed that it was intentional & that you thought it advantageous to begin at once with the lower price. I would make any sacrifice rather than consent to fixing the price of the Pol. Ec. higher than the one announced, as it would look like breaking faith with the public. But I feel the same objection as before to binding myself by a permanent engagement which would prevent the plates from ever returning to me. I am most willing that you should retain as many copies beyond the 8000 as will indemnify you for what you would otherwise lose by your mistake. The loss being 2/6 on each of 4000 copies, 2000 copies additional at 5/- would compensate you for this, but would leave you losers by the paper & press work of the 2000 & for that I am ready to add as many more copies as you think sufficient to indemnify you, leaving the stipulation about the subsequent sale as it already stands, viz, that you should continue to publish the editions at half profit for five years after the sale of the whole number of copies agreed on.
I am glad to hear so good an account of the sale.3 I suppose the 400 copies sold of Hamilton are chiefly the trade subscription.4 The Logic will require an unusual amount of revision for the new edition,5 & I will take it in hand as soon as I can, but as this can hardly be before my next return to England, I will ask you to send the sheets to Blackheath Park rather than here.
I was not aware that you had been asked to allow your name to appear as one of my supporters for Westminster, and I beg that you will not consent unless, on public grounds, you prefer me to any other candidate likely to be proposed. I should be much honoured by your doing so, but if you do not I hope you do not think that it can have any influence on my personal sentiments towards yourself.
808.
TO WILLIAM GEORGE WARD1
[May? 1865]
It is very unlikely that anything you write, however much I may disagree with it, could appear to me either “detestable” or “simply mischievous,”2 I have never read anything of yours in which I have not found much more to sympathise with than to dislike. . . . [again] the only opposition which I deem injurious to truth is uncandid opposition, and that I have never found yours to be, nor do I believe I ever shall.
809.
TO JOHN PLUMMER1
- Avignon
May 1. 1865
Dear Sir
I am extremely obliged to you for taking the trouble to send me those cuttings, none of which I had seen (except Mr Berkeley’s letter,2 which was also in the Daily News) and most of which it would have been a loss to miss. I have been particularly pleased with the tone in which several of them speak of women’s voting, and of Mr. Hare’s plan.
Lincoln is a glorious martyr if ever there was one. He is not to be pitied—to be envied rather. One’s feeling is all personal—it is as if a ruffianly assassin had deprived one of a dear personal friend. I do not believe the cause will suffer. It may even gain, by the indignation excited. There was real danger lest the North, and Lincoln himself, should be too soft-hearted to the exslaveholders, and leave them too much power of mischief.
We are glad to hear that you are settled in your new home.
With our kind remembrances to Mrs Plummer I am
Dear Sir
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
810.
TO AN UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT1
- Avignon
May 1. 1865
Dear Sir
I shall be happy to join in any mark of sympathy to the Free States of America, both on their success in their arduous struggle, and on the atrocious act which has mingled such deep grief with the very hour of triumph. I should think that the initiative would be taken by friends of the cause who are in a position to act more effectually than I could. I should like an address to the American people to be signed by millions.2
I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
811.
TO HENRY SODEN1
- Avignon
May 2. 1865
Dear Sir—
I have just received your letter, dated 25th Feby.
It is a great compliment to me that my supposed opinions should have had the influence you ascribe to them in Australia.2 But there seems to have been a considerable degree of misunderstanding about what they are. The fault probably lies with myself, in not having explained them sufficiently. I have entered rather more fully into the subject in the new editions published this spring. But, not to give you the trouble of referring to them, I can have no difficulty in saying that I never for a moment thought of recommending or countenancing, in a new colony more than elsewhere, a general protective policy, or a system of duties on imported commodities such as that which has recently passed the representative assembly of your colony. What I had in view was this. If there is some particular branch of industry, not hitherto carried on in the country, but which individuals or associations, possessed of the necessary capital, are ready & desirous to naturalize: & if these persons can satisfy the legislature that after their workpeople are fully trained, & the difficulties of the first introduction surmounted they shall probably be able to produce the article as cheap or cheaper than the price at which it can be imported, but that they cannot do so without the temporary aid either of a subsidy from the Govt or of a protecting duty: Then it may sometimes be a good calculation for the future interests of the country to make a temporary sacrifice, by granting a moderate protecting duty for a certain limited number of years, say ten, or at the very most twenty, during the latter part of which the duty should be on a gradually diminishing scale, & at the end of which it should expire. You see how far this doctrine is from supporting the fabric of Protectionist doctrine, in behalf of which its aid has been invoked.
Your wish respectg a cheap edition of the little book on Liberty has already been fulfilled. It is now on sale at 1/4 & my Pol. Econ. & Rep. Govt at prices proportionally even lower 5/ & 2/.
You are at full liberty to make any use you please of this letter.
812.
TO WILLIAM E. HICKSON1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
May 3, 1865
Dear Hickson
The universality of the feeling occasioned by Lincoln’s catastrophe is a good sign of our common humanity, for it is, in most cases, genuine feeling of the bitterness of losing such a man. He himself may be considered happy in his death—quite otherwise than if he had died before the decisive triumph. There cannot be a more glorious fate than to die so mourned by a whole people—to have become so dear to them through the best part of their character exclusively. I agree with you in having no fear of public mischief from his loss. It will perhaps, on the contrary, prevent a great deal of weak indulgence towards the slaveholding class, whose power it is necessary should be completely and permanently broken at all costs. Meanwhile the effect is admirable in Continental Europe (England does not need that particular lesson) of the example of power passing by course of law, without a dream of opposition in the freest country in the world.
From what you say, the Lucas who is dead2 must be the younger brother of Frederic Lucas. I was slightly acquainted with him formerly, but had lost sight of him. I suppose he died of heart disease like his brother—more fortunate than he in dying without a long illness.
Pray thank Mrs Hickson and Miss Grant3 for their kind remembrances.
We shall remain here probably until about May 30, when we leave for a time in Auvergne. We expect to return about June 30, and to leave for England about July 3. If you should be passing while we are here, we shall be very glad to see you.
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
813.
TO GUSTAVE D’EICHTHAL1
- Avignon
le 5 mai 1865
Je voudrais bien, mon cher d’Eichthal, pouvoir répondre à votre lettre, comme M. Blackie,2 par une lettre en grec: Πολλου̑ γε καὶ δει̑; ἐπεὶ παντὸς μα̑λλον, ὤ ϕίλε, βουλοίμην ἄν.3 Assurément la nation grecque vous doit de la reconnaissance, ainsi que, en second lieu, à M. Duruy.4 Du reste, elle me semble déjà bien avancée dans le chemin de la restauration grammaticale de son ancienne langue. Jugez de ma satisfaction quand j’ai vu, dans la redaction de sa nouvelle Constitution,5 qu’elle avait repris possession complète du cas datif. Après cela il ne lui reste guère à reprendre que l’infinitif, chose très importante, mais nullement plus difficile à regagner.
Votre nouvelle brochure6 ne m’est pas encore parvenue, mais un paquet va venir qui la contiendra. Je tâcherai de faire en sorte qu’il soit question de toutes les deux, non seulement dans la Revue de Westminster,7 mais peut-être ailleurs.
Nous avons un fort bon livre anglais sur la prononciation de la langue grecque, par un nommé Pennington,8 dans lequel il est à peu près démontré que les anciens Grecs prononçaient leur langue d’une manière peu éloignée de celle des Grecs d’aujourd’hui. Je n’ai pas un exemplaire de ce livre, et je crois qu’il se trouve difficilement, si ce n’est dans les bibliothèques publiques; sans cela je vous l’aurais envoyé. C’est le sécrétaire du gouvernement anglais des îles Ioniennes qui me le fit lire en 1855.9
J’essaierai de vous voir en traversant Paris en deux mois d’ici, bien que je n’y compte rester que quelques heures.
Avez-vous vu l’article du dernier numéro de la Revue de Westminster sur l’Evangile de Saint-Jean? Il ne vous offre probablement rien de nouveau, puisqu’il se donne comme résumé des travaux de l’école de Tubingue.10
Bien des salutations à votre frère et à Duveyrier,
Tout à vous
J. S. Mill
814.
TO EMILE LITTRÉ1
- S[t] V[éran]
May 11. 1865
Cher monsieur—
La seconde partie de mon travail sur M. Comte ne sera publiée que le 1er juillet mais on a promis de me donner bientôt des exemplaires séparés. Il vous en sera expédié cinq, destinés comme auparavant pour vous même, pour le traducteur,2 pour Mme Comte, pour M. de Blignières et pour M. Taine. Il est très naturel que vous n’approuviez pas sans réserve tout ce que j’ai dit dans la 1re partie. Ce que votre livre a montré d’accord entre nos jugements est encore plus que je n’osais espérer. Une critique de ma critique, faite de votre point de vue, m’intéresserait grandement, et ce serait une bonne fortune pour moi si vous pouviez avoir le temps de vous en occuper.3
Quant au livre sur Hamilton c’est en grande partie une oeuvre de circonstance, comme le doit être tout livre de polémique—mais avec quelques chapitres de psychologie positive. Ce que ce livre a de mieux c’est qu’il porte la guerre dans le camp ennemi. Aussi je crois que les métaphysiciens de l’école éclectique et allemande ne me le pardonneront pas.
Si un journal a dit que je sollicite des électeurs, ce journal se trompe: ce sont des électeurs qui m’ont sollicité. On m’a porté candidat presque malgré moi. J’ai refusé de rien faire de ce que font ordinairement chez nous les candidats. Je n’ai fait que ce qu’ils ne font guère c. à. d. une profession de foi parfaitement sincère. Au reste je pense avec M. Comte que, sauf des circonstances exceptionelles et transitoires, la place des philosophes n’est pas dans le gouvernement, et malgré mes 35 ans des fonctions administratives je ne me regarde pas comme une exception. Vous savez que dans l’idée que je me fais des assemblées délibérantes, elles doivent être un lieu de discussion plutôt que d’action, et si je consentais à y siéger ce serait pour n’y exercer qu’un pouvoir spirituel. P. L. Courier4 disait que, presque seul parmi les Français, il ne voulait pas être roi: si l’on me nommait à la chambre j’y serais probablement le seul député qui ne voudrait pas être ministre.
815.
TO FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE1
- S[t]V[éran]
May 11. 1865
Dear Mr Maurice—
I was already so well aware of your kind feelings towards me that even such a letter as I have just received from you hardly increases my sense of them. I most sincerely feel towards you & your work in life, the full equivalent of all which you so kindly express. I never voluntarily leave unread any of your writings & if I have not more frequently offered you any of mine it was because I seldom felt confident that what you would approve in them, would outweigh what you would disapprove. I knew however that there was much in my new book2 with which you would fully sympathize, greatly as I know you differ from the metaphysical doctrines contained in it. You were continually in my thoughts when I wrote the chapter against Mansel3 and your controversy with him contributed much towards stirring me up to write the book.
I sympathize with the feeling of (if I may so call it) mental loneliness which shews itself in your letter & sometimes in your published writings. In our age & country, every person with any mental power at all, who both thinks for himself & has a conscience, must feel himself, to a very great degree, alone. I shd think you have decidedly more people who are in real communion of thoughts, feelings & purposes with you than I have. I am in this supremely happy, that I have had, & even now have, that communion in the fullest degree where it is most valuable of all, in my own home. But I have it nowhere else; & if people did but know how much more precious to me is the faintest approach to it, than all the noisy eulogiums in the world! The sole value to me of these is that they dispose a greater number of people to listen to what I am able to say to them; & they are an admonition to me to make as much of that kind of hay as I can before the sun gives over shining. What is happening just now is the coming to the surface of a good deal of influence which I had been insensibly acquiring without knowing it; & there are to me many signs that you are exercising a very considerable influence of the same kind, though you yourself seem to think the contrary.
816.
TO JOHN PLUMMER1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
May 11. 1865
Dear Sir
I have to thank you for a great many more cuttings, which were extremely interesting to me, and on the whole very satisfactory, for those of my opinions which are thought to be most out of the common way seemed to obtain fair consideration, and to be found not so bad as they look. I was amused with your friend’s letter, especially with his idea that the male voters need the ballot to protect them against their wives. I think, myself, that the privilege of the vote gives an advantage not only to a bad husband over the wife, but to the wife over a kind husband, for he thinks he ought to defer more or less to her, on account of his voting as the representative of both. If she had a vote of her own, she would not have so much power of interfering with his.
Your friend should reconsider his opinion on representation of minorities. Cobden’s answer2 is no answer at all; for in his plan, of having as many constituencies as there are members, a minority of each would still be unrepresented. On Mr Hare’s plan, no one need be unrepresented, since the electoral body would divide of itself into unanimous constituencies.
With our kind remembrances to Mrs Plummer
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
817.
TO HENRY BOWIE1
- Avignon
May 13. 1865
Sir
I have had the honour of receiving your letter dated the 10th inst. inclosing a Requisition from the Lord Provost, Magistrates, and many distinguished citizens of Edinburgh, who, in the name of the Directors and Members of the Philosophical Institution,2 invite me to deliver the Inaugural Address at the opening of the Session in November next.
I feel most strongly the high distinction conferred on me by being the object of such a request from such a body. There being, however, many persons who are far better qualified than myself for the honourable function which the Directors and Members of the Institution propose to entrust to me, I beg to be excused from undertaking it, as I could not without great personal inconvenience be at Edinburgh, or anywhere in Great Britain, in November next, in addition to which I have so much occupation on my hands, that I could with difficulty find time for the duty and the necessary preparation for it.
I have the honour to be
Sir
very respectfully yours
J. S. Mill
Henry Bowie Esq
&c &c
818.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
May 15. 1865
Dear Chadwick
I have been so very busy, and have had, besides, so many letters to write, that I am very tardy in replying to your interesting letter of April 29. We were greatly amused by the “election humours” which it communicates, and by the comments you report on the injudiciousness of my second letter.2 I do not wonder that people should think it injudicious if they suppose that my grand object in the whole matter is to get myself elected. But as the only purpose for which I care to be elected is to get my opinions listened to, it would have been very “injudicious” in me to forego so good an opportunity of that, for fear that it should damage my election. I have gained this by it, that what are thought the most out of the way of all my opinions, have been, and are, discussed and canvassed from one end of the country to the other, and some of them (especially women’s voting) are obtaining many unexpected adhesions. I reckon this a good stroke of practicality, whether I am elected for Westminster or not.
As to the election itself, I had much rather you were elected than I, and if I could transfer my supporters in a body to you, I would do so instantly. I suspect, however, that the thing will be taken out of our hands. The appearance in the field of the illustrious man3 whom the Tories have put forward as the representative of the intelligent classes against popular ignorance, as embodied in me, will probably produce a general demand that one of the professedly liberal candidates should be withdrawn; and perhaps the appeal to the individual electors by circular, which we have contended for, will be made for the inferior purpose of ascertaining who ought to retire. I do not think the Tories expect their man to come in, otherwise some more considerable person would have started in that interest. But they are glad when anybody with money to spend, is willing to venture it on the chance.
I feel for Sir Edw. Lytton,4 who expected to get some credit from my friends by the expression of his good wishes (which were very likely sincere) but found he had come across a man who had the peculiarity of expecting that people should act up to what they say. I should have thought more highly of him if he had said plainly, “These are my private sentiments, but I must go with my party”, a feeling which, as men go, is very excusable. Lord Amberley,5 I am glad to see, has a higher standard. It is really a fine thing in him to have withdrawn from Grosvenor’s Committee and come over to me.6
It is an agreeable surprise to me that Mr Westerton should have been so favourably impressed by the “Liberty”. I give him very great credit for it. It shews that his view of religion is a much higher and better one than is at all common. Had I listened to commonplace notions of “practicality,” I should never have published that book; yet its publication does not seem to do me any practical harm.
As to the application you have received about having my likeness taken for publication, I have a real difficulty about it, owing to having refused my photograph to friends who much wished for it. If it should be necessary, however, there is a cameo likeness of me,7 from which a copy could be taken; but it cannot be till we return.
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
P.S. I have just received your packet of printed documents. The list of the Committee is very good: there are some names on it which I am glad to see, but was afraid would be wanting.
819.
TO PARKE GODWIN1
- Avignon
May 15. 1865
Dear Sir—
I had scarcely received your note of April 82 so full of calm joy in the splendid prospect now opening to your country & through it to the world; when the news came that an atrocious crime had struck down the great citizen who had afforded so noble an example of the qualities befitting the first magistrate of a free people & who in the most trying circumstances had gradually won not only the admiration but almost the personal affection of all who love freedom & appreciate simplicity & uprightness. But the loss is ours, not his. It was impossible to have wished him a better end than to add the crown of martyrdom to his other honours & to live in the memory of a great nation as those only live who have not only laboured for their country but died for it. And he did live to see the cause triumphant & the contest virtually over. How different would our feelings now be if this fate had overtaken him as it might so easily have done, a month sooner!
In England, horror of the crime & sympathy with your loss seem to be almost universal, even among those who have disgraced their country by wishing success to the slaveholders. I hope the manifestations which were instantaneously made there in almost every quarter may be received in America as some kind of atonement or peace-offering. I have never believed that there was any real danger of a quarrel between the two countries but it is of immense importance that we should be firm friends; & this is our natural state; for though there is a portion of the higher & middle classes of Great Britain who so dread & hate democracy that they cannot wish prosperity or power to a democratic people, I firmly believe that this feeling is not general even in our privileged classes. Most of the dislike & suspicion which have existed towards the U.S. were the effect of pure ignorance; ignorance of your history, & ignorance of your feelings & disposition as a people. It is difficult for you to believe that this ignorance could be as dense as it really was. But the late events have begun to dissipate it, & if your Government & people act as I fully believe they will, in regard to the important questions which now await them there will be no fear of their being ever again so grossly misunderstood, at least in the lives of the present generation.
As to the mode of dealing with these great questions, it does not become a foreigner to advise those who know the exigencies of the case so much better than he does. But as so many of my countrymen are volunteering advice to you at this crisis perhaps I may be forgiven if I offer mine the contrary way. Every one is vaguely inculcating gentleness, and only gentleness, as if you had shown any signs of disposition to take a savage revenge. I have always been afraid of one thing only, that you would be too gentle. I shd be very sorry to see any life taken after the war is over (except those of the assassins) or any evil inflicted in mere vengeance; but one thing I hope will be considered absolutely necessary: to break altogether the power of the slaveholding caste. Unless this is done, the abolition of slavery will be merely nominal. If an aristocracy of ex-slaveholders remain masters of the State legislatures they will be able effectually to nullify a great part of the result which has been so dearly bought by the blood of the Free States. They & their dependents must be effectually outnumbered at the polling-places: which can only be effected by the concession of full equality of political rights to negroes & by a large immigration of settlers from the North, both of them being made independent by the ownership of land. With these things in addition to the constitutional amendment3 (which will enable the Supreme Court to set aside any State legislation tending to bring back slavery in disguise) the cause of freedom is safe & the opening words of the Declaration of Independence will cease to be a reproach to the nation founded by its authors.
I doubt not that you have by this time received from Mr Hare the new edition of his book. I do not know if Mr Fawcett has fulfilled his intention of sending you his pamphlet,4 but as Mr Hare has adopted the simplifications which Mr Fawcett proposed, you will be under no necessity of learning them from any other source. I am,
dear Sir,
yours very truly,
J. S. Mill
820.
TO JOHN PLUMMER1
- Avignon
May 22. 1865
Dear Sir
I have this morning received three more packets of extracts, for which I cannot sufficiently thank you. They are all of use to me, the unfavourable ones most of all.
You will do me a favour if you will buy the Fortnightly Review for me, and (after reading it yourself) keep it for me till my return to England. I should like to see the article you speak of,2 but do not think it worth while to have it sent here, and the more, as I have very little time at the present moment to read it.
I have the Saturday Review.
With our kind remembrances to Mrs Plummer I am
Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
821.
TO GUSTAVE D’EICHTHAL1
- Avignon
le 23 mai 1865
Mon cher d’Eichthal
Merci de votre brochure sur “l’usage pratique de la langue grecque comme langue internationale”2 et des deux journaux grecs de Trieste.3 La première me fait désirer la complétion de l’ouvrage dont elle forme le commencement. Les derniers montrent bien l’enthousiasme que votre proposition excite très naturellement chez les esprits Helléniques. Je lis assez facilement le Grec moderne, à quoi, en effet, il suffit de posséder une certaine connaissance de la langue ancienne, et d’avoir lu une grammaire quelconque de la moderne: car, dans le vocabulaire, toute ce qui n’est pas grec ancien est une imitation assez drôle des mots occidentaux et surtout français. Je n’ai jamais ri de meilleur coeur que lorsqu’à ma première visite à la poste aux lettres d’Athènes, je vis devant moi une affiche commençant par ces mots: Ἡ γενικη διευθυνσις τω̑ Ἑλληνικων ἀτμοσκαϕειων Ἐιδοποιει̑.4
Je trouve l’article de Littré5 fort bon, et votre lettre dans la Clio6 excellente. Ce serait, sans doute, difficile de faire dans la langue ordinaire la restauration grammaticale que vous proposez. Mais après tout ce que les Grecs ont déjà fait dans ce genre, il ne faut désespérer de rien. D’ailleurs l’instruction que reçoivent à peu près tous les enfants (au moins mâles) dans l’ancienne langue, rend ces changements beaucoup moins difficiles, puisque les formes restaurées seraient tout d’abord comprises.
Je vous renverrai les journaux, qui pourront vous servir encore pour la propagande.
Je ne connais M. Blackie7 que par son réputation et par quelques-uns de ses écrits. J’ai remarqué avec plaisir les succès parlementaires de Lanjuinais.8
Ce serait une bonne fortune pour moi que de vous voir à Avignon: mais, pour le moment, je n’en ai guère l’espoir; car je me propose de partir en cinq jours pour une tournée dans les Cévennes et en Auvergne, après quoi je ne serai ici que pendant deux ou trois jours au commencement de juillet avant de partir pour l’Angleterre, où je passe habituellement la moitié de l’année. L’élection de Westminster n’est pour rien dans mon retour. Cette élection se fait absolument sans moi.9 Je ne compte pas du tout sur le succès, mais s’il arrive, il en sera d’autant plus honorable pour moi et pour les électeurs.
Je vous serre la main.
J. S. Mill
822.
TO EDWIN L. GODKIN1
- Avignon
May 24, 1865
Dear Sir
I thank you very sincerely for your article in the North American Review;2 not merely for sending it to me, but for writing it. I consider it a very important contribution to the philosophy of the subject; a correction, from one point of view of what was excessive in Tocqueville’s theory of democracy, as my review of him was from another. You have fully made out that the peculiar character of society in the Western States—the mental type formed by the position and habits of the Pioneers—is at least in part accountable for many American phenomena which have been ascribed to democracy. This is a most consoling belief, as it refers the unfavourable side of American social existence (which you set forth with a fulness of candour that ought to shame the detractors of American literature and thought) to causes naturally declining, rather than to one which always tends to increase.
But if any encouragement were required by those who hope the best from American institutions, the New England States as they now are, would be encouragement enough. If Tocqueville had lived to know what those states have become, thirty years after he saw them, he would, I think, have acknowledged that much of the unfavourable part of his anticipations had not been realized. Democracy has been no leveller there, as to intellect and education, or respect for true personal superiority. Nor has it stereotyped a particular cast of thought; as is proved by so many really original writers, yourself being one. Finally, New England has now the immortal glory of having destroyed Slavery; to do which has required an amount of high principle, courage, and energy, which few other communities, either monarchial or republican, have ever displayed. And the great concussion which has taken place in the American mind, must have loosened the foundations of all prejudices, and secured a fair hearing for impartial reason on all subjects, such as it might not otherwise have had for many generations.
It is a happiness to have lived to see such a termination of the greatest and most corrupting of all social iniquities—which, more than all other causes together, lowered the tone of the national and especially the political mind of the United States. It now rests with the intellect and high aspirations of the Eastern States, and the energy and straightforward honesty of the Western, to make the best use of the occasion, and I have no misgiving as to the result.
Do not trouble yourself to send me the North American Review, as I already subscribe to it. But I shall always be glad to be informed of any article in it which is of your writing, and to know your opinion on any American question.
I am Dear Sir
yours very sincerely
J. S. Mill
Edwin L. Godkin Esq.
823.
TO WILLIAM WHEWELL1
- Avignon
May 24. 1865
Dear Sir—
It gave me great pleasure to receive your note of May 15. It was, in the first place, very agreeable to hear that you go along with my book, so far as it is directed against Sir W. Hamilton; which is fully as much approbation as I could hope for; & it was pleasant to be told that there are other points which could have been made against Sir W. H. but which I had omitted—fearful as I was of being charged, on the contrary, with having pursued him à toute outrance.
But a still greater cause of satisfaction to me from receiving your note, is that it gives me an opportunity on which without impertinent intrusion I may express to you, how strongly I have felt drawn to you by what I have heard of your sentiments respecting the American struggle2 (now drawing to a close) between freedom & slavery, & between legal gott & rebellion without justification or excuse. No question of our time has been such a touchstone of men & has so tested their sterling qualities of mind & heart—as this one—& I shall all my life feel united by a sort of special tie with those, whether personally known to me or not, who have been faithful when so many were faithless. I am Dear Sir
very truly & respectfully yours
824.
TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
May 28. 1865
Dear Sir
It seems a very long time since I either heard from you or wrote to you, and you may have thought it strange that I did not write on a subject of such deeply tragical interest to us both as the assassination of Lincoln. But I felt it necessary to express my feelings on that catastrophe to so many persons,2 Americans and others, who could not otherwise have known them, that I felt less prompted than usual to give vent to them, to those who would know and judge of them by their own. What I now principally feel is that the death of Lincoln, like that of Socrates, is a worthy end to a noble life, and puts the seal of universal remembrance upon his worth. He has now a place among the great names of history, and one could have wished nothing better for him personally than to die almost or quite unconsciously, in perhaps the happiest hour of his life. How one rejoices that he lived to know of Lee’s surrender.
At present I am chiefly anxious that the Americans may not do themselves any damage in the matter of Jefferson Davis.3 I do not like the trial of the assassins by martial law. If they try Davis in that manner, and convict him, let him be ever so guilty, the world will never believe that he had a fair trial. I have good hopes, however, from the favourable opinion of Johnson4 expressed by men who have the means of knowing him.
I was happy to see your name in full, attached to your excellent article on Lowe’s speech.5 There were several very good things in the last number: the leader, by Huxley,6 particularly so, notwithstanding what I venture to think heretical physiology, which, however, he clearly sees, and as clearly shews, not to affect in the smallest degree the moral, political, or educational questions, either as regards negroes or women. I wish, however, that the Reader did not cultivate a tone of flippant attack, often on very slender grounds which is infinitely more offensive than damaging to the persons attacked. The Saturday Review, with much more real matter, manages these things much better. Do you know the editor?7 He seems to me to be amenable to good influences, and worth cultivating.
We propose setting out in two or three days for an excursion in the central mountains of France, but letters will from time to time be forwarded to me from here. I shall be in England in time for the July meeting of the Club,8 at which I am pledged to open my question if required and where I shall hope to see you. If you write, pray tell me your London address.
Ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
825.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
May 28, 1865
Dear Chadwick
You have indeed a fine list of occupations for any one to carry on pari passu with his election to Parliament. But your power of work seems unlimited.
The request of the Committee2 places me in a considerable embarrassment. What they propose is in itself perfectly reasonable; and any one who comes forward and proposes himself as a candidate, ought to be willing to meet the Committee and the Electors in the way they propose, as often as they think desirable. But I have never, from the beginning, been in the position of one who offers himself as a candidate. In my first letter3 I disclaimed doing so; I said that my personal inclination was against going into Parliament; but that if the electors of Westminster nevertheless did me the great honour of choosing me, I would do my best to serve them, and would answer unreservedly any number of questions respecting my political opinions, which might be put to me by or in behalf of any body of electors. My candidature went forth to the public on this footing; and this declaration seemed to be one of the causes of the feeling so widely expressed in favour of the candidature. If I were now to attend meetings and make speeches to the electors in the usual, and, in most cases, very proper manner, it would seem as if there had been no truth in my declaration that I did not personally seek to be in Parliament; as if I had merely been finessing to get myself elected without trouble and expense, and having found more difficulty than I expected, had at last shewn myself in my true colours, rather than run the risk of losing the election.
If you will kindly represent these things to the Committee, they will, I hope, enter into the difficulty I feel. If they think that any further explanation of my opinions would be desirable, they have only to ask for it. If Mr Beal, or Mr Westerton, or any other member of the Committee, will write to me, asking my opinion on any new points, or the reasons and justification of my opinion on any of those on which it has been already asked and given, I shall have the greatest pleasure in satisfying them.
In the same manner, I shall be happy to reprint any of my articles which the Committee may propose. I cannot, however, remember any that would be much to the purpose, as the political articles are mostly on gone-by politics. I should be very happy to reprint the article on “Enfranchisement of Women,”4 but it must be as my wife’s, not as mine.
I am glad to hear what you tell me concerning Mr M’Clean.5 In addition to his very handsome subscription, he has lately sent me two polite invitations in his capacity of President of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and I was desirous to know how I had acquired so much of his good will.
Any writing by Tories, nominally in my favour, is of no consequence. The Tories prefer anybody to a regular government man, as they suppose Grosvenor to be.6 Any one who is not a pledged member of the ministerial party, they hope may now and then give them a stray vote. But if I were elected I should hope to be a much greater thorn in their side than a member of the old Whig connexion can be.
This letter of course is not for publication, but it may be shewn to any members of the Committee.
I am Dear Chadwick
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
826.
TO THOMAS HARE1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
May 29. 1865
Dear Sir
It is a long time since I wrote to you: indeed, from a variety of causes. I have had so many more letters to write to total or comparative strangers than I ever wrote in the same time before, that writing to my real friends has been put off. I have not, however, been inattentive to what you have been doing meanwhile. The Social Science meeting2 evidently gave a push onward to Personal Representation, and you have followed it up in the Daily News with vigour and effect.3 The question has for the first time passed into the domain of popular discussion, and is making unexpected proselytes. You must have noted Lubbock’s4 qualified and Hughes’5 distinct adhesion in their electoral addresses. Perhaps you may not have observed a letter from Francis Newman,6 giving reasons for and against supporting my candidature, in which my adherence to your plan is placed among the foremost of the reasons for supporting me. There are also articles in some of the country papers, shewing that the plan is obtaining favour in proportion as it becomes known. In addition to which, my Westminster supporters are all busy finding what they can say to defend their candidate on the points of representation of minorities and women’s suffrage. Certainly this election affair is a better propaganda for all my political opinions than I might have obtained for many years; and it is selling my cheap editions, and indeed the dear ones too, in a most splendid manner.
My occupation here, except letter-writing, has been of a kind very remote from these interests, being chiefly that of reading Plato, with a view to reviewing Grote’s new book.7 I do not find that this by any means quickens my zeal in my own cause, as a candidate. It is an infinitely pleasanter mode of spending May to read the Gorgias and Theatetus under the avenue of mulberries which you know of, surrounded by roses and nightingales, than it would be to listen to tiresome speaking for half the night in the House of Commons. The only disagreeable thing here is having to choose between pleasures: thus we are about to tear ourselves away from this most enjoyable place to make a tour in the Cevennes and Auvergne, beginning at Alais, and going round by Le Vigun, the Lozère, the Cantal, and Mont Dore, to Clermont. We expect much pleasure from this, but we give up so much pleasure by not remaining here, that did we not think it useful to health, I do not believe we could either of us make up our minds to it.
I shall be back for the July meeting of the Club, where I shall hope to see you. I am glad to see that Gladstone is to be chosen a member.8
With our kind regards to all your family
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
Letters will be sent to us from here.
827.
TO HERBERT SPENCER1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
May 29. 1865
Dear Sir
Nothing can be more agreeable to me than to hear that you are going to answer me in the Fortnightly Review.2 I hope you will not spare me. If you make out so strong a case (and no one is more likely to do so if it can be done) as to make it absolutely necessary for me to defend myself, I shall perhaps do so through the same Review; but not without a positive necessity. I have had enough, for the present, of writing against a friend and ally.
With regard to the Reader, I like the plan of full signatures. I am glad to see that my friend Professor Cairnes has adopted it, & I should be glad if it were the common practice. But, to admit of this, it would be necessary for the Reader to give up the plan it has recently adopted of making slashing attacks to the right and left, with very insufficient production of evidence to justify the vituperation: and in a manner which gives to an indifferent spectator the impression either of personal ill will in the particular case, or of general flippancy and dogmatism. Contributors will not like to identify themselves by name with a publication which would embroil them with an unlimited number of angry and vindictive writers together with their friends and their publishers. I myself should not like to be supposed to be in any way connected, for instance, with the attack on the Edinburgh Review3 (for which I am at this very time preparing an article)—an attack of which I wholly dislike the tone, and agree only partially with the substance; and it happens that the article singled out from the last number for special contempt,4 my name too being cited against it, is by a personal friend of my own, a man of very considerable merit, whom I was desirous of securing as a recruit for the Reader—and who is very naturally hurt and indignant at the treatment of him. I am by no means against severity in criticism, but the more it is severe, the more it needs to be well weighed and justly distributed. I have represented a good deal of this to Mr. Rae,5 with whom I am in correspondence, and of whom in other respects I have formed a very favourable impression. He has very much improved the Reader, and is improving it more and more; and but for that one fault it bids fair to justify our original hopes.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
828.
TO MAX KYLLMANN1
- S[aint] V[éran]
May 30, 1865
Dear Sir—
I have not written to you since I came here, having from various causes been so overwhelmed with letter writing that I was obliged to adjourn all of it that admitted of postponement. I now write though I have not anything very particular to say, except that I am going to leave Avignon for a tour in the Cevennes & Auvergne & though letters will be sent to me from here, they will not reach me so soon or so certainly as at present. It seems to me that discussion on the fundamental points of representative government & especially on the points raised in my Westminster letters, is going on very satisfactorily at present. Numbers of country papers are sent to me in which Hare’s system, repr of minorities, in all its shapes, and women’s suffrage are mooted—sometimes with approbation, & often (especially as to women’s suffrage) with much less hostility than was to be expected. You have probably seen Mr. Hughes’ declaration in favour of Hare’s system2 & Francis Newman’s commendation of me for adhering to it.3 The cheaper editions also are going off at a wonderful rate & even the dear ones are increasing in sale. These are substantial advantages derived from the Westr contest whether it succeeds or not. I think it hardly possible that it should succeed. Though it has brought to light a most unexpected amount of good feeling by isolated individuals towards me personally, there is no set of political men who really wish to have me in Parlt: neither Whigs, nor Tories, nor the Bright radicals (though I hear that B. himself speaks in my favour), nor any other set of radicals except perhaps the Cooperative section of the working classes. Look at the list of subscribers for the election expenses: next to none of them are representative men. They are people from here, there, & everywhere who have happened to like my books. Many even who for personal reasons might have subscribed, hold back, evidently because their sets are hostile to me. This is what I always said would be the case. As Comte says, “tout ce qui est aujourd’hui classé” is sure to be hostile to really new ideas—a little shuffling of the cards is all they want.4
But enough of this. I am full of joy & spirits for the glorious future of America. The catastrophe of Lincoln though it was a great shock, does not cloud the prospect. How could one have wished him a happier death? He died almost unconsciously, in the fulness of success, & martyrdom in so great a cause consecrates his name through all history. Such a death is the crown of a noble life.
829.
TO WILLIAM FRASER RAE1
- Avignon
May 31. 1865
Dear Sir
The author of the paper “Nurses Wanted”2 offers an article on a very different subject, a notice of the new (and much improved) edition of Mr Hare’s book on Representation. The article3 is strongly in favour of Mr Hare’s system; which I suppose you do not object to, especially as any other contributor is free to take the opposite side. I think the writer brings out some important points very well, and will give an impression of novelty in the mode of treatment.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
W. F. Rae Esq.
830.
TO CHARLES LORING BRACE1
[June, 1865]
Your remark2 is most just on the unworthiness of the conversions due only to success. Such conversions merely show the fundamental unworthiness of the original error. The disgust they occasion is one of the causes which make those who have fought an up-hill battle up to the hour of victory eager to go forward to something else, in which they will still have the low-minded and selfish part of mankind against them.
831.
TO ROWLAND G. HAZARD1
- Bagnols les Bains, Lozère
June 7, 1865
Dear Sir
I am writing to you from a little place in the mountains of Central France, where we are making a short excursion. I have not liked to write until I had read your treatise on Freewill.2 I have now done so, with great admiration in many respects, but I am unable to say that it has made any alteration in my opinion. It is very clearly thought and expressed, and draws some metaphysical distinctions which though quite correct are often disregarded, for instance, that fundamental one between volition and choice. There is great acuteness too in much of the polemic with Edwards,3 though I think that he might have found much to say in reply to it, and that you have sometimes refuted rather his expressions than his thoughts. But I do not find that your arguments in any way touch the doctrine of so-called Necessity as I hold it. You allow that volition requires the previous existence of two things, which the mind itself did not make, at least directly, nor, in most cases, at all: a knowledge, and a want. You consider as the peculiarity of a free cause, that its determinations do not depend on the past, but on a preconception of the future. But though the knowledge and the want refer to what is future, the knowledge and the want themselves are not future facts, but present, or rather past, facts, for they must exist previous to the volitional act. You seem to admit not only that the knowledge and want are conditions precedent to the will, but that the character of the will invariably corresponds to that of the knowledge and want, and that any variation in either of these determines, or at least is sure to be followed by, a corresponding variation in the volition. Now this is all that I, as a necessitarian, require. I do not believe in anything real corresponding to the phrases Necessity, Causal Force or the like. I acknowledge no other link between cause and effect, even when both are purely material, than invariability of sequence, from which arises possibility of prediction. And this it seems to me, on your own shewing, exists equally between volitions and the mental antecedents by which you allow that they are and must be preceded.
My own view of the subject you will find in a chapter of my book on Sir William Hamilton,4 which I hope reached you, and to which I must refer you for the arguments I have not room for here. Let me add, however, that on the subject, practically considered, I am at one with you. Your view of what the mind has power to do, seems to me quite just: but we differ on the question, how the mind is determined to do it.5
To turn to another subject, no less interesting to us both; you seem to have now a finance minister who understands currency,6 and the close of the war will render return to the right path comparatively easy. I look forward to the brightest future for America now, provided the North is not foolishly generous to its conquered enemies. It is quite indispensable to break the power of the Slaveholding oligarchy. Emancipation is not enough, without making the freed negroes electors and landholders, nor without reinforcing them by a large migration of northern people into the southern states. Otherwise the negroes will remain in a state of dependence on their old masters approaching to slavery, and both they and the mean whites will be kept ignorant and brutish as they have been kept hitherto. I would not shrink from extensive confiscation if it were necessary for these purposes, but doubtless the impoverishment of the great landholders, and their disgust with the new state of things, will cause a great number of the large estates to be sold and broken up, a thing eminently desirable. Probably the indignation of your whole people at the atrocious crime which robbed the world of your noble President, added to the known opinions and determined character of his successor, may tend to diminish the risk of any undue indulgence being shown to those who, like dethroned despots, will be always hankering after their lost power. It is only the next generation of them who can possibly become true citizens of a free nation.
I am Dear Sir
very sincerely yours
J. S. Mill
R. G. Hazard Esq.
832.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK1
- Mende, Lozère
June 8. 1865
Dear Chadwick
I am extremely sorry that your two letters were not answered immediately, owing to their having arrived a day or two after we had set out on an excursion in the mountains. They have been forwarded to me here, along with a letter from Mr Beal, to whom I have by this post sent a reply, which he will no doubt communicate to you. I have told him that I am decidedly for proceeding in the way first proposed,2 and submitting your name to the electors with those of all the candidates, and that it would not be just to you to ask you to forgo such claims as you possess, without having laid them before the electors and obtained their decision. The talk about dividing the liberal interest is quite inapplicable to the course proposed, in which it is implied that neither you nor I will be nominated if the result of the appeal to the electors shews that we have fewer supporters than Grosvenor and Smith. I need not repeat what my own wishes are, and that I would much rather you were elected than myself. But that is not the question: it is for the electors to shew their preference, and for us, or rather our supporters, to withdraw our names if any other candidates in the liberal interest are preferred to us.
I have revised your address,3 not as to matter, but as to style, in which it was very defective, and sometimes even unintelligible, from haste. The contents of it (and it is an understatement of your public services) ought to suffice for your election by any constituency in the country. If the public were not so much inured to seeing any petty consideration prevail over personal fitness they would feel it a national disgrace that you are not in Parliament.
Ever, dear Chadwick,
yours truly
J. S. Mill
833.
TO GEORGE GROTE1
- Mont Dore les Bains
June 18. 1865
My dear Grote
Many thanks for the two sheets, which were waiting for me at Mende along with your letter. The chapter on the Leges2 is less interesting than most of the others, because the subject is less so: its inferiority, in fact, was the main point to bring out. The two concluding chapters,3 on the other hand, are equal in interest to almost anything in the work; especially the account of the Megarics, Kyrenaics &c. of whom I previously knew very little. I hope to be able to make a useful article on the book:4 but when I spoke of giving an intellectual outline of Plato from your materials, I meant from your thoughts: not that I had attained any higher point of view than yours, but that I hoped to reproduce yours in a condensed form.
I hope you have seen Mark Pattison’s review of you in the Reader.5 He contests the question of the Platonic canon with you, or rather, promises to contest it. I fancy he reckons the history of philosophy one of his own strong points; which it certainly is not, since he can speak of Aristotle as a mere pupil of Plato. I was pleased, however, as well as surprised, to find him so eulogistic of the book in every other respect. He had just before written a review of my Hamilton in which he equally surprised me by the extent of his adhesion.6
How valuable to me is your approbation of the Hamilton I need not say. The opinion you express of it comes up to my highest hopes. I have been amused by some of the discussions respecting it which have been evoked by the stimulus of the Westminster affair. I learn from the Spectator,7 that the Morning Advertiser8 (à propos of the chapter on Mansel’s Bampton Lectures)9 declares that I am not only an athetist, but have on this occasion put forth my atheism in a form the most revolting which the editor of that paper has ever met with: and the Record10 says I am the chief of the Satanic School in England at present. The Spectator, on the contrary, says the principal value of the book is the logical; that the passages in question are the true language of prophets and apostles: and in the same number in which it attacks and protests against the philosophy of the book, makes a hearty and vigorous defence of its religion: saying at the same time that it has never been able to find out what my private religious opinions are, and that nobody has any right to pry into them. All this is pretty much as I expected, and wished.
I am writing to you from a beautiful place, in the heart of a valley which is an old crater, surmounted by summits between 6 and 7000 feet above the sea, though only from 3 to 4000 above the plateau of Central France. The interior of the crater is filled up with the loveliest pastures and forests. We have enjoyed our tour very much, and have not been indulged with a single rainy day, or even hour, in which to get on with Plato. I hope to see you in the early part of next month.
With our kind regards to Mrs Grote
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
834.
TO CHARLES WESTERTON1
Clermont-Ferrand, June 21 [1865]
Dear Sir—
I very much regret that your letter and telegraphic message were not answered as promptly as I should have wished, they having had to be forwarded to me here. I have no objection whatever to attend meetings of the Committee, or even of the electors, other than those which I stated in my answer2 to a letter which Mr Chadwick wrote to me on the subject, at the request as I understood, of the Committee. But I confess the reason you now give for desiring me to come over and meet the Committee, operates on my mind the reverse way. I should never, for my own part, think of taking any notice of a charge of irreligion brought by the Record3 or the M. Advertiser.4 They are ready to bring such a charge against the most pious man in England if he does not agree in their narrow minded & thoroughly unChristian notions of religion and my attending a meeting just at present would scarcely promote the purpose for which you suggest it, since I should positively and deliberately refuse to allow myself to be interrogated on any subject whatever of purely religious opinion. I do this on principle. I conceive that no one has any right to question another on his religious opinions; that the tree ought to be judged, and only can be judged, by its fruits; and I hold myself bound, not for my own sake, for it is my practice to speak my opinions very plainly, but for the sake of future candidates, not to do any thing that may facilitate raising a religious cry against a person who may be unassailable as a politician, on evidence extorted from his own mouth. The case is different as to my expressed opinions. Whatever I have written and published I stand by, and am ready to defend; and I defy any one to point out in my writing a single passage that conflicts with what the best religious minds of our time accept as Christianity. The passage which, I am informed, the Record and the Advertiser have fastened upon, I maintain to be one of the most religious and Christian expressions of feeling in all recent literature. I am not alone in this opinion. Among many others, one of the most eminent of the Bench of Bishops declares in a letter in the Spectator of June 17,5 that the sentence in question breathes the purest spirit of Christian morality; and the Spectator itself (a most religious paper) had said a fortnight before,6 of the same sentence, that it speaks the true language of Prophets and Apostles. Such expressions as these it would not become me to use; but I am not afraid that your judgment, or that of any rational person who reads the passage and the context fairly, would pronounce it other than Christian, in the truest sense. I am not aware that Mr Mansel’s theology7 is the same thing with religion, or that to say that I will worship no God but a good God is to be an atheist.—You are at full liberty to make any use you please public or private, of this letter.
Any letter to me had better be addressed to Avignon, as I am about to return there, and thence very shortly to England.
Charles Westerton, Esq.
835.
TO CHARLES WESTERTON1
[June 21, 1865]
Dear Sir—
When I wrote to you this morning I had not yet received your letter of the 17th inst. written in the name of the Committee and requesting a personal interview. In reply I beg to say that I shall be happy to attend the Committee on any day they may appoint after I arrive in England. In the meantime I beg to say that with regard to the plan of addressing the electors by circular, as on every other matter connected with the election, it rests with the Committee alone to decide; and I regard it simply as an additional mark of courtesy and consideration towards myself, that they should have sought any consultation with me on the subject. Not taking any of the usual burthens of a candidate, I have no claim to the privileges of one. It is but reasonable that those who take all the trouble should freely determine on their own judgment the course to be pursued. I did not volunteer the proposal of submitting various names to the constituency, as a suggestion of my own; I understood it to be included in the original scheme of which my nomination was a part; and thinking the plan an excellent one, both in itself and as an example, I expressed strongly the approbation which I felt. My opinion on the subject is not changed; I still think that it would have been highly desirable to adopt this course in the first instance. The Committee, however, are of opinion that the time has gone by for it, and that it would not be suitable to the present state of affairs. They have a perfect right to act on their own judgment; and were they even to carry courtesy so far as to postpone their judgment to mine, to accept such an act of abnegation would be to take the conduct of the election out of their hands, which I am as little inclined as entitled to do. Any discussion between us, therefore, on this matter, I regard as merely an affair of friendly explanation, and not of a practical character. I shall be at Blackheath Park on the 6th of July,2 and I shall hold myself at the disposal of the Committee any day and hour afterwards, except the evening of the 7th for which I have a positive engagement.3
836.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK1
- Brioude
June 22. 1865
Dear Chadwick
Your letters of the 15th and 16th followed me to Clermont, and along with them I received an urgent letter from Mr Westerton (with a telegraphic message which had preceded it) urging emphatically the necessity of my coming over at once on account of the accusations of atheism made against me by the Record and the Morning Advertiser.2 I thought so much sensitiveness to such attacks from such quarters of very bad augury; and not choosing to submit to being catechized on my religious belief, I wrote to Mr Westerton as follows: [Here JSM copies Letter 834].
By the next day’s post I received a further letter from Mr Westerton as Chairman of the Committee requesting on their part a personal interview with me for the purpose of explaining to me how they had endeavoured to adopt my plan (as he called it) of addressing the electors by circular, and why they were now of opinion that altered circumstances render it desirable to abandon the plan. I do not see what answer I could give to this except that it was their affair, not mine; that having been asked my opinion I had given it, and that it is unchanged; but that I am not a candidate, and have no right or wish to take the management of the election into my own hands. I therefore wrote the following letter: [Here JSM copies Letter 835].
My private opinion is, that they made a mess of the matter, and spoiled their chances of great public good and great honour to themselves, by not acting on the plan at first; but that they have let the time go by; that they would stultify themselves by adopting it now, and (especially after Shelley’s retirement)3 would bring on themselves bitter reproaches for dividing the liberal interest, which they are not the men to be capable of facing. My opinion of them is greatly lowered, and I doubt much if they have it in them to bring in even one candidate. Mr Beal is evidently not a typical, but a much too favourable specimen of them.
If you decide to start independently, I will subscribe, as I said. I do not think either of us will be elected. I would at present lay considerable odds on Grosvenor and Smith.
The details in your letters interest me very much and some of them are really important, for purposes much beyond this election.
I am Dear Chadwick
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
Of course this letter is private, and only for yourself.
837.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK1
- Avignon
June 26. 1865
Dear Chadwick
A very urgent letter which I have received this morning from Mr Westerton seems to make it necessary that I should return immediately, as it is due to those who have taken so much trouble about me that I should not give them the impression that for my own convenience I expose them to the probable frustration of all their endeavours. I shall therefore be at Blackheath next Friday morning, and shall probably see Mr Westerton and perhaps the Committee on the same day.2 I shall apparently be obliged to attend also a meeting of the electors, though by doing so I shall in some degree alter the original character of my candidature, which I had wished to preserve.
As I expect to see you so soon, I need not touch on any other topic.
Ever, dear Chadwick
yours truly
J. S. Mill
838.
TO CHARLES WESTERTON1
- Avignon
June 26, 1865.
Dear Sir
Your letter, which I have just received, leaves me no alternative but to comply with the wish which you so strongly express. I will therefore return to England immediately, and shall arrange so as to arrive early on Friday the 30th.
I shall be happy to attend the Committee or to call on you personally on that or any following day, if you will kindly write to Blackheath Park fixing the place and time.
I am Dear Sir
Very truly yours
J. S. Mill.
Charles Westerton Esq.
839.
TO CHARLES WESTERTON1
- Blackheath Park
June 30. 1865
Dear Sir
Having been informed by you that a proposal has been received from Capt. Grosvenor’s Committee, for a personal conference between Capt. Grosvenor and five members of his Committe on the one part, and myself and five members of your Committee on the other, to discuss the possibility of cooperation between the two bodies; I beg to say, that I can have no objection whatever to a conference between the two Committees for the proposed purpose, but that I cannot personally take any part in it. I have from the first declared that I am not a candidate, in the ordinary sense of the term; that I do not offer myself to the electors, but that, if thought worthy of the honour of being elected, I will do my best to serve them. To engage personally in a negociation with another candidate, would be not only to assume the character which I have disclaimed but to take into my own hands, in a certain degree, the management of the election. That management must rest, as it has hitherto done, wholly with your Committee; with whose judgment respecting the mode of conduct which most conduces to the furtherance of the liberal interest, I have neither the wish nor the right to interfere.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
Charles Westerton Esq.
840.
TO HARRIET ISABELLA MILL1
- Blackheath Park
July 2, 1865
Dear Harriet
I duly received your packet, but thought it best to put off signing the document till I got my signature witnessed in London. Having now done so, I dispatch it to Mr. Paterson2 by the first post.
There is no occasion to send stamps.
I am glad that you have got to the end of your troubles in this matter.
J.S.M.
841.
TO EDWIN ARNOLD1
- Blackheath Park
July 6, 1865
Dear Sir
I am very much indebted to you for your note, as well as for your most energetic and most valuable support. I did not get the note until I had finished my speaking for the evening2 except in answer to questions. If any one had come, as I fully expected, primed with questions out of the Morning Advertiser,3 I was prepared to enter upon the subject you mention.4 But as no one said anything about it, I thought it best to say nothing either. If I should be troubled on the subject at any of the other meetings I have to attend (which does not now seem likely) I shall be ready to face the assailants. But (thanks partly to you) I have now such a multitude of defenders5 that they would carry me through almost any attacks—saying and doing much more for me than I should choose to say or do for myself.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
Edwin Arnold Esq.
842.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK1
- Blackheath
July 6. 1865
Dear Chadwick
Though I hope you have gone to Evesham, I write to say that when I went to the meeting yesterday evening,2 the Committee had already come to an arrangement with Grosvenor’s Committee,3 in the bona fides of which they seemed to have complete confidence so that there was nothing for me to do but to acquiesce in it. I had copies made of the draft of my speech, but as the reports of the previous meeting4 were so satisfactory, I made no use of them, and those of this morning give me no reason to regret that I did not. You will have seen in the Daily News, and doubtless in the Telegraph,5 the onslaught I made on the money power. The Times report,6 though otherwise good, has cut down, or rather cut out, all that related to that subject. I have to speak at meetings tonight, Saturday, and Monday. Happily Monday’s must be the last.7 The meeting was very enthusiastic, and every one seemed very confident. Qui vivra verra. I shall only believe in success when I see it; and, success or not, shall always regret that the original plan was not tried. The probable loss of some liberal seats even metropolitan ones, through too many or bad candidates, will make the liberal managers see what they ought to have done when it is too late to retrieve the error. I am
Dear Chadwick
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
843.
TO W. L. HARVEY1
Blackheath-park, July 13 [1865]
Dear Sir,—
The suggestion2 you make of an optional secrecy of voting has been made before, but it has always appeared to me to be liable to all the objections against the ballot without having its advantages; since an elector who asked for the ballot would, by doing so, be considered to declare that he intended to vote in opposition to the influence exerted over him; and the influence which is strong enough to induce him to vote against his convictions would be strong enough to compel him to give his vote openly as long as he had the option of doing so. Electors who are tradesmen may be some times exposed to coercive influence from both sides; but in that case I should expect that both sides, or at all events the one which thought itself strongest, would insist on the elector’s voting openly, in order that they might know whether they could depend on him.
You are at liberty to publish my letter.
I am, dear Sir, very faithfully yours,
J. S. Mill
844.
TO AN UNIDENTIFIED CORRESPONDENT1
Blackheath Park, July 13, 1865
Dear Sir—
. . . In spite of Mr. Hill’s drawing back about the Wolverhampton Plate-Lock Makers,2 the papers which have been sent to me from both sides, and especially the report of the correspondent of “Aris’s Birmingham Gazette,”3 confirm me in my opinion that the Co-operators are wholly in the right.
I am, dear Sir, very truly yours,
J. S. Mill
845.
TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES1
- Blackheath
July 14 / 65
Dear Sir
Would this day week Friday the 21st, suit you and Mrs Cairnes for coming here about 12 o’clock and going with us to Chiselhurst returning here to dinner? If Mr Conway2 would do us the favour of accompanying you, he would see some very pretty country of the English type, and would give me the pleasure I much desire of seeing and conversing with him.
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
846.
TO JOHN PLUMMER1
- Blackheath
July 14, 1865
Dear Sir
To begin with the most pressing—there does not exist any photograph of me; but I have been so urged to have one taken, that I have been obliged to make up my mind to it, and I promise that you shall have one of the very first copies.2
I cannot thank you enough for the trouble you have taken in sending me such a number of cuttings from newspapers &c which I should not otherwise have seen, and for which even in a pecuniary sense I must be considerably your debtor. We are hoping to see you and Mrs Plummer very soon but are still so overloaded with occupations we cannot put off, that we have not been able yet to fix a day when we can ask you to give us that pleasure.
In haste
ever yours truly
J. S. Mill
847.
TO WILLIAM GEORGE WARD1
[After July 17, 1865]
It gives me much pleasure that you sympathise so completely with me on the subject of the Westminster election. That you were sure to feel with me as to the passage of my book for which I have been attacked,2 I could not doubt after reading your book on Nature and Grace.3 Let me add that (whatever may be my opinion of Ultramontanism) I know far too much both of your writings and of yourself to be in any danger of mistaking you for a ‘bigot.’4 Few people have proved more fully than you not only their endeavour but their ability to do ample justice to an opponent.
[Mill wrote also at considerable length on the Galileo case,5 and the essay was partially recast in deference to his criticism.]
848.
TO JANE MILL FERRABOSCHI1
- Blackheath Park
July 18, 1865
Dear Jane
Though extremely busy, I write these few words to thank you for your congratulations,2 and to wish you, though it is past the day, many happy returns of your birthday. I am quite well, and am glad to hear a good account of your health and that of all your family. The cause of my not having called on you is that it is many years since I have passed more than a few hours at Paris. I regretted that some time ago when you were in England, my absence prevented me from seeing you. Helen desires her kind regards.
J.S.M.
849.
TO HENRY FRANKS1
- B[lackheath] P[ark]
July 21, 1865.
Dear Sir—
I have been prevented by much occupation from sooner acknowledging your letter dated the 14th.
The difficulty which you feel I understand to be this: how is the opinion that Christianity might have been extinguished by persecution, compatible with the belief that God intended & preordained that Christianity should subsist?2 I conceive there is no inconsistency between the two opinions. If Xtianity would have perished had it been persecuted in a certain manner, if God had preordained that it shd not perish, the reasonable inference is that God preordained that it should not be persecuted in that manner. The preservation of Xtianity thus brought about would be no “accident” but part of the divine plan.
The relation between means & ends is quite compatible with a providential government of human affairs. It is only necessary to suppose that God, when he willed the end, willed the means necessary to its accomplishment. If the Maker of all things intended that a certain thing should come to pass, it is reasonable to suppose that provision was made in the general arrangements of the universe for its coming to pass consistently with these arrangements.
850.
TO THE REV. WILLIAM HENRY LYTTELTON1
- B[lackheath] P[ark]
July 21. 1865
Dear Sir—
I thank you most sincerely for your Tract2 which I have read with very great pleasure & sympathy. Though I had read several papers belonging to the same series & was well acquainted with your name & character I had not happened to see this tract. You had a strong case & you have stated it well & effectively, & above all, like one who feels its importance. I cannot conceive how any other view than that which you take, of the question raised by Mr Mansel,3 can be deemed religious, or Christian; & I felt sure that in maintaining, from my own point of view, the same conception of religious duty, I shd be in complete sympathy with the best part of the religious world—using that phrase in its literal & not in its slang acceptation. Accordingly the manner in which so many of the greatest ornaments of the C[hurch] of E[ngland] lately came forward4 to share the responsibility of a doctrine which coming from me was called atheistic & satanic,5 did not cause me half so much pleasure from its connexion with myself as because it so fully justified the perfect confidence I had in their high feelings & principles. It causes me no surprise but additional pleasure that you so fully participate in the same convictions & sentiments.
I return as desired your letter in the Guardian6 with thanks for the pleasure it has given me.
851.
TO WILLIAM E. GLADSTONE1
- Blackheath Park
July 23. 1865
My dear Sir
Allow me, in thanking you for your kind congratulations on the result of the Westminster election, to congratulate in my turn, not you, but the electors of South Lancashire,2 on having placed themselves in the honourable position which another constituency has so unwisely relinquished. Though your reelection for the University under the new circumstances would have been, both personally and publicly, a great triumph, the opposite result is not any real loss, it being obvious to everybody that, but for the new mode of voting, you would have been returned by a large majority. If the temporary check to the Liberal party had indicated a retrograde movement at Oxford, it would have been a serious matter. But the country knows that the real University, the resident members of the body, are clear of the discredit of this party move, and that, with them, you are stronger than ever. It is even possible that this disappointment, by stimulating the Liberal party in the University to increased exertions, may ultimately be as great a help to the cause of improvement as even your reelection would have been.
I am My dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
852.
TO JOHN PLUMMER1
- Blackheath
July 25, 1865
Dear Sir
I hope to be able to give you a photograph soon, but I have not yet received a proof from the artist. As soon as I have a likeness in a state to be sent to you I will send it.
Hoping to see you and Mrs Plummer on Sunday I am
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
853.
TO JOHN CHAPMAN1
- Blackheath Park
July 28, 1865
Dear Sir
Many thanks for your note.
My usual conditions with my publishers are the ordinary half profit plan for a single edition—the number of copies to be at the discretion of the publisher and the copyright to remain with me. This is what I should propose for the Comte papers, if agreeable to Mr Trübner.2 I should wish to revise the articles before they are sent to the printer.
I shall be very glad to hear of any further applications of your discovery.3 If it proves applicable to cholera, it will be still more important than it is already shewn to be. I am
Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
854.
TO JOHN PLUMMER1
- Blackheath
July 28 [1865]
Dear Sir
I wrote last Sunday to ask if you and Mrs Plummer would do us the pleasure of dining with us next Sunday July 30 at six o’clock. I have since received a note from you and not being sure when yours was written, do not know whether you have received mine. I should be glad to know whether we may count on the pleasure of seeing you.
I hope the photograph will soon be ready.
I am Dear Sir
Yours very truly
J. S. Mill
855.
TO JOHN CHAPMAN1
- Blackheath Park
July 30. 1865
Dear Sir
I have been long under an engagement to review Mr Grote’s book for the Edinburgh2 —and shall scarcely have time to do that, much less to write another review also,3 before the meeting of Parliament. I sympathize much in your difficulty, as it is not easy to find writers who are sufficiently familiar both with Plato and with philosophy, without being full of wrong ideas on the latter, if not on both. I can think of no one who is not likely to have been already thought of by yourself. Have you asked Professor Bain?4
I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
856.
TO AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN1
- Blackheath
July 31, 1865
Dear Sir—
In revising my Logic for a new edition2 I have arrived at the places where your son pointed out an error—viz, in my numerical estimation of the probability arising from the addition of two independent improbabilities (Vol. 2. Ch. 23 § 6 of the third book). I find to my very great regret that I have mislaid the paper which contained the discussion of the point, and though I was convinced at the time, I have not been able to reason out for myself the estimation of the compound probability in the case supposed. Though I greatly regret giving you the trouble, I should feel it a great favour if you would kindly put on paper the few sentences which would be sufficient to make me once more understand the matter as it really is.
I ought not to need this additional assistance but though it is my own fault, I think it better to ask for instruction on the subject than to go without it.
857.
TO HELEN TAYLOR1
- Penzance
- (Queen’s Hotel)
Wednesday [Aug. 2, 1865]
Thanks dear for taking the trouble to write an abstract of so many letters. None of them need be sent, or need be answered till I come back, except Thornton’s.2 To him I will write tonight or tomorrow & I quite agree with you about not taking any notice of Smith’s letter.3 It is very possible that the creature thinks he has not committed any corruption, for that sort of person squares his conscience by the law, entirely.
I rather think I shall not return till Monday, but I will write again to say. Irvine4 seems rather inclined to stay on, and there is plenty to do botanically for a much longer time. We have been successful thus far—fine though showery weather (I have brought & worn a waterproof) & plenty of plants but I have not been so well as I expected to be having had diarrhoea which is going off but has not quite left me. I cannot write more as I am keeping Irvine from his dinner to save the post.
Yours ever affectionately
J.S.M.
858.
TO RICHARD CONGREVE1
- B[lackheath] P[ark].
Aug. 8. 1865
Dear Sir—
It is precisely because I consider M. Comte to have been a great thinker, that I regard it as a duty to balance the strong & deeply felt admiration which I express for what I deem the fundamental parts of his philosophy by an equally emphatic expression of the opposite feeling I entertain towards other parts.2 It is M. Comte himself who, in my judgment, has thrown ridicule on his own philosophy by the extravagances of his later writings; & since he has done so, I conceive that the mischief can only be corrected if those who desire to separate the first from the last, shew that they are as much alive to the ridiculous side of his character & speculations as those are who are unable to appreciate his greatness. Unless this separation can be effected, either the absurdities will weigh down the merits or the merits will float the absurdities, & since many of those last are, in my estimation, of such a kind that if it were impossible to laugh at them it would be necessary to denounce them seriously & severely, I am glad that the former side of the alternative is possible. Forgive the freedom with which I express what I know must appear to you not only error & prejudice, but want of due modesty & reverence. But any weaker terms would not put you in full possession of what I feel in the matter, on which feeling must rest the justification of the tone of the article. In saying that the offence I feared I might give would be unintentional I did not mean that it would be unforeseen, but only that such a consequence of my free speaking on the subject would be one which I shd sincerely regret. I earnestly disclaimed, near the beginning of the second article, any feeling but that of respect towards M. Comte’s persistent disciples, and I am bound to acknowledge the extreme courtesy of your letter, in circumstances which would have excused in my eyes some vehemence of language.
859.
TO GEORGE JACOB HOLYOAKE1
- Blackheath Park
Aug. 8. 1865
Dear Sir
I have to thank you for three or four notes which want of time prevented me from answering when I received them. I congratulate you on the triumphant return of Mr Cowen for Newcastle,2 and I regret that the attacks on you should have prevented the realization of your hopes in regard to the Secretaryship.3
The Affirmation Bill4 must not be suffered to drop in consequence of Sir John Trelawny’s absence from the House.5 His non-election is one of the greatest of the few losses which advanced opinions have sustained in this Parliament.
I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
860.
TO THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY1
- Blackheath Park
Aug. 8. 1865
Dear Sir
I suppose that the projected International Education Society2 is intended to carry out the plan concerning which a good deal has been written by Professor Lorimer of Edinburgh.3 The idea seems to me a good one, but I should hardly place it in the foremost rank of the improvements which require to be made in education, and in any case I could not afford to give any time to it, or incur any responsibility. I do not know whether being one of the Vice Presidents would imply more than a general good opinion of the undertaking, grounded on confidence in some of the names of the list of Directors.
I should like also to know more precisely what attitude the mode of education will hold towards Theology.4
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
Professor Huxley
861.
TO AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN1
- Blackheath Park
Aug. 9. 1865
Dear Sir
Your letter is clear and conclusive, and, together with my own letter grounded on your previous one,2 makes the truth perfectly obvious in the case to which they apply, viz. the comparative probabilities of the different causes which may have produced a known effect. But it is not quite so easy to apply the same principle to cases in which there is no known effect to be accounted for, but the antecedent probability of an unknown fact is to be estimated from mere statistics. Take the case in its most general form, as it stands in my book: Two of every three As are Bs, three of every four Cs are Bs, what is the probability that something which is both an A and a C is a B?3
The beginning of the argument runs smoothly enough. If the thing is a B, something must be true which is only true twice in every thrice, and something else which is only true thrice in every four times, and this coincidence will only happen six times in twelve. If the thing is not a B, something must be true which is only true once in every thrice, and something else which is only true once in every four times, and this coincidence will only happen once in twelve times; making the comparative probabilities six to one. But what becomes of the other five cases in this statement? In the case of the two witnesses these five cases are put out of count, being cases in which the two witnesses give opposite testimonies, which in the case in question it is known they have not done. But what is the equivalent of this exclusion in the more general theorem? It seems to me that in this, the a posteriori falsity is replaced by an a priori impossibility, since the remaining five cases, implying that the thing is both B and not B, involve a contradiction.
There is something, to my mind, a little louche about this reasoning, which makes me wish for your sanction to it before I make use of it. Is there not something absurd in a theory of 12 possible cases of which 5 turn out impossible? In the case of the witnesses, the five cases are not impossible, but it is merely known that the particular instance is not one of them. But in the general form of the theorem it would seem as if there were twelve cases, in six of which one thing is true; in one, another thing; and in the remaining five, nothing.
I thank you for your kind wishes about my health. No doubt I shall be fully occupied with Parliament during the session, but I hope by keeping out of engagements, to be able to work at other subjects in the vacation. My safeguard is that I have no taste for what is called society; which is the grand consumer of time, energy, and in my case, of animal spirits. As I do not mean to let myself be drawn into that, I hope to have a fair average amount of leisure like other people.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
862.
TO JOHN PLUMMER1
- Blackheath Park
Aug. 11. 1865
Dear Sir
I have now the pleasure of enclosing two carte photographs either of which I give my full consent to your employing, for the purpose of Cassell’s Family Paper.2
I also enclose the very droll letter which you received from North Wales. If you are often expected to communicate universal knowledge by return of post, your duty will be an onerous one. The impatience of your correspondent must have been great, since he could not even wait for an answer in the paper. I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
863.
TO HERBERT SPENCER1
- Blackheath Park
Aug. 12. 1865
Dear Sir
When I received your article in the Fortnightly Review,2 the reprint of my book on Hamilton was too far advanced to admit of any correcting at the proper place the misconception which you pointed out in p. 536 of the Review. I consequently added a note at the end of the volume, of which, in case you have not seen it, I enclose a transcript.
I do not find that the distinction between the two senses of the word inconceivable,3 removes or diminishes the difference between us. I was already aware that the inconceivability which you regard as an ultimate test, is the impossibility of uniting two ideas in the same mental representation. But, unless I have still further misunderstood you, you regard this incapacity of the conceptive faculty merely as the strongest proof that can be given of a necessity of belief. Your test of an ultimate truth I still apprehend to be the invariability of the belief of it, tested by an attempt to believe its negative.
I have, in my turn, to correct a partial misunderstanding of my own meaning. I did not assert that a belief is proved not to be necessary by the fact that some persons deny its necessity, but by the fact that some persons do not hold the belief itself; which opinion seems as evident as the other would be absurd.4
On the main question between us your chief point seems to be, that the Idealist argument is reduced to nonsense if we accept the idealist conclusions, since it cannot be expressed without assuming an objective reality producing, & a subjective reality receiving, the impression.5 The experience to which our states of mind are referred, is, ex vi termini, (you think) experience of something other than states of mind. This would be true if all states of mind were referred to something anterior; but the ultimate elements in the analysis I hold to be themselves states of mind, viz—sensations, memories of sensations, and expectations of sensation. I do not pretend to account for these, or to recognize anything in them beyond themselves and the order of their occurrence; but I do profess to analyze our other states of consciousness into them. Now I maintain that these are the only substratum I need postulate; and that when anything else seems to be postulated, it is only because of the erroneous theory on which all our language is constructed, and that if the concrete words used are interpreted as meaning our expectations of sensations the nonsense and unmeaningness which you speak of do not arise.
I quite agree with you, however, that our difference is “superficial rather than substantial”,6 or at all events, need not and does not affect our general mode of explaining mental phenomena. From the first I have wished to keep the peace with those whose belief in a substratum is simply the belief in an Unknowable. You have said what you deemed necessary to set yourself right on the points which had been in controversy between us. I am glad you have done so, and am now disposed to let the matter rest. There will probably be other and more hostile criticisms, by Mansel and others, and if I should think it desirable to reply to them, I could on the same occasion make some remarks on yours, without the appearance of antagonism which I am anxious to avoid.
I am, Dear Sir,
very truly yours,
J. S. Mill
Since writing this I have seen a clever article in today’s Saturday Review7 which takes my side of the question against yours. It is pleasant to see these abstract questions really and intelligently discussed in a popular periodical.
864.
TO EDWARD WILSON1
- Blackheath Park
Aug. 13. 1865
Sir
I beg to acknowledge your letter of Aug. 2 respecting Parliamentary Reform and representation of minorities, and to say that I shall be happy to read the pamphlet2 you mention when it reaches me, which it has not yet done.
I am Sir
yours very faithfully
J. S. Mill
Edward Wilson Esq
865.
TO JAMES BEAL1
- Blackheath Park
Aug. 14. 1865
Dear Sir
In consequence of the wish expressed by many of my friends in Westminster to have my likeness, I have sat to a photographer, and the result is the inclosed cartes of which allow me to request your acceptance. It will therefore be unnecessary that I should comply with the proposals made by Mr Mayall2 and by the Stereoscopic Society.3
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
James Beal Esq.
866.
TO THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY1
- Blackheath Park
August 18, 1865
Dear Sir
From what you say of the projected School2 I feel no doubt that it will be a good thing, and deserving of support; but I do not see how, with my opinions, I could publicly associate myself as a special supporter and recommender, with any school in which theology is part of the course; for assuredly I do not think that theology ought to be taught in any school; and there are, even at present, schools (the Birkbeck schools)3 in which none is taught; though I am not aware of any schools of that sort for the higher and middle classes, unless it be the London University College School,4 which, I believe is only a day school. It might be useless, in the present state of the public mind to propose such schools, and it may be quite right to support others; but I do not feel that that justifies me in holding myself forth as approving, and partly founding, schools in which a principle I wholly condemn is even partly recognised and acted on. I must wait, therefore, to know more of the actual plan of the institution in this respect, before I can judge how far and in what way I can join in promoting its establishment.
When I said that our educational system needs other modifications still more than it needs the due introduction of modern languages and physical science,5 what I had chiefly in view was improvements in the mode of teaching. It is disgraceful to human nature and society that the whole of boyhood should be spent in pretending to learn certain things without learning them. With proper methods and good teachers boys might really learn Greek and Latin, instead of making believe to learn them, and might have ample time besides for science and for as much of modern languages as there is any use in teaching to them while at school. And if science were taught as badly as Greek and Latin are taught, it would not do their minds more good.
I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
867.
TO JOHN BOYD KINNEAR1
- B[lackheath] P[ark]
Aug. 19. 1865
Dear Sir—
Having a strong impression that I shd like the book which you did me the favour to send,2 I delayed writing to thank you for it until I shd have had time to read it through.
I have now done so & I not only agree with far the greater part of the opinions expressed but consider the book as of permanent value & shall keep it by me for reference, especially on points connected with our military & naval system, & with law reform.
The chief points on which I differ from you are
1st. I think you ascribe too great influence to differences of race & too little to historical differences & to accidents as causes of the diversities of character & usage existing among mankind.3
2dly. I cannot join with you (glad as I shd be to do so) in thinking that the wages-receiving class, if universally enfranchised would have no class feelings or class opinions as such.4 The fact that the operative classes are divided on many questions of politics & legislation is equally true of the higher, or the middle class, of landholders, or of capitalists, & is as consistent in the one case as in the other with their holding together as a compact body in cases in which their joint interest is or seems to be involved, or in which any bias arising from their common social position is liable to operate.
I am heartily glad to welcome you as an adherent of a reading & writing qualification. We agree in thinking that this, combined with independence of public charity, should entitle to a vote. I do not find any notice in your book of the principle of representation of minorities or rather, representation of all instead of a number of local majorities. I cannot help wishing that your attention were drawn to a principle which besides its inherent justice and manifold expediency, would be the most important corrective, as I think, of the inconveniences liable to arise from universal suffrage even subject to the condition of reading and writing.
868.
TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES1
Aug. 22. 1865
Dear Sir
I have read your letter in the Economist.2 It is extremely well done, and I sympathize fully in your feelings, but it does not touch any of my difficulties.
I still think that the proper ground to take is to insist on keeping out of the Senate of the Queen’s University3 any person who is disaffected to the purpose for which that University was instituted, viz. mixed education.4 The Catholic party have a just claim to be represented in the choice of examiners, but none whatever to have a voice in the curriculum of study for any but their own institutions, or the conditions of a degree even for those. These are things to be decided only by the State. If necessary, the subjects of examination ought to be fixed, not by the body which confers degrees, but by the government, or even by act of parliament.
You are quite right to point out the bad consequences which are likely to follow the present concession,5 even if it cannot be with propriety refused. But the great point is, to insist that the particular scheme of education which the British nation has instituted because it thinks that (for Ireland) it is the best, shall continue to have fair play; and that the enemies of the scheme shall have no voice in deciding how it shall be carried out. This is also the utmost which there is any chance of obtaining; for the ministry cannot retract after the general election what they promised before it. They must either keep their promise, or resign.
I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
869.
TO GEORGE GROTE1
- Blackheath Park
Aug. 22. 1865
My dear Grote
I am sorry to say that this present day is the first time since I left Avignon on which I have been able to resume Plato. The whole time here, since I got clear of the election, has been occupied in preparing a new edition of the Logic;2 which I had hoped to be spared until December and January, when the article for the Edinburgh3 would be finished. But Longman came down on me unexpectedly with a peremptory demand; which I should not be much surprised, after all, to find had been premature. From this pressure, I have been obliged to get through the revision of the Logic in a more summary manner than I had hoped to do, and to content myself with alterations and additions to several chapters which I had once thought of rewriting altogether. I have limited myself to what was indispensable, but have given references to the book on Hamilton on points into which I could not enter at length. I read Professor Grote’s4 book carefully, but found speculations and criticisms much more vague and less tangible than I expected. Bain seemed to think that the objection to Noumena was important, and merited notice, but, as I understand it, it amounts to little. It is very well to say, why suppose an unknowable entity as the substratum of everything knowable, but the truth seems to be that the Professor merely, with Reid and Hamilton, believes this unknowable entity to be the knowable. Altogether I could make no use of the Exploratio for the improvement of my Logic, and have merely touched upon it briefly in a note.5
I have also (but this was a very slight business) revised the two articles on Comte for republication by Trübner as a small volume. I need hardly say how glad I am that you like them. The parallel which struck you between Comte in his old age and Plato in his, had impressed itself forcibly on my own mind.
I was very happy to infer from Mrs Grote’s letter to Helen, that the visit to Baden was benefitting her health. It is hardly to be expected that her recovery should be rapid from the state of prostration she seems to have been in. All will depend upon her being surrounded for a considerable time with the most favourable circumstances attainable. We are not likely either to see you and her before our departure or to encounter you on the Continent, as we go first to North Germany, and shall make a long though very rapid circuit before settling down to Avignon and Plato. There is now no other heavy work hanging over me before the meeting of Parliament, and the worst that can happen is that I may have to ask Reeve6 for an additional three months, so as to have the whole time up to February available.
Your doubts whether the new employment of so much of my time will on the whole be a good thing, answer to corresponding misgivings of my own. It will depend on what I find myself able to do in Parliament in the way of promulgating useful opinions and adding to improving influences. How much this will be, neither I nor anyone else can know beforehand, but it will be a positive duty for me to try my utmost. On the other point you speak of, the new influences brought to bear on the tone of my writings, I feel quite easy. Those new influences will have no effect at all. I consented to be elected on the footing of not modifying or keeping back a high opinion on account of its being unacceptable to the public or the electors. As much to my own astonishment as to that of others, I actually was elected on that footing, and nothing else that I said or did, had so much success at all the public meetings as that had. As for the social influences which so often corrupt or tame men when they go into Parliament, I shall protect myself against those by keeping out of their way.
An intelligent correspondent of mine in Greece, Mr Leonidas Sgouta,7 has sent me the inclosed appeal from the Archaeological Society of Athens to those in the Western countries who are interested in Grecian antiquities. You are at the central point of all such, and I cannot better promote the object than by sending the papers to you. I should be very glad to join with others in any subscription for the object.
Ever my dear Grote
Yours most truly
J. S. Mill
870.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK1
- Blackheath
Sept. 1. 1865
Dear Chadwick
I am obliged to you for drawing my attention to the official correspondence about the Low2 affair. I should otherwise have overlooked it.
Today, the very day before we leave, I have for the first time been able to look through the pamphlets and documents which you sent to me, and which I now return. Your address to the Social Science Assn is very good,3 and Lord Ebrington’s pamphlet4 is full of good things.
I send a few more of the photographs. If you write before the end of September, it will be best to direct here, as letters, (though not parcels) will be forwarded. After that time direct to Saint Véran, Avignon.
ever yrs truly
J. S. Mill
871.
TO WILLIAM MARTIN DICKSON1
- Blackheath Park, Kent,
Sept. 1, 1865.
Dear Sir
I am sincerely obliged to you for giving me an opportunity of reading the letter of General Cox,2 and your excellent paper in reply.3
You ask me for an opinion. I should hesitate very long before obtruding upon any American, and still more upon the American public, any mere opinion of mine respecting their internal concerns. But it is the concern of all mankind, almost as much as of the United States, that the conquests achieved by your great and arduous struggle should not be, in the very hour of victory, carelessly flung away: and the opinion which you do me the honor to ask is one which I share with so many of the noblest and wisest Americans, that I need have the less scruple in expressing it.
It is certainly some gain to the negroes, and to the principle of freedom, that they have been made even nominally free. I do not pretend that it is nothing, that they can no longer legally be bought and sold. But this is about the amount of all they will have gained, if the power of legislation over them is handed over once more to their old masters, and to the mean whites by whom they are despised as much, and probably hated more, than even by their masters, and who have been fighting these four years to retain them enslaved. If it were not for your State institutions, the case would not be so pressing, for those who have made them free could keep them so. But, once the war power laid down, and the regular course of State government restored, what is to prevent a State legislature chosen by their enemies from making laws under which, unless they resist by force, they will have as little the control of their own actions, as little protection for life, honor, and property, will in short be, except in a few of the outward incidents of slavery, almost as much slaves as before? To bring this about, it would not even be necessary to enact new laws. It would suffice to leave the old ones unrepealed, by which the testimony of a negro cannot be received against a white. Nay, even were these laws abrogated, nothing more would be needed than partiality and prejudice in the white courts of justice. And would it be consistent with ordinary human nature that such partiality and prejudice should not exist? All this is so evident that even the candidate to whose letter you so ably replied, is quite aware of it; and can suggest no means of averting the evil, except what I agree with you in regarding as the chimerical project, of effecting a local separation between the two races, excluding the negroes from the jurisdiction of the States, and giving them a territorial government apart. It is not to be believed that the President or Congress will entertain such a scheme as this seriously. If, then, they allow the Southern States to reorganize themselves and resume all their constitutional rights without negro suffrage, what is to be done? To abandon the negroes to the tender mercies of those from whom, at so terrible a cost, you have so lately rescued them? No party or set of men in the Free States are so shameless as to propose this combined turpitude and imbecility. But the freedom of the negroes and the self-government of the Southern States as at present constituted, cannot coexist: and if it is determined that, come what will, the former shall be a reality, it must be intended that the latter should be a mere pretence. A censorship will have to be exercised over all the acts, both legislative and administrative, of the State governments; the Federal authorities will by military coercion prevent or set aside all proceedings calculated to interfere with that equality of civil rights which they are bound by every consideration both of duty and of interest to secure to the freed race. And this military dictatorship will have to be continued for a very great length of time; for it is speaking within bounds to say that two generations must elapse before the habits and feelings engendered by slavery give place to new ones; before the stain which the position of slave master burns into the very souls of the privileged population can be expected to fade out.
This is the state of things which the policy now apparently acted on by the Federal Government leads to; but I have too high an opinion of the intentions and feelings of the President, and the practical good sense and determination of the American people, to believe that such a policy will be persevered in. It would be nothing less than electing to rule tyrannically over the whole Southern population, in order to avoid depriving the white half of that population of the power of tyrannizing over the black half.
Instead of restoring to the States lately in rebellion a nominal self-government which, unless you are willing to sacrifice all that has been gained by four years of civil war, can not be suffered to be real, would it not be better to make the self-government real, but to grant it only to a mixed community, in which the population who have been corrupted by vicious institutions will be neutralized by black citizens and white immigrants from the North?
And what is the hindrance to this in the minds of the President and his cabinet? Is it scruples about legality? To be scrupulous about exceeding his lawful powers, well becomes the first magistrate of a free people. But in this case the scruple seems wholly out of place. We are told that the rebel States must be assumed never to have been out of the Union, and therefore to be unconditionally entitled to all their original liberties and powers the moment they condescend to accept them. Reason would say, on the contrary, that by declaring themselves independent of the Union, they could not indeed, divest themselves of its obligations, but certainly forfeited its privileges. A state of civil war suspends all legal rights, and all social compacts, between the combatants. Except under the terms of a capitulation, defeated rebels have no rights but the universal ones of humanity. The Southern people, their lives, bodies, and estates, were by the issue of the war, placed at the discretion of their conquerors; but of conquerors whom both the general law of right, and the special principles of their own social and political institutions, forbid to exercise permanent dominion over any human beings as subjects, or on any other footing than that of equal citizenship. It would, however, be on the part of the Free States a generosity partaking of silliness, were they to give back to their bitter enemies not only power to govern themselves, and the negroes within their limits, but (through representatives in Congress,) to govern the Free States too, without first exacting such changes in the structure of Southern society as will render such a relation between them and the Free States rational and safe. If you have not a right to do this, you had not a right to impose the abolition of Slavery. Consider what an element you are going once more to admit into the supreme government of the Union. Think of this one thing—it is but one of many. Every Southern member of Congress, elected without negro suffrage, is a sure vote for that blackest and most disgraceful breach of faith, which would brand American democracy and popular government itself with a mark that would endure for generations—the repudiation of the war debt. The Southern representatives, in fact, would be the only members of Congress who could honestly vote for this; since to their minds, unless the Confederate debt is recognised too, it would seem only equal justice. This is of itself a sufficient reason why no community, composed exclusively or principally of those who have been engaged in the rebellion, is fit to have a voice in Congress. Of course the States have to be readmitted: to keep them out, and govern them as subjects, would be in contradiction to all the principles of the American or any other free constitution. But the future history of America perhaps for ages to come, depends (I cannot but think) upon your requiring them, before admission, to give guarantees to freedom, by admixture with fellow citizens whose interests and feelings are in unison with justice and with the principles of the Free States. Migration from the North will do this in time and in part, but only negro suffrage can do it sufficiently.
I have no objection to requiring, as a condition of the suffrage, education up to the point of reading and writing; but on condition that this shall be required equally from the whites. The poor whites of the South are understood to need education quite as much as the negroes, and are certainly quite as unfit for the exercise of the suffrage without it.
I am Dear Sir,
yours, very sincerely,
J. S. Mill
Hon. Judge Dickson
872.
TO JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES1
- Blackheath Park
Sept. 2. 1865
Dear Sir
The “middle course” which you seem to think not feasible2 would, I think, consist in making the Board which confers degrees totally distinct from any of the Colleges, and depriving it of all authority over them. Perhaps the best mode would be to place the whole affair under the University of London,3 appointing, as you suggest a few persons in the confidence of the Ultramontanes4 to seats in the Senate. If this is objected to, it seems to me that a similar body, named by the Government, and in which the Ultramontanes should be represented but not to the extent of half, should be created for Ireland. They are not entitled to half. The Catholic religion is entitled to half, but not any particular section of the Catholic body. The Government would merely in appointing Catholics take care to appoint some of the Ultramontane party, instead of taking care to exclude that party.
But I am afraid there is little chance of getting this, or anything like it, assented to by the Government or Parliament. Jacta est alea5 I fear. But there must be a stir made in the House, in which I hope to help.
We leave this evening (Saturday). It will be best to write to Blackheath Park up to the end of September; after that to Saint Véran, Avignon. In haste
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
872A.
TO GEORGE HOWELL1
- Berlin
Sept. 13. 1865
Dear Sir
I thank you sincerely for your letter and its enclosures.2 Your details are of importance by shewing that a strike, when extending to an entire trade, or even to a great part of it throughout the country, is sometimes remarkably successful. But you seem to argue that the benefit to the operators is not at the expense of the employers, being, I suppose, reimbursed to them by the increased price of the article in which they deal, being, in the present case, houses. Now this might, and often would, happen in a single trade, but you have not, perhaps, considered that it could not happen if the rise of wages extended to all, or the generality, of trades. I could shew that there could not possibly be, in that case, an equivalent rise of general prices. But I content myself with saying that even if there was, it would not compensate the employers, since a rise of price extending to all things is merely nominal. Besides, a rise of wages accompanied by an equivalent rise of all prices would be no benefit to the labouring classes.
I think you will find, on consideration, that though a partial rise of wages may be at the expense of the consumer, a general one is always at that of the employer; which however is far from being, with me, a reason for not desiring it. I am Dear Sir
Yours very sincerely
J. S. Mill
Mr George Howell
873.
TO JOHN BOYD KINNEAR1
- Munich
Sept. 25. 1865
Dear Sir—
Many thanks for your long & interesting letter. It is well that those who agree as much as we do shd occasionally discuss their points of difference, if only for the sake of suggesting to each other matter for further thought. I will therefore add a few words by way of rejoinder confining myself at present to your third point, the extension of the suffrage.2
My experience agrees with yours as to the greater mental honesty, & amenability to reason, of the better part of the working classes, compared with the average of either the higher or middle. But may not this reasonably be ascribed to the fact that they have not yet, like the others, been corrupted by power? The English working classes have had no encouragement to think themselves better than, or as good as, those who are more educated than themselves. But once let them become the ascendant power & a class of base adventurers in the character of professional politicians will be constantly addressing them with all possible instigations to think their own crude notions better than the theories & refinements of thinking people, & I do not deem so highly of any numerous portion of the human race as to believe that it is not corruptible by the flattery which is always addressed to power.
The vertical divisions of opinion which you speak of seem to me to belong to the past, & to be almost wholly the effect of bad laws, now mostly removed. Who ever thinks of opposition of interest or feeling between the agricultural & the trading classes now that the corn laws have been repealed?3 But the division between labourers & employers of labour seems to me to be increasing in importance, & gradually swallowing up all others, & I believe it will be always widening & deepening unless, or until, the growth of Cooperation practically merges both classes into one. And if either of the two powers is strong enough to prevail without the help of an enlightened minority of the opposite class, it seems to me contrary to all experience of human nature to suppose that it will not abuse its power. There is no considerable opposition of apparent interest among the different kinds of manual labourers. Even if there be any kind of them whose wages do not admit of being raised, which I for one do not believe (much less would they), they would still, I apprehend, vote for a law which they thought would raise the wages of others, since the rise would not be at their expense. Neither is it only on the question of wages, or hours of labour, that the poorest & most numerous class would feel a common interest as against the propertied classes; might they not be tempted to throw all taxes on property—or even on realised property—& to make the taxes heavy in order, by their outlay, to benefit as they might think, trade & labour? Does anyone think them sufficiently enlightened to have outgrown these fallacies? I am expressing all this very crudely for want of time & space, but “I speak as to wise men—judge ye what I speak.”4
I heartily wish you were in the H. of C. to speak there the whole of your book5 & many things besides. But perhaps the wish will appear to you like that of the fox who had lost his tail.
874.
TO JOHN PLUMMER1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Oct. 14, 1865.
Dear Sir
There has lately been forwarded to me from Blackheath a note from Mr Walford,2 one of the editors of “Once a Week”, saying that he had been asked to suggest a proper person to go out to India to edit a daily paper, with a good salary guaranteed for three years certain, a knowledge of commercial politics being one of the requisites. He wished to know whether I thought you qualified for such a post, as if so he should like to recommend you for it. I was in some difficulty in giving a distinct answer to Mr Walford’s question, from not knowing exactly what he meant by commercial politics, nor knowing completely what commercial questions you had attended to. I stated to him this difficulty, but said that I thought you quite competent to the editing and much of the writing of such a paper as he mentioned. I did not, however, say anything leading him to suppose either that you would, or that you would not, be likely to accept such a position, not knowing whether it would be more agreeable to you than your present one. I have heard nothing further from Mr Walford, but I think it as well to mention to you what has passed on the subject. It is at any rate an additional instance of a favourable impression made by you.
We are now here till the meeting of Parliament. With our kind remembrances to Mrs Plummer, I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
875.
TO WILLIAM FRASER RAE1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Oct. 18. 1865
Dear Sir
I have a strong impression that you are well qualified for the Professorship for which you propose offering yourself,2 but have some difficulty in specifying the grounds of that impression with the precision and detail desirable in a testimonial. I inclose a few lines, but I should not be surprised if they were quite insufficient to be of use to you.
I am sorry that you have had so serious an illness, but very glad that you have got so much better. Your letter is the first information I have had that you are no longer editor of the Reader. I have heard nothing of its affairs since I saw you beyond being invited to a meeting to ratify the sale to some one whose name I do not remember to have heard you mention.3 I was in hopes that in changing proprietors the paper would not have lost its Editor. I am
Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
W. F. Rae Esq.
876.
TO MONCURE DANIEL CONWAY1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Oct. 23. 1865
Dear Sir
I cannot thank you enough for Mr Wendell Phillips’ admirable speeches.2 I was not aware that he was so thorough an adherent of not only representation of minorities, but what is much more, personal representation—the representation of every elector: that great idea of which the credit, though Mr Phillips seems to give it to me, is exclusively due to Mr Hare. It is hardly possible to state the merits of the principle more forcibly, or with a more thorough understanding of all its importance, than Mr Phillips has done. It is indeed at once a direct corollary from the first principles of democracy, and a most powerful corrective of all evils liable to arise from the forms of democratic government hitherto in use. That Mr Phillips should have taken it up, and in the manner he has, is most cheering and auspicious. I was not aware of the publication he mentions, and should like very much to see it.
I beg that you will express my warmest thanks to Mr Phillips for his correction of my unintentional misrepresentation of the Abolitionists—to whom, I hope I need not say that I meant no disparagement, having always regarded them as the élite of their country, not to say of their age. I have been much gratified by receiving so strong a confirmation, from such authority, of my opinion concerning Tocqueville, which I shall now hold with increased confidence.
I have not, however, been convinced by Mr Phillips’ argument against an educational qualification.3 It is very true that intelligence, and even a high order of it, may be formed by other means than reading, and even (though, I think, rarely) without the aid of reading: but not, I think, intelligence of public affairs, or the power of judging of public men, save perhaps in exceptional cases, too few to affect the practical conclusion. At the present crisis, however, the securing of equal political rights to the negro is paramount to all other considerations respecting the suffrage. I should be glad to think that you are strong enough to reject a compromise admitting negroes on an educational qualification common to them with the whites. As things look now, it seems as if even that would be a thing to be thankful for.
The author of the article “Enfranchisement of Women” would have been well rewarded by the progress which that question is making, had she lived to see it.4 Nothing would have gratified her more than to hear on such high authority that a cause to which she was so earnestly devoted had been in any degree forwarded in America by what she wrote.
I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
Do you wish the two numbers of Mr Garrison’s paper5 to be returned?
877.
TO AUGUSTUS DE MORGAN1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Oct. 25, 1865
Dear Sir
I have to thank you for three letters2 which have been reproaching me ever since they were forwarded from Blackheath. The one on probability I was obliged to lay by for reperusal. This I have now been able to give to it and I seem to myself to follow the reasoning and agree with it. You have probably observed the correction I made on the point in question in the new edition of my Logic.3 It will probably now require a supplementary one. If the edition were still unpublished I would have asked you for a short note with leave to insert it as yours.
I agree with you about the misuse of prepositions, but is “averse to” a case of it? Undoubtedly we ought to have said averse from; but did writers in any [era?] of English literature, say so?
When I refer to a former “book,” I always mean liber not opus. The confusion is only pardonable in conversation where the context usually clears it up.
I have sometimes thought I ought to have some mark for alterations and additions. But one could scarcely give distinctive marks to all the successive strata of new matter, and a mere note of distinction from the edition immediately previous would not answer the [purposes of] those readers who only possess a still earlier one.
I well remember our meeting long ago, on the occasion you refer to, and I have retained ever since a vivid impression of your personal appearance. By the way, the phrenological indications in your letter do not by any means tally with what knowledge I possess of my own character; but I refrain from saying in what they differ from it, as I am not [—?] to shew up my weak points.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
878.
TO MAURICE WAKEMAN1
- Avignon
Oct. 25. 1865
Dear Sir—
Your letter dated Sept. 29 has been forwarded to me here. For the good opinion & good will which it expresses as regards myself I am duly thankful.2 You will scarcely be surprised that the bitter hostility it declares against my country & (with a few individual exceptions) against the whole of my countrymen, produces in me a very different sentiment.
No one disapproves more, or is in the habit of expressing his disapprobation more strongly than I do of the narrow, exclusive patriotism of former ages which made the good of the whole human race a subordinate consideration to the good, or worse still, to the mere power & external importance, of the country of one’s birth. I believe that the good of no country can be obtained by any means but such as tend to that of all countries, nor ought to be sought otherwise, even if obtainable. If my country were peopled, as you seem to think, by the scum of the earth, & if its existence were a standing nuisance to all other nations, I for one would shake the dust from my feet & seek a better country elsewhere. But, speaking as one who has never kept any terms with national vanity nor ever hesitated to tell his countrymen of their faults & who has especially censured the feelings & conduct of an influential portion of them on the occasion of your late glorious contest, I do not admit the charges brought against them in your letter. England is to the populations of Europe the representative, by no means perfect but still the representative, of the same principles of social & political freedom which Americans so justly cherish. Any weakening of her influence would be simply so much additional discouragement to popular institutions & to liberty of thought, speech, & action throughout the old continents, & strengthening of the hands of despotism, temporal & spiritual, all over the world.
A war between Great Britain & the United States, were such a calamity possible, would give a new lease to tyranny & bigotry wherever they exist, & would throw back the progress of mankind for generations. Let me remind you that what you say about the grasping disposition & aggressive spirit of the English Government & people, is exactly & literally what the ignorant and prejudiced part of the higher & middle classes of Great Britain sincerely think & say concerning America. In neither of the two cases is the accusation true: but the profound ignorance of each other which it exhibits in both countries, is a most serious danger & evil to the world, which all who wish well to mankind must earnestly desire to cure, & which can only be exagerated by the indulgence of such feelings as you express.
879.
TO GUSTAVE D’EICHTHAL1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
le 26 octobre 1865
Mon cher d’Eichthal
Je vous remercie très sincèrement de l’envoi de votre travail sur la question des origines américaines,2 bien que je ne l’aie point encore vu. Votre lettre m’a été envoyée ici, mais l’Etude se trouve confondue dans la foule d’imprimés de tout genre dont on m’accable, et pour la faire venir ici il faudrait qu’on fît un paquet de plusieurs kilogrammes de fadaises. Ce sera pour moi une lecture bien intéressante lorsque je pourrai la faire. Je ne puis vous recommander d’autre nom pour recevoir un exemplaire, si ce n’est peut-être celui de la Société Ethnologique, presidée par M. Crawfurd.3
Vous m’avez écrit de Vienne une bien aimable lettre, à laquelle je n’ai pas répondu alors, à cause de l’incertitude de votre adresse, et encore plus par la multitude de mes occupations. Cette dernière raison m’a également empêché de remercier votre frère du bon et amical billet qu’il m’écrivit lors de mon élection. Je vous prie tous deux d’agréer mes excuses, et de croire que je n’en suis pas moins sensible à ces marques d’amitié. Plus on s’avance dans la vie et plus on tient aux vieilles amitiés, même lorsque l’éloignement physique en fait une jouissance surtout de pensée et de conscience.
Je me réjouis que vous vous occupez fortement de votre St Jean.4 Si cette partie est relativement à la hauteur de la première, vous aurez fait un des plus importants ouvrages sur un des plus grands sujets.
Tout à vous
J. S. Mill
880.
TO HERBERT SPENCER1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Oct. 29, 1865
Dear Sir:—
I have kept your letter by me unanswered, partly for want of time, and partly in hopes that the delay might enable something to occur to me which would throw light on the rather subtle matter of difference between us which you bring to my notice.2 It is evident that I have again a misapprehension of your opinion to confess and correct, since you do not acknowledge it as yours in the mode in which it is stated by me. We seem to differ on two questions, one a question of fact, viz. whether it is possible, while looking at the sun, to imagine darkness. You, and your three friends, think it is not, while my consciousness seems to tell me that it is quite as possible to imagine darkness in its absence, as anything else in its absence. Of course the stronger present impression of an actual sensation makes the simultaneous consciousness of a mere recollection seem feeble by comparison. But it appears to me perfectly real, and as like the impression of sense which it corresponds to, as most reminiscences are to their originals.
But, you say, even if I could, under such conditions, imagine darkness, it would not follow that I could imagine that I am actually at the moment looking into darkness. To me it seems, that to imagine an object of sight, is always to imagine myself actually at the moment seeing it. I think one never imagines anything otherwise than as an immediate and present impression of one’s own. Indeed, when the object to be conceived is darkness, there is absolutely nothing else to imagine, than oneself trying to see and not seeing; for darkness is not a positive thing. It seems to me, then, that I can, in broad daylight, conceive myself then & there looking into darkness. Is this the same thing, or not the same thing, as what you mean by the words “conceive that I am then and there looking into darkness”?3 It strikes me that this change of the expression to the form I am, just marks the transition from conception to belief—from an imagination of something thought as absent from the senses, to an apprehension of something which is thought to be present to the senses; of which two states of mind I hold the former to be, in the assumed circumstances, possible, the latter impossible. It was in this way I was led to think that you were here using the word conception in the sense of belief. Even now, I cannot see how the phrase, to conceive that I am, or that anything is, can be consistent with using the word conceive in its rigorous sense.
I am, Dear Sir,
Yours very sincerely,
J. S. Mill
881.
TO CHARLES GAVAN DUFFY1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Oct. 30. 1865
Dear Sir
The place from which this note is dated will sufficiently account to you for my not having written to you sooner. Had I been in England, I should have endeavoured to find you out before this. As it is, I can only say that I shall be at Avignon for the next three months and that if your Continental excursion should lead you this way, I shall be most happy to see you. My address here can be learnt at the Hotel d’Europe.
I am Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
C. Gavan Duffy Esq.
882.
TO MACRAE MOIR1
October 30, 1865
My absence from England prevented me from receiving your circular . . . but I beg to express my satisfaction at Mr. Masson’s appointment to the Edinburgh Professorship.2
883.
TO LOUIS BLANC1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
le 4 Novembre 1865
Mon cher Monsieur Louis Blanc
J’avais déjà vu dans un journal la nouvelle de votre mariage,2 et j’ai reçu depuis de Blackheath la carte qui m’en faisait part. Je vous félicite de tout mon coeur, et vous souhaite tout le bonheur que puisse offrir un pareil événement.
J’espère que l’adresse n’indique pas que vous avez définitivement quitté Londres pour demeurer à Brighton. Quoiqu’ il en soit, je n’ai pas besoin de vous dire que lorsque vous et Madame Louis Blanc serez à Londres et que nous serons à Blackheath nous aurons le plus grand plaisir à vous y voir.
Votre affectionné
J. S. Mill
884.
TO JOHN MORLEY1
Nov. 4, 1865
Wherever I might have seen that article,2 I should have felt a strong wish to know who was its author, as it shows an unusual amount of qualities which go towards making the most valuable kind of writer for the general public.
885.
TO ADAM GUROWSKI1
[Before Nov. 5, 1865]
I have read your three volumes . . . and the result is that on their own account as well as on yours, I am desirous that they should be published.2 You have fully established the claim of your view of the last years of American history, to be heard and considered. Your Diary will be an important part of the evidence which future historians of these great events will have to study. It will be very instructive even in this country.
886.
TO JOHN NICOLAUS TRÜBNER1
- Avignon
Nov. 5. 1865
Dear Sir
Though I should like very much to be of service to Count Gurowski, and really think his book2 well worthy of republication, I should not be willing to write an introduction to it, or attach my name to it as Editor. I have abstained hitherto, and prefer still to abstain, from making myself responsible for other people’s writings; and in this book there are so many severe things said of individual politicians, that it would be wrong in me, with no more information than I possess, to make myself a party to them, and hardly possible to put my name to the book without seeming to do so.
Your report respecting the work on Comte is very satisfactory.3 A translation of it into French is in course of being made, with my concurrence, to be published by Germer Baillière.4 With regard to a German translation,5 I have no wish except that it should not be done by an incompetent person. I do not look for any gain from it, and I doubt if it would be worth the while of a publisher to give anything worth taking for the privilege: but if it should so happen, I propose that we should divide equally whatever is obtained.
I do not wish any copies to be sent here; but I should like a copy sent to Professor Fawcett, M.P. Trinity Hall, Cambridge, if he was not on the list I sent you; also to J. S. Storr Esq.6 26 King Street Covent Garden, and Dr Brewer,7 21 George Street Hanover Square.
I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
887.
TO GEORGE GROTE1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Nov. 10. 1865
My dear Grote
I find myself, from my want of knowledge of the Platonic critics, ignorant of the merits of a question of some importance and difficulty, viz. whether the Platonic Apologia is in substance the real defence of Sokrates. I learn from your book that Schleiermacher and Ueberweg think so,2 and that you are of the same opinion. But on the other hand, the Platonic Apologia is almost wholly different from the Xenophontic,3 which latter professes to be the defence actually made by Sokrates and told to Xenophon by Hermogenes, who is also mentioned in the Phaedon as one of the friends who were with Sokrates at his death.4 Xenophon says,5 indeed, that many more things were said by Sokrates than are included in his report; and the things which Xenophon was likely to omit, would be just those which Plato would relate. But Plato’s report does not profess to omit anything. If both are genuine, we must suppose that each reporter left out exactly what the other took, for there is hardly anything in common to them both, except the allusion to Palamedes.6 Now, in every other case, you seem to regard the Xenophontic, and not the Platonic, as the historical Sokrates. Could you, without much trouble, give me some notion of the reasons for holding the opposite opinion in this particular case?
If the Apologia is not the real speech of Sokrates I do not know why we should consider it as authoritative evidence of the point of view of Sokrates as distinct from Plato. For it seems almost equally unlikely that Plato would have put anything unSokratic into the mouth of Sokrates in the affecting narrative of the last day of his life: yet he does, without scruple, put into his mouth on that day the whole of his own two doctrines of Ideas and Reminiscence, which, as far as I know, neither you nor any one supposes to have been held by Sokrates. These things are a real puzzle to me: an ἀπορια for which I greatly need τον καταλυσοντα.7
Reeve has very courteously consented to wait for the article till the April number,8 which gives me the whole time up to the meeting of Parliament for completing it. I have not yet written anything, but have read Plato all through, and am now going through your book carefully again, not only referring to Plato frequently, but reading once more quite through some of the most important of the dialogues which I read last spring: Phaedon, Parmenides, Theoctetus, Sophistes, Politikos, &c.
The article in the Westminster on your book9 seems to me very good. I am curious to know who wrote it.
If you have time to answer this, please tell us also how Mrs Grote is, for it is long since we heard.
Ever yours affectionately
J. S. Mill
888.
TO W. O. ADAMS1
- Avignon
Nov. 13. 1865
Sir—
To give a proper answer to your question2 would be to write the essay which you are intending to write. But if you wish for a mere opinion, expressed in few words, I would say,
1. Severe punishments of some kind are often necessary for boys, but only when they have been negligently or ill brought up & allowed to acquire bad habits.
2. Assuming severe punishments to be necessary, any other mode of punishment that would be effectual is preferable to flogging. In the case however of certain grave moral delinquencies chiefly those which are either of a cowardly or of a brutal character, corporal punishment in that or some equivalent form may be admissible.
889.
TO ROWLAND G. HAZARD1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Nov. 15. 1865
Dear Sir
I have been a long time without acknowledging your very interesting letter of July 1. My excuse must be the great quantity of temporary business (including a vast amount of letter-writing) which has come upon me lately, and the necessity of finishing off old engagements before the new and engrossing ones commence.
I hope you at length received the book on Hamilton. I gave a fresh order for sending it to you, having reason to think that the first had not been executed. You will have found less than you probably expected on the Freewill controversy, the object having been, not to give a complete view of the metaphysics of the question, but merely to reply to some objections and resolve certain difficulties. I am glad you were interested by the review of Comte. The remarks on his philosophy in your letter are just and reasonable from your own point of view. Above all, they are clear; a merit which your writings possess in a degree not common with the a priori or spiritualist metaphysicians.
I was happy to find, though it was no more than I expected, that we think exactly alike on the necessity of giving equality of political rights to the negroes. What has just taken place in Jamaica2 might be used as a very strong argument against leaving the freedmen to be legislated for by their former masters. The legislation appears to have been just such as might have been expected, and the consequence is what we see. It seems not at all unlikely that England will have to make a clean sweep of the institutions of Jamaica, and suspend the power of local legislation altogether, until the necessary internal reforms have been effected by the authority of the mother country. How much more needful, then, is it that America should refrain from giving back to the rebel states the rights already forfeited by them, except on such conditions as will secure equal laws and an impartial administration of justice between colour and colour; which will not and cannot be the case unless the Negroes can serve on juries, and, through the electoral suffrage, have an equal voice in choosing or controlling the judges, or those who appoint them. I felt greatly discouraged a short time ago by the turn which events seemed to be taking; but the published conversation between the President and Mr Stearns3 has revived my hopes; for it seems to shew that Mr Johnson does not differ fundamentally from us; that he only hesitates on the question of time, and is ready even at once to enfranchise the negroes subject to certain conditions, which he would make applicable also to the uneducated whites. If he adheres to this, and also to his declared opinion that non-electors ought not to be counted, even in a fractional proportion, as part of the population that determines the number of Federal representatives; the Republican majority in Congress will be able to act with him, and to prevent any serious mischief.
You must be greatly edified, if you read the English newspapers and periodicals, by their change of tone on American affairs. Those who, at the time of the colonization of New England, used to be called “waiters on Providence,” have changed sides, and are now profuse of panegyrics on the people of the United States. Their praise is of no more intrinsic value than their attacks were before; but it is an additional proof what a great benefit your people have conferred on mankind by shewing what democracy and universal education together can do—how they make a whole people heroes when heroism is required, and peaceful citizens again as soon as the necessity is ended. Most English observers are also much struck by the total absence of vindictive spirit, even under the provocation of Mr Lincoln’s murder. I do not share their surprise, my only fear having been that your people would forgive too easily. But if they only take care not to be forgiving at the Negroes’ expense, I am ready to join in the universal chorus.
We often think and talk of you, both at Blackheath and here, where we first saw you. I hope to hear from you now and then. It is of no consequence whether you direct here or to Blackheath, as letters are promptly forwarded.
Ever, dear Sir, yours truly,
J. S. Mill
890.
TO CHARLES ELIOT NORTON1
- Avignon
Nov. 24, 1865
Dear Sir
I have had the pleasure of receiving your letter of the 30th ulto. It is needless to send me the North American Review, as I am already a subscriber to it; but I am always glad to hear from any of the writers and to be enabled to identify an article with its author. The essay on American Political Ideas2 I had read the day before I received your letter. There is a good cause why the Americans are more attached than the people of other countries to the principles of their Constitution; it is because their Constitution has principles. The British Constitution has no principles: it is the unpremeditated and unplanned result of a secular conflict of opposing forces. There are however, principles, not laid down in words, but involved both in the English and in the American institutions, viz. personal freedom; liberty of thought and publication; and, in America, perfect civil equality between one person and another. To these principles the people of each country are strongly attached, but in neither are they thoroughly carried out, though by you far more nearly so than by us. I hope you are going to carry the last of them into effect as between white people and black; after which it will still remain to bring it into operation between men and women.
I have great pleasure in subscribing to every word of the practical exhortations in your concluding paragraphs. Society in the Southern States has to be democratized in law and in fact, on the principles of the Declaration of Independence, otherwise the sufferings and sacrifices of these glorious years will be more than half lost. And this will be easily done if the people of the Northern States do but will it. The opinions, feelings, and entire civilization of the North have made a wonderful stride since the war began. If they are not yet quite up to the final mark, who can blame them? May they reach it before anything irrevocable has been done in restoring the rebel States to their constitutional rights. I am Dear Sir
Yours very sincerely
J. S. Mill
My address is Blackheath Park, Kent, from whence, in my absence, letters are forwarded.
891.
TO GEORGE GROTE1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Nov. 26. 1865
My dear Grote
I am very much indebted to you for taking the trouble to give me such full explanations in answer to my question respecting the Apologia.2 The points you mention in Xenophon and Plato are all familiar to me, but I wanted your appreciation of them, and that you have given me. I had been much struck with the fact that the two authorities are not agreed even as to what the oracle was, though unquestionably they must both have known it. There is also a prima facie objection to the statement of Sokrates in the Apology, that he first commenced his cross-examining Elenchus after he had already been declared by the oracle to be the wisest of men. If the oracle declared this of Sokrates before he set out on the career which has given him all his fame with posterity, the oracle must have had remarkable sagacity and wonderfully good information. However this may be, I understand you to think that Sokrates spoke the substance of what Xenophon ascribes to him, and also matters which, idealized by Plato, became the Platonic Apology;3 and this seems much the most probable supposition which can be made.
I now feel assured how far I can safely build upon the character of Sokrates which the Apology indicates; and that is what I wanted. I do not think it possible, without abridging more important matter, to discuss in the article Plato’s precise relation to Sokrates. His relation to the Sokratic dialectic is the important thing: and, by the aid of your book and of the familiarity I have now acquired with Plato himself, this is not difficult to bring out.
I have written a great part of the article, and see my way clearly to the end of it. There will never, I think, have been as much said about Plato in the same space; but there will not be anything both important and new in it, for you have left nothing to do: except that every fresh turning over of the ground makes some of the things that are turned up look new by some new light which falls on them.
We are very happy to hear your favourable account of Mrs. Grote. Pray give her our kindest regards. I am equally pleased and honoured by your reviewing me for Chapman,4 and I am glad that you take the opportunity of doing justice to my father.5 My own contribution to his memory is already written in a MS designed for posthumous publication;6 though if I live more than a few years longer, I shall very likely publish it while I am alive.
I am fully and greatly enjoying my last weeks of freedom. The chief occupation of this year has been with Plato, Sokrates, and you: and there could not have been, to me, a pleasanter one.
Ever, my dear Grote
yours most truly
J. S. Mill
892.
TO JOHN PLUMMER1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Nov. 27. 1865
Dear Sir
I have received your note, but not the prospectus of the new paper,2 which if sent to Blackheath, would in ordinary course wait there for my return, as though letters are forwarded to me here, printed matter is not. I however expect a parcel from Blackheath in a week or thereabouts, which will probably contain it. I dare say I shall be able to write some sort of letter to you when I have seen the Prospectus, or at any rate after the first number. An article, I am sorry to say, would be quite out of the question with my present occupations.
I have never yet had time to acknowledge your letter of Nov. 11. I am very much obliged to you for all you write, and no less so for not writing solely to forward applications which you are quite right in thinking I should be unable to comply with. I am not surprised at your not accepting the offer of the Indian Editorship,3 and were I in your place I would not accept it either. Your present position, like all others, may have its disagreeables, but they are probably much less than those of the Indian situation, and the connexion is a better one for opening other opportunities both of improving your own condition and of serving your opinions.
I am always glad to be told what people say about public affairs; but the remarks mentioned in your letter as made by the Moderate Liberals must come from very moderate Liberals indeed. If (which I am not aware of) the Liberal party is “rapidly approaching a state of complete disorganisation”, the conclusion I should draw would be that it is time for it to dissolve, and organise itself anew on some better basis. I am sure no party can deserve to be kept together which is in danger of being broken up by the accession of two or three persons who are thought likely to speak opinions freely which are in advance of the rest. But the Moderate Liberals are always anxious to stop the mouths of the immoderate ones, and these things are said and printed for the effect it is hoped they may produce on the supposed marplots themselves. I am Dear Sir
with our kind regards to Mrs Plummer
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
893.
TO CHARLES KINNEAR WATT1
- Avignon
Nov. 27. 1865
Dear Sir
I have this morning had the honour of receiving your letter of the 23rd instant.
At almost any other time than the present I should have felt it a duty to shew my sense of the distinguished honour conferred on me, by accepting the office of Rector and endeavouring to the best of my power to discharge its duties. But it is hardly possible that such a function could have devolved on me more inopportunely than in the circumstances in which I am placed at the present moment, when my whole time is devoted to clearing off longstanding literary engagements which I cannot hope to have completed sooner than the commencement of the Session of Parliament.2 Even, therefore, if it were possible for you to wait a considerable time for the visit which it would be my duty to pay you, I do not know at what time it would be in my power to pay it. An address fit to be delivered on such an occasion and to such an audience, is a thing which I certainly could not produce off-hand, or with a mind occupied with other engrossing thoughts. Under these difficulties I see no course which I can take but that of respectfully declining the office which has been so flatteringly bestowed on me by the students of the University.3 With sincere thanks for their good will and favourable opinion, I am
Dear Sir
very truly yours
J. S. Mill
Charles K. Watt Esq.
894.
TO LOUIS BLANC1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
le 2 Décembre 1865
Mon cher Monsieur Louis Blanc
Je ne puis m’abstenir de vous féliciter des admirables lettres que vous écrivez au Temps sur les déplorables événements qui se sont passés en Jamaïque, et surtout de celle qui a paru le 30 Novembre.2 Rien ne saurait être mieux pensé ni mieux senti que cette lettre. Souhaitons qu’il se trouvera dans le parti libéral de la chambre assez d’hommes de coeur, non seulement pour flétrir dignement les iniquités de la répression, mais pour exiger la punition exemplaire de leurs auteurs. Le ministère et la chambre, voire même la nation, veut donner leur mesure. S’ils laissent faire de pareilles énormités au nom de l’Angleterre, ils n’auront rien à reprocher ni aux Russes en Pologne—qui n’ont jamais fait autant—ni aux Carrier3 et Collot4 de la Révolution française.
Vos observations au le Times sont excellentes; mais on pourrait dire de plus, que dans ce qui regarde les West Indies, ce journal ne représente pas l’opinion publique de l’Angleterre, bien qu’il entraîne trop souvent cette opinion. Vous avez pu remarquer qu’en tout ce qui regarde les nègres, le Times est depuis vingt ans l’organe de l’oligarchie blanche des West Indies. Je ne sais pas quel est l’intérêt, pécuniaire ou social, qui le décide à se ranger sous cette bannière, mais le fait n’est pas douteux. Le Times n’a-t-il pas fait, pendant de longues années, tout son possible pour forcer ou persuader le gouvernement à retirer l’escadre anglaise des côtes de l’Afrique?5 tentative qu’il n’a abandonnée que lorsque l’impossibilité de réussir a été pleinement constatée. On sait toujours d’avance ce que dira le Times dans tout cet ordre de questions: on est sûr qu’il sera du parti le plus brutalement contraire aux noirs. Il ne serait pas sans utilité que cette liaison du Times avec les intérêts esclavagistes fût connue en France, où généralement on voit dans ce journal un organe de l’opinion anglaise, sans tenir compte des impulsions spéciales et privées qui agissent souvent sur les écrivains du Times comme sur ceux de tout autre journal, et modifient sa mauvaise direction générale par de mauvais caprices particuliers.
tout à vous
J. S. Mill
895.
TO DR. HENRY MacCORMAC1
- Avignon
Dec. 4. 1865
Dear Sir—
In answer to your letter of Nov. 29, I would say, that restrictions on marriage, or on any other human action when so conducted as to be directly injurious to others than the agents themselves, do not appear to me objectionable on the principle of Liberty.2 For all our actions which affect the interests of other people I hold that we are morally, & may without violation of principle be made legally, responsible. I have however expressly guarded myself against being understood to mean that legal restrictions on marriage are expedient. That is an altogether different question, to which I conceive no universal & peremptory answer can be given, & in deciding which for any particular case due weight ought to be given to the probability of consequences of the kind you mention as well as of any other kinds.
I am glad that you agree with me on the subject (much more urgent in this country) of compulsory education.
896.
TO JAMES BEAL1
- [Avignon]
Dec. 13, 1865
Dear Sir—
I have seen with great pleasure, in the newspapers, the movement which the St. James’s Vestry has originated at your suggestion for the union of all London into one body for municipal purposes, with smaller bodies of the same sort for purposes special to each of the parliamentary divisions.2 I have long wished that an effort in this direction should be made. All the more important town-interests are common to the whole town, and can only be properly attended to by a body representative of the whole; and I quite agree with you that there should be but one such body, and that the functions (for instance) of the Board of Trade should merge into those of the united municipality. I also go entirely along with the proposal to abolish the jurisdiction of the Middlesex magistrates in the metropolis, and to have none but stipendiary magistrates. The only point on which I do not agree with the scheme as reported is the choice of magistrates by the citizens or the municipal body. The proposed corporation ought, of course, to have powers equal to those of other municipal corporations; but it seems to me that the choice of judicial officers is best placed, not with any corporation, but with a minister or great public functionary, who can be held responsible for making a proper choice. As a general rule, skilled professional officers are hardly ever well chosen by numbers; some one person must make it his business to find them and judge of their qualifications. I do not know if this view of the question has been under your consideration, or that of the vestry; but as I hope to aid in bringing your plan before Parliament, I am glad to begin already an interchange of sentiment with you on the subject.3
I am, dear Sir,
very truly yours,
J. S. Mill
James Beal, Esq.
897.
TO WILLIAM FRASER RAE1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Dec. 14. 1865
Dear Sir
I imagine that none of the candidates for the Professorship had any chance against Mr Henry Morley.2 I am sorry to hear such an indifferent account of your health, and I regret much that you have been prevented from finishing the article you mention. If you pass through Avignon before we leave for England, we shall be very glad to see you.
I fully intend to read Livingstone’s new book3 when I have time, but I do not know when that will be. There seems likely to be enough doing in Parliament, this session, to occupy all one’s thoughts. There is no part of it all, not even the Reform Bill, more important than the duty of dealing justly with the abominations committed in Jamaica.4 If England lets off the perpetrators with an inadequate punishment, no Englishman hereafter will be entitled to reproach Russia or the French Revolutionists with any massacres, without at the same time confessing that his own country has done worse.
I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
898.
TO HORACE WHITE1
- Avignon
Dec. 15. 1865
Dear Sir—
Your letter dated Nov 3 has been forwarded to me here. It would be a great satisfaction to me to be able to give any assistance in the struggle which the enlightened friends of Free Trade have to maintain against, I am sorry to say, many Americans whose opinions & feelings on other matters command my warmest sympathies. I do not despair of being able, some time hence, to write something for the Chicago Tribune of the kind you wish,2 & if so I shall esteem it a privilege to have it accepted without any payment. At present however my time & thoughts are so fully occupied by engagements which must be completed before the commencement of the session of Parlt now near at hand, that I really am not able to undertake any fresh work. What you ask me to do is not easy; I hardly know any point in Pol. Economy which it is more difficult to treat popularly, & so as to carry persuasion to those who have not studied the subject, than that one, of the influence of high & low wages on foreign trade. To understand the matter it is necessary to realize the fact that all trade is in reality barter—that the question is not whether the home capitalist shall produce or not, but whether he shall produce one thing or another—cotton fabrics, for instance, or wheat; & that high wages which must equally be paid in either case, cannot place one of these two modes of employing his capital at any disadvantage by the side of the other. If it was only in cottonspinning that American wages were higher than English, while in agriculture they were equal, then indeed the high wages being peculiar to one employment would really make it more difficult, & perhaps impossible to carry it on without a protecting duty. But in that case it would clearly be an employment unsuited to the country, since labour employed in it would require to be remunerated more highly than the general rate of wages in the country.
It is very difficult to make this argument popular. What one ought to do is, to ask, If high wages are sufficient to make the American cotton manufacturer unable to compete with the English, how is it that the same high wages do not prevent the American farmer from underselling the English, unless because farming is an industry suited to the circumstances of the country & cottonspinning not?
899.
TO JOHN TULLOCH1
Avignon Dec. 20. 1865
Dear Sir,
You are probably aware of the causes which have so long delayed my answer to your communication dated the 24 in ulto. Being so situated as to have no chance of being able to visit Saint Andrews’ for the purpose of delivering an address, at any time when the University will be sitting, earlier than the end of January 1867, I thought it best to make this circumstance known to the students who had done me the honour of electing me, and to be guided by their wishes in accepting or declining the Rectorship. Being informed that, notwithstanding this inevitable delay, it is still the wish of the Students that I should fill the office of Rector, I beg, accordingly, to communicate to you my acceptance of that office. I understand that this intimation should properly be made to the Vice Chancellor.2 I am not able, where I am, to ascertain who is the present holder of that dignity, nor the proper form in which to make the announcement; but I take the liberty of inclosing a communication addressed to him, and of begging that if it be informal, or in any other way insufficient, you will kindly furnish me with the means of rectifying it.
I am Dear Sir
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
Rev. Principal Tulloch
900.
TO EDWIN CHADWICK1
- Saint Véran, Avignon
Dec. 29. 1865
Dear Chadwick
I received your letter only this morning, so that if you are at Paris tomorrow as you expected, you will not receive this answer. But as in that case I shall probably see you at Avignon, it will not matter.
I am doubtful of any good from an inquiry moved for by Lord Elcho.2 The sole object of its promoters will probably be to obtain such statistics as may frighten Parliament and the electoral body into restricting the extension of the suffrage to the narrowest limits possible. They do not want to have your, or my, or Mr Hare’s plans of reform taken into consideration, and they will prevent all such consideration if they can. Any locus standi for “crochets” and “fancy franchises” before the Commission will have to be fought for, and fought for against Tories, Whigs, and such Radicals as Bright. It would therefore be in my opinion a false policy for any reformer to say to Government or the public, Do not propose a Reform Bill, but wait for the result of an enquiry by such men as Lord Elcho. But even if it were competent to any other reformer to take this position, it is not so for me. It is for those to call for an enquiry who need an enquiry, before being willing to take action. I know what reform I want, and am ready now to do my utmost to get it. An enquiry should be supplementary to, and not instead of, any measure of reform that the present ministry are likely to propose.
I am very sorry that you have had so much unpleasantness about the Newsman, and sorry that Beal had any share in it. I was hoping that you and he would be able to work together at the local government of London. It is one of the many questions which incessantly make me regret that you are not member for Westminster. I shall want to consult with you about it, and shall miss you if you are in Algeria.3 But if you can really help the sanitary improvement of the army, it is a thing worth going there for.
The idea of making the rate book the register, is a good one if the only qualification is to be one of rating, because it makes the registration seek the elector instead of the elector the registration. But it will not be carried, because it would take away the qualifications by property—freehold, copyhold, and leasehold. If those qualifications are allowed to remain, there will still be need of lawyers, and registration associations. The whole of our laws of election from top to bottom require to be reconstructed on new principles: but to get those principles into people’s heads is work for many years, and they will not wait that time for the next step in reform. If they would, all they would get is to be told that the public is content with the thing as it is. And perhaps some measure of reform is as likely to promote as to delay other improvements in the representative system. I am Dear Chadwick
yours very truly
J. S. Mill
[1. ]MS at LSE; published in part in Principles, pp. 1088-89.In reply to Cairnes’s letters of Dec. 23 and 25, MS copies also at LSE, and published in part in Principles, pp. 1074-75 and 1086-88.
[2. ]See Letter 709, n. 4, and Letter 728, n. 2.
[3. ]Cairnes gave permission for this use of his notes in his letter to JSM, Jan. 9, 1865. JSM used Cairnes’s material twice; see Principles, pp. 332-33n., and 334-36. For JSM’s emendations of these passages, see Principles, p. 1077, n. 41, and p. 1082, n. 43.
[4. ]An Irish Landlord, “Twenty-five Years’ Work in Ireland,” Gardener’s Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, Dec. 4, 1864, pp. 1162-64.
[5. ]Jonathan Pim (1806-1885), of Pim Bros. and Co; MP for Dublin, 1865-74; author of The Condition and Prospects of Ireland . . . (Dublin, 1848) and On the Connection between the Condition of Tenant Farmers and the Laws respecting the Ownership and Transfer of Land in Ireland (Dublin, 1853).
[6. ]Benjamin Moran (1820-1886), assistant secretary and secretary of the United States Legation in London, 1857-74. It was Moran who, in Dec., 1863, had transmitted silver medals from the Union League of Philadelphia to JSM, Cairnes, and W. E. Forster.
[7. ]Henry Ashworth, author of A Tour in the United States, Cuba, and Canada (London and Manchester, 1861).
[8. ]See Letter 733.
[9. ]“Co-operation in the Slate Quarries of North Wales,” Macmillan’s, XI (Jan., 1865), 181-90, reprinted in Cairnes’s Essays in Political Economy, pp. 166-86.
[10. ]Samuel Laing (1812-1897), author of, among other works, Atlas Prize Essay, National Distress, its causes and remedies (London, 1844), which JSM quotes in Principles, pp. 769-70.
[11. ]Presumably the letter headed “America,” Daily News, Dec. 28, 1864, p. 5. JSM had earlier sent to Cairnes the letter from Brace. See Letter 739.
[12. ]Rowland G. Hazard.
[1. ]MS in Osborn Collection, Yale.
William Tallack (1831-1908), author, prison reformer, Quaker; secretary of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (1863-66), and of the Howard Association (1866-1901).
[2. ]A Royal Commission, which included among its members Lord Stanley, John Taylor Coleridge, John Bright, William Ewart, and Gathorne Hardy, had been appointed on July 8, 1864. Its findings were published in 1866 in Report of Commission on the Provisions and Operations of the Laws of Capital Punishment in the United Kingdom.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]See Letter 724, n. 2.
[3. ]George Peacock (1791-1858), mathematician; Lowndean professor of astronomy and geometry, Cambridge, 1839-58; Dean of Ely, 1839-58; author of Treatise on Algebra (2 vols., Cambridge, 1842-45), referred to by JSM in his Logic (8th ed.), II, 156 (III, xxxiv, 6), in conjunction with De Morgan’s work.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]Address on Railway Reform (London, 1865), read at the first meeting of the Department of Economy and Trade, of which Chadwick was president, of the NAPSS, on Jan. 31, 1865. Chadwick was critical of competition in the railway system, and “argued in favour of consolidation and unity of administration, to be attained through part purchase or compensation to the shareholders. . . .” (Daily News, Feb. 1, 1865, p. 2).
[3. ]The meeting of the Political Economy Club, held Feb. 3, 1865, for which Chadwick presented the question: “What are the leading principles of Political Economy applicable in this Country to the initiation, construction, and working of Railways for public use?”
[1. ]MS at LSE, published in part in Principles, p. 1091. In reply to Cairnes’s letter of Jan. 9, MS copy at LSE, and published in part in Principles, pp. 1089-90.
[2. ]The 6th ed.
[3. ]Principles, p. xciv.
[4. ]See Letter 741, n. 3.
[5. ]In Book V, chap. x, sec. 1, three long paragraphs were added to the text of the previous edition. Principles, pp. 919-21.
[6. ]William Frederick (later Sir Frederick) Pollock (1815-1888), barrister and author, served for a time as literary editor of the Reader. For his account of his connection with the paper, see his Personal Remembrances (2 vols., London, 1887), II, 128-33.
[1. ]MS at Canberra.
[2. ]See Letter 646, n. 2.
[3. ]Functional diseases of the stomach, Part I. Sea-sickness: its nature and treatment (London, 1864).
[1. ]MS in 1943 in the possession of Mrs. K. E. Roberts.
[2. ]The Election of Representatives (1865), 3rd ed.
[3. ]Thomas Walker (1822-1898), sub-editor, 1851, editor, 1858-69, of the Daily News.
[4. ]John Russell, Viscount Amberley (1842-1876), son of Lord John Russell, 1st Earl Russell; Liberal MP for Nottingham, 1866-68; father of Bertrand Russell.
The speech referred to, in favour of parliamentary reform, was addressed to the electors of Leeds, Jan. 31, 1865. For an account of its reception, by both politicians and press, see The Amberley Papers, eds. Bertrand and Patricia Russell (2 vols., London, 1937), I, pp. 358-63. See also The Times, Feb. 2, p. 5. The Times carried full reports of this speech and later ones: March 17, p. 10; March 18, p. 10; March 20, 1865, p. 6.
[1. ]MS in Wellesley College Library, as is also Hazard’s of Feb. 6, to which this is a reply.
[2. ]See Letter 738, n. 2.
[3. ]Language; its connexion with the present condition and future prospects of man. By a Heteroscian (Providence, R.I., 1836).
[1. ]MS in the Norcross Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Joseph Henry Allen (1820-1898), American Unitarian minister, associate editor (1863-65) of the Christian Examiner.
[2. ]“Doctrine and Theory of Inspiration,” Christian Examiner, LXXVII (Nov., 1864), 265-85.
[3. ]“The Later Writings of John Stuart Mill,” Christian Examiner, LXXIV (Jan., 1863), 1-43, which includes remarks on Dissertations, and “Review of Current Literature,” LXXVII (Nov., 1864), which also includes a notice of Dissertations, pp. 370-72.
[4. ]“Democracy on Trial,” Christian Examiner, LXXIV (March, 1863), 262-94.
[5. ]In chap. xv, “Of Local Representative Bodies.”
[1. ]MS at LSE. Published in part in Principles, p. 1092. In reply to Cairnes’s letters of Jan. 24 and Feb. 5, MS copies of both of which are at LSE, and are also published in part in Principles, pp. 1090-92.
[2. ]See Letters 728 and 761, and Principles, pp. 414-15.
[3. ]The decree removing the second décime ( of a franc, a war surtax) from the registration fee was announced in the legislative assembly on April 16, 1864. (The first décime-de-guerre had been adopted in 1799.) See The Times, April 19, 1864, p. 12. The French forces were conducting a successful campaign of pacification of Mexico at this time.
[4. ]Charles Edward Brown-Séquard (1817-1894), eminent physiologist and physician; head of the national hospital for the paralysed and epileptic, London, 1859-63; professor of physiology and pathology at Harvard University, 1863-67; of pathology at Paris, 1869-72; of physiology at Geneva, 1877; and of experimental medicine at the College of France, 1878-94. Cairnes had reported in his letter of Feb. 5 that he had met Brown-Séquard, “who had just returned from America full of enthusiasm for the [Northern] cause, and represents the state of opinion there as highly satisfactory and still progressive.” In his Logic, 6th ed. (1865), JSM introduced a section (III, xiii, 3; 8th ed., I, 555-56) drawing on Brown-Séquard’s Lectures on the Physiology and Pathology of the Central Nervous System (Philadelphia, 1860).
[5. ]Cairnes had written (Feb. 5): “Goldwin Smith . . . is advocating peace on the basis . . . of reconstruction with an admission of the right of secession, which seems much like as if one were to rebuild a house whose foundation had given way, having just given the architect directions that on no account were the foundations to be restored.” These remarks referred to two letters by Goldwin Smith, “The Prospects of Peace in America,” Daily News, Jan. 28, 1865, p. 4, and Feb. 4, 1865, p. 4.
[6. ]Cairnes reported in his letter that he had sent the Reader a review of R. H. Patterson’s The Economy of Capital; or, Gold and Trade (Edinburgh and London, 1864); the review appeared in the number for Feb. 18, pp. 189-90.
[1. ]MS at Canberra.
[2. ]Probably the Lancet, Dec. 3, 1864, in which on p. 651 a surgeon of the Cunard Line, Sam M. Bradley, testifies to the efficacy of Dr. John Chapman’s spinal bag for curing seasickness.
[3. ]John Henry Bridges (1832-1906), positivist philosopher. “There has also appeared very recently, under the title of ‘A General View of Positivism’, a translation by Dr. Bridges, of the Preliminary Discourse in six chapters, prefixed to the Système de Politique Positive.” “Later Speculations of Auguste Comte,” WR, n.s. XXVIII (July, 1865), 2 (reprinted in Collected Works, X, 328-68). Bridges’ translation was published in London, 1865.
[4. ]So noticed under “Politics, Sociology, Voyages, and Travels,” WR, n.s. XXVII (April, 1865), 590.
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[2. ]Not located.
[3. ]On Jan. 5, 1865, a Mrs. M’Dermott appeared before a Westminster magistrate to complain that her daughter Eliza, age 16, had been improperly induced to enter a Catholic nunnery by Father Bowden of the Brompton Oratory. The Daily Telegraph reported the case on Jan. 6, p. 6; on Jan. 9, pp. 4-5, in its second leader it attacked the Brompton Oratory, summarized the case, and called for governmental visitation and inspection of conventual establishments for both males and females. The resultant controversy brought forth many letters both pro and con and several more leaders in the Telegraph in January.
[1. ]MS at LSE .
[1. ]MS draft at LSE. In reply to Longman’s letter of Feb. 10, also at LSE.
[2. ]Longman had proposed that he should hold the right to publish the cheap editions of three books until 8000 copies of each were sold, and if further agreement could not be reached at that time the stereotype plates should be destroyed.
[3. ]Longman next proposed a five-year term, which JSM accepted (see Letter 756).
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also a letter by Kyllmann of April 22, 1865. Published in Elliot, II, 16-18.
[2. ]See Rep. Govt., chap. viii.
[3. ]See Letter 734, n. 10.
[4. ]Robert Mohl (1799-1875), professor of law at Heidelberg, and statesman. One of his articles may have been that cited by Hare as of Dec. 10, 1861, in his The Election of Representatives, 3rd ed., p. 328.
[5. ]For an abstract of one article by Louis Blanc, see Hare’s The Election of Representatives, App. I, 3rd ed., pp. 340-43.
[6. ]Edouard René Lefebvre de Laboulaye (1811-1883), politician, editor, historian, and legal expert, professor of comparative law at the College of France. See his “De La Constitution des Etats Unis. Le Droit Electoral,” Revue Nationale, XVIII (Oct. 10, 1864), 500-515; reprinted in Histoire des Etats-unis (3 vols., Paris, 1855-66), III, 315-42.
[1. ]MS draft at LSE. In reply to Longman’s letter of Feb. 15, also at LSE.
[2. ]See Letter 754.
[3. ]See Letter 715, n. 2.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]James Beal (1829-1891), auctioneer and land agent, radical politician and reformer, particularly interested in municipal reform. See his obituary in The Times, June 12, 1891, p. 9, and also J. M. Davidson, Eminent Radicals in and out of Parliament (London, 1880), pp. 191-99.
[3. ]A circular letter was to be sent on each candidate to each of the electors of Westminster and back to an umpire. (Letter from James Beal, March 4, 1865, MS at Johns Hopkins.)
[1. ]MS at Brit. Mus.
[2. ]At the Ridgeway, at Shere, Guildford, Surrey, the country home of the Grotes from 1863.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
[2. ]“Clerical Subscription in the Church of England,” North British Rev., XXXIX (Nov., 1863), 399-428.
[3. ]“Education at Public Schools,” North British Rev., XLI (June, 1864), 105-33.
[1. ]MS draft at Northwestern. In reply to Spencer’s of Feb. 28 (MS also at Northwestern), expatiating on the troubles of The Reader magazine under the editorship of Frederick Pollock.
[2. ]The adjourned annual general meeting of the Reader Company, in which JSM held a share (see Letters 733 and 741).
[1. ]MS at LSE; published in part in Principles, p. 1093. A MS copy of Cairnes’s letter of March 1, also at LSE, is published in part in Principles, p. 1092. The other letter JSM was answering does not appear to have survived.
[2. ]See Letter 741, n. 5.
[3. ]See Letters 709 and 734.
[4. ]See Letter 741, n. 7.
[5. ]July 7, 1865: “Does the high rate of Interest in America and in new Colonies indicate a correspondingly high rate of profits? and if so, What are the causes of that high rate?”
[6. ]W. E. Gladstone became an honorary member later in 1865.
[7. ]Charles Mackay was special correspondent of The Times in the United States from Feb., 1862, through Dec., 1865. For a sample of his pro-Southern, war-scare reporting, see his dispatch in The Times, Feb. 8, 1865, p. 9.
[8. ]See Letter 760.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
[2. ]See preceding Letter.
[3. ]Not identified.
[1. ]MS at Canberra.
[2. ]See Letter 814.
[3. ]The translation into French was by Georges Clémenceau (1841-1929), later the famous political leader of the Third Republic: Auguste Comte et le positivisme, par J. Stuart Mill, traduit par M. le Dr G. Clémenceau (Paris, 1868). The translation went through six editions. Emile Littré apparently did not arrange for the translation, which Clémenceau undertook after meeting JSM in the spring of 1865. See J. Hampden Jackson, Clémenceau and the Third Republic (London, 1946), pp. 12-13. Littré reviewed the work on Comte, “Auguste Comte et Stuart Mill,” Revue des Deux Mondes, LXIV (Aug. 15, 1866), 829-66. See also D. R. Watson, “Clemenceau and Mill,” Mill News Letter, VI (Fall, 1970), 13-19.
[4. ]See Letter 767.
[5. ]See Letter 759.
[1. ]MS draft at Northwestern, written on Spencer’s letter of Sunday [March 5] reporting a second adjournment of a meeting of the shareholders of the Reader Company (see Letters 761 and 762).
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins. Published in Elliot, II, 18-21; in the Morning Advertiser, March 23, 1865, p. 3; the Daily News, March 23, p. 5; and The Times, March 24, p. 5.
[2. ]On Feb. 13, 1865, a meeting of Liberal electors and Liberal members of vestries of the City of Westminster took place. Dr. William Brewer (d. 1881), physician, and church warden of St. George’s, presided. The meeting agreed to solicit eminent men to run for one of the seats for Westminster, since Sir George de Lacy Evans (1787-1870) was retiring. JSM and Viscount Amberley were suggested. See The Times, Feb. 14, 1865, p. 6.
[3. ]See Letter 757.
[4. ]The supporters of Captain Robert Wellesley Grosvenor (1834-1918), who won the other seat for Westminster in 1865 as a Liberal. For struggles between supporters of Grosvenor and those of JSM, see The Times, Feb. 18, p. 12; March 9, p. 12; March 28, 1865, p. 14.
[5. ]John Romilly, later first Baron Romilly, an acquaintance of JSM for many years (see Earlier Letters, p. 72).
[1. ]MS in 1944 in the possession of the Hon. Isaac Foot.
[2. ]See Letter 759.
[3. ]Amberley’s “Political Economy” appeared in WR, n.s. XXVIII (July, 1865), 106-33, as a review article on the People’s ed. of JSM’s Pol. Econ.
[1. ]MS at LSE. MS of the list also at Canberra.
[2. ]The preceding Letter.
[3. ]See Letter 532, n. 2.
[1. ]MS at LSE. First two paragraphs published in Principles, pp. 1093-94. Cairnes’s reply of March 13, MS copy at LSE, is published in part in Principles, p. 1094.
[2. ]On Ireland. See Letters 728 and 761.
[3. ]See Letter 761.
[4. ]Principles, p. 414.
[5. ]Not identified.
[1. ]MS at Brit. Mus.
[2. ]Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates (3 vols., London, 1865).
[3. ]“Grote’s Plato,” ER, CXXIII (April, 1866), 297-364; reprinted in Dissertations, Brit. ed., III, 275-379, Am. ed., IV, 280-384.
[4. ]See Letter 763.
[1. ]MS draft and MS copy at Northwestern. Published in Duncan, I, 155-56. Spencer’s reply of March 13, MS also at Northwestern, is in Duncan, I, 156.
[2. ]Especially in Spencer’s pamphlet, The Classification of the Sciences: to which are added reasons for dissenting from the philosophy of M. Comte (London, 1864). For an index of JSM’s references to Spencer in Auguste Comte and Positivism, see Collected Works, X, 557.
[3. ]Hamilton.
[1. ]MS at LSE. In reply to Cairnes’s of March 13, MS copy also at LSE, and published in part in Principles, p. 1094.
[2. ]See Letters 741, 745, 760, and 762.
[3. ]See Letters 761, n. 5.
[1. ]MS not located. Published in the Morning Advertiser, April 19, 1865, p. 3, and in the Daily News of the same date, p. 6.
The newspaper article is entitled “Mr. Cobden’s Last Letter.” Potter had asked Cobden for his opinion of JSM’s statements on representation in his letter of March 16. Cobden in his reply, dated March 22, the last letter he wrote before his death on April 2, stated his objections to proportional representation and said, “Instead of the 50,000 returning five in a lump, I would have five constituencies of 10,000, each returning one member.” Potter received JSM’s permission to print his letter with Cobden’s reply. See Letter 794.
[2. ]At least three meetings of working-class and middle-class leaders interested in the reform of Parliament were held in London, on Feb. 23, March 11, and March 16. These were reported in The Times: Feb. 24, p. 9; March 13, p. 9; March 17, p. 8. At the meeting of March 16 at St. Martin’s Hall, agreement was reached between the workers and the middle-class reformers in arranging a joint union for a new Reform League upon a platform of manhood suffrage and the ballot.
[3. ]Potter had founded the Union and Emancipation Society of Manchester, 1861-66.
[4. ]See Letter 755.
[5. ]Presumably the meeting of that night.
[1. ]MS draft at Northwestern. In reply to Spencer’s of March 13, MS also at Northwestern, published in Duncan, I, 156.
[2. ]See Letter 770.
[3. ]See Letter 771.
[1. ]MS at Brit. Mus.
[1. ]MS in 1944 in the possession of the Hon. Isaac Foot. Bears note in another hand: “23 / 3 / 65 sends Hare” and “23 / 3 Invite to Rodborough.”
[2. ]The 3rd ed. (London, 1865).
[3. ]Delivered to the electors of Leeds, March 16, and reported in the Daily News, March 18, p. 6. The speech was on the extension of the suffrage.
[1. ]MS not located. Published in the Co-operator, May 1, 1865, p. 181.
[2. ]The Wolverhampton Plate-Locksmiths, a co-operative manufactory formed in Feb., 1864, was subjected to below-cost price-cutting by the capitalist lock makers. The co-operative survived with great difficulty until 1879. See Benjamin Jones, Co-operative Production (Oxford, 1894), chap. xx, 437-43.
[1. ]MS at Arsenal.
[2. ]Charles Duveyrier (1803-1866), earlier, one of the leading writers among the Saint-Simonians. See Earlier Letters.
[3. ]Apparently d’Eichthal did not complete this work. See Letter 628, n. 2.
[1. ]MS not located. Published in Newcastle Daily Chronicle, May 23, 1865, p. 3.
William Todd, identified only as a grocer of Gateshead, and author of Parliamentary Reform. The Franchise. Being a series of articles originally published in the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle (Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1865). The main principle of Todd’s plan was to base the franchise on payment of a house tax rather than of the poor-rate, and he offered a scheme for the machinery to carry out his proposal.
[1. ]MS at LSE; published in part in Principles, p. 1095. In reply to Cairnes’s of March 13, MS copy at LSE, published in part in Principles, p. 1094.
[2. ]See Letter 791.
[3. ]In his letter of March 13, Cairnes said: “I see my observations on American wages and profits in their connexion with the theory of profit did not hit the mark; and I fear I must now relinquish the hope—I might say the ambition—of doing this, as on the assumption that the exposition I gave was correct—which you concede to me—I am unable to perceive where the difficulty lies: in short the scientific problem seems to me to be solved.”
[4. ]Principles, p. 619.
[5. ]A debate on “Defences of Canada,” on March 13. See Hansard, CLXXVII, cols. 1539-1637.
[6. ]See The Times, March 15, p. 8, and “England and the United States,” SR, March 18, 1865, p. 298-99.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
[2. ]See Letter 776.
[3. ]Such a letter appeared under the heading, “Another Glimpse of Masters and Men,” Sp., April 8, 385-86. It was written by Thomas Hughes, fellow Christian Socialist with J. M. Ludlow and F. D. Maurice. Maurice was a good friend of Richard Holt Hutton, editor of Sp. See Letter 793.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins. Published in Elliot, II, 21-22, in the Beehive, April 15, 1865, p. 5; Co-operator, May 1, 1865; in part in the Sp., April 8, 1865, p. 373; and in Benjamin Jones, Co-operative Production, p. 438. Jones’s reply of March 24 is at Johns Hopkins.
Thomas Jones was the secretary of the Co-operative Plate Lock Manufactory.
[2. ]See Letter 776, n. 2.
[1. ]MS in 1943 in the possession of Mrs. K. E. Roberts.
[2. ]“An Appeal in the Metropolitan Constituencies for a Larger Choice,” Daily News, March 20, 1865, p. 5.
[3. ]The meeting took place on April 10, 1865, at the offices of the Social Science Association, Adam Street, Adelphi. Lord Stanley presided, and JSM participated in the discussion of Hare’s paper, “Such an organization of the Metropolitan Elections as would call into exercise the greatest amount of the knowledge and judgement of the constituencies, and as far as possible discourage all corrupt and pernicious influences.” See The Times, April 11, p. 10, and National Reformer, April 16, 1865, pp. 250-51.
[4. ]John, Earl Russell, An Essay on the History of the English Government and Constitution from the Reign of Henry VII to the Present Time (new ed., London, 1865). In the “Introduction,” pp. xxxii-xxxiii, and p. li, Russell attacked JSM and Hare for advocating plural voting.
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[1. ]MS at Bibliothèque Nationale.
[2. ]Not located.
[3. ]Lettres sur l’Angleterre, 1st ser. (Paris, 1865-66); 2nd ser. (Paris, 1866-67).
[1. ]MS at LSE.
[2. ]Of his first article on Comte.
[1. ]MS and MS copy at UCL. In reply to De Morgan’s letters of Feb. 5 and March 26, published in Sophia De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan, pp. 328-31.
[2. ]See Letter 724, n. 3 and n. 4.
[3. ]George Campbell De Morgan (1841-1867), also a gifted mathematician, died of consumption.
[4. ]“I see you are in England again by your complimentary letter to the Westminster electors [Letter 765, which had been published in the newspapers on March 23 and 24]. You pay them a higher compliment than they pay you. I am always in doubt about the origin of the word compliment. It looks like a formation from comply, but I doubt it. I suspect that complément is the original, though the present spelling and usage is as old as the Academy’s Dictionary. I suspect that old forms of civility were at last described as complements, fillings up; and that complimts, at the end of a letter, meant that all usual forms are to be understood. My theory receives a little support from comply not being a French verb.”
[1. ]MS in 1943 in the possession of Mr. S. M. Colman. See Letters 542, 645, and 792.
[1. ]MS in 1944 in the possession of the Hon. Isaac Foot.
[2. ]See Letter 775.
[3. ]The London home of Lady Amberley’s parents, Lord and Lady Stanley of Alderley, was at 40 Dover St.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]Probably a draft manifesto by Chadwick inviting support of Liberal electors for his and JSM’s candidacies for Westminster. Later Chadwick drew up an address on his own candidacy (see Letter 832). See also Letter 804. JSM and Robert Wellesley Grosvenor became the Liberal candidates. See Letter 765, n. 4.
[3. ]Charles Westerton (1813-1872), bookseller and librarian; churchwarden of St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge. As such he had been party to a famous anti-ritual suit brought against the Rev. Robert Liddell, of St. Paul’s.James Beal participated in a similar suit as an inhabitant of the parish served by St. Barnabas, also under the cure of Liddell. The judgment, in favour of Westerton and Beal, directed the removal of crosses, altars, and candlesticks inconsistent with the practices of the Church of England. See The Times, March 23, 1857, p. 10. Subsequently to this letter, Westerton became chairman of JSM’s election committee, and Beal its hon. secretary.
[1. ]MS at LSE. In reply to Cairnes’s of March 27, MS copy also at LSE.
[2. ]See Letter 779.
[3. ]William Fraser Rae (1835-1905), a barrister and journalist, specialist in Canadian affairs.
[4. ]“Taine’s History of English Literature: Contemporary Writers,” WR, n.s. XXVII (Jan., 1865), 1-34.
[5. ]Thomas Hughes, one of the original proprietors of the Reader.
[6. ]Letter 765.
[7. ]Howell, James & Co., silk mercers and jewellers, of Regent St.
[8. ]The well-known grocery firm.
[9. ]The firm founded in 1837 by Robert Debenham (1786-1854).
[1. ]MS at LSE. See Letter 787.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
Richard Holt Hutton (1826-1897), miscellaneous writer who had become joint-proprietor and editor of Sp. in 1861.
[2. ]See Letter 776 and 780.
[3. ]See Letter 781.
[1. ]MS not located. Published in the Morning Advertiser, April 19, 1865, p. 3, and in the Daily News of the same date, p. 6.
[2. ]Potter succeeded Cobden as MP for Rochdale.
[3. ]Letter 772.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
[2. ]John Lubbock, 4th baronet and later 1st Baron Avebury (1834-1913), banker, man of science, and author. Lubbock was defeated in his attempt to gain the seat for West Kent, but was returned for Maidstone in 1870.
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[1. ]MS at Canberra.
[2. ]See Letter 763.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
[2. ]See Letters 780, n. 3, and 793.
[3. ]They were not published.
[4. ]See Letter 782, n. 3.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins. Published in Elliot, II, 22-26, in Daily News, April 21, 1865, p. 4, Morning Advertiser, April 21, p. 3, and The Times, April 21, p. 7. In reply to Beal’s of April 12, 1865, MS also at Johns Hopkins. Elliot dates as of April 19, but see Letter 800. The MS copy in the Chadwick collection at UCL is in Helen Taylor’s hand; the last page of the MS copy contains JSM’s letter to Chadwick of April 17.
A statement purporting to be by JSM, in response to the request that he be a candidate, in W. D. Christie’s article “Mr. John Stuart Mill for Westminster” (Macmillan’s, XII [May, 1865], 92-96), is apparently Christie’s paraphrase based upon JSM’s letter of March 7 and this one.
[2. ]The meeting of Liberal electors was held in St. James’s Hall on Thursday, April 6. JSM was not present, and was represented by Chadwick. Others who spoke included John Roebuck, W. D. Christie, and Henry Fawcett. See the Daily News, April 8, 1865, p. 6. JSM must have known the results of the meeting before he left for France on Tuesday, April 11.
[3. ]Sir Edward Baines (1800-1890), journalist and economist, MP for Leeds, 1859-74; his bill to reduce the property qualification for electors in parliamentary elections from £10 to £6 in the boroughs of England and Wales was defeated at its second reading, May 8, 1865.
[4. ]Peter John Locke King (1811-1885), reformer, MP for East Surrey, 1847-74; his bill to extend the franchise to all £10 occupiers in the counties of England and Wales was defeated at its second reading, April 13, 1864.
[5. ]In 1859 Austria ceded Lombardy to the kingdom of Sardinia as a result of France’s intervention.
[6. ]On July 3, 1849, the French Army occupied the Republic of Rome, which had been organized as a republic on Feb. 9, 1849. The French remained in occupation until Sept. 20, 1870, and thereby strengthened the power of Pope Pius IX in Rome and the other Papal states.
[7. ]On Jan. 23, 1863, an insurrection broke out in Russian Poland; in the fall of 1863, it collapsed because it lacked support from abroad.
[8. ]On Feb. 19, 1864, the forces of Austria and Prussia invaded Denmark proper over the question of Schleswig and Holstein. On June 25, 1864, the British cabinet resolved not to interfere in Denmark’s behalf. See JSM’s letter, “England and Europe,” Daily News, July 1, 1864, p. 5, in which the British government is praised for having objected to the plundering of Denmark without intending to resort to war.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]See preceding Letter.
[3. ]The cheap editions of JSM’s works.
[4. ]The Morning Advertiser had already on April 5 carried an announcement by Longman’s of the publication on April 11 of “People’s Editions” of Rep. Govt. at 2s., On Liberty at 1s.4d., and Pol. Econ. at 5s. But see Letter 807, n. 2.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
[2. ]“Mr. Mill on the Philosophy of Comte,” SR, April 15, 1865, pp. 431-33, a review of JSM’s first article on Comte.
[3. ]Trübner published JSM’s two WR articles with the title Auguste Comte and Positivism in November.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
Joshua Fayle (1834?-1888), B.A., Cambridge, 1869; schoolmaster; author of a biography of the Quaker philanthropist, William Allen, The Spitalsfields Genius (London, 1884).
[2. ]Possibly the annual meeting of the Peace Society on May 23, 1865, in Finsbury Chapel, Darlington.
[3. ]Letter 799.
[1. ]MS at Huntington. MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also the MS of Hickson’s reply of April 29. Part published in Elliot, II, 27.
[2. ]L’istruzione elementare nell’Inghilterra e nella Scozia: relazione (Turin, 1864).
[3. ]Alberto Mario (1825-1883), journalist and revolutionary, husband of Jessie White Mario (1832-1906), English advocate of Italian republicanism. In the event, the first translation of On Liberty into Italian was by G. Marsiaj (Turin, 1865).
[4. ]Cobden died April 2, 1865.
[5. ]Samuel Lucas (1811-April 16, 1865), journalist and politician, husband of John Bright’s sister Margaret and brother of Frederick Lucas, Roman Catholic journalist and politician. Not the Samuel Lucas (1818-1868), journalist, author, barrister, contributor to The Times and founder of the Shilling Magazine, 1865, to whom JSM refers. Hickson in his reply of April 29 made the identification.
[1. ]MS at UCL, as is also a MS copy in an unidentified hand. Attached to the MS copy is a draft in JSM’s hand of a statement evidently intended to be sent to the electors of Westminster.
[2. ]Edwin R. Lankester (1814-1874), medical scientist and writer; coroner for Central Middlesex, 1862-74.
[3. ]See Letter 799.
[4. ]The Times of April 24, p. 9, carried the letters exchanged between Grant and Lee arranging for the surrender of Lee’s army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox on April 9, 1865. Lincoln died on April 15, 1865.
[1. ]MS draft at LSE. Published in G. J. Holyoake, Bygones Worth Remembering (2 vols., London, 1905), I, 261. A slightly variant printed copy is in the possession of Co-operative Union Ltd., Holyoake House, Manchester. In reply to Holyoake’s of April 21, MS at LSE.
[2. ]The Liberal Situation: necessity for a qualified franchise (London, 1865).
[3. ]See Letter 734, n. 10.
[1. ]MS not located. Excerpt published in Gomperz, pp. 405-406.
[2. ]Theodor Gomperz, Herkulanische Studien, Erstes Heft: Philodem über Induktionsschlüsse, nach der Oxforder und Neapolitaner Abschrift (Leipzig, 1865).
The second section in the series Herkulanische Studien (April, 1866) is dedicated to JSM: “Herrn John Stuart Mill zum sechzigsten Geburtstag 20. Mai in Ehrfurcht und Liebe zugeeignet.” Gomperz, p. 418.
[1. ]MS draft at LSE. In reply to Longman’s letter of April 28, 1865, MS at LSE, as is Longman’s reply of May 3.
[2. ]Longman had reported that Rep. Govt. had been advertised in error at two shillings instead of 2s.6d as the agreement specified, and Pol. Econ. at 5s instead of 7s (on the first four thousand copies, after which the price was to be reduced to 5s).
[3. ]Longman reported that he had been too cautious in printing the cheap editions. After printing only 1000 each of Liberty and Rep. Govt., he found it necessary to order 2000 more of each, and before these were received, to order another 2000 of each.
[4. ]I.e., those sold to the booksellers in advance. The original printing was 1000 copies.
[5. ]Longman reported that only 137 copies remained on hand. The 6th ed. was published later this year.
[1. ]MS not located. Excerpt published in Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival (London, 1893), p. 279. In reply to Ward’s letter of April 28, 1865, ibid., pp. 278-79.
[2. ]Ward had written: “I fear that since we last corresponded our divergence is even greater than it was before. I am now editor of the Dublin Review, and if you ever happen to cast your eye on it I cannot doubt that you will think it as simply mischievous . . . as any production can possibly be.” Referring to his own article on the Encyclical and Syllabus in the April number, Ward hadsaid: “you will admit (I think) that the statement is clear of principles which you will regard as detestable.”
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[2. ]This letter, dated April 22, is in the Daily News, April 24, 1865, p. 2. In it Francis Henry F. Berkeley (1794-1870), MP for Bristol, 1837, 1841-70, and a tireless advocate of the secret ballot, wrote in support of his contention that a secret ballot was necessary to protect electors from coercion. Berkeley’s letter is a commentary on Letter 799. Hare replied to Berkeley’s letter inthe Daily News, May 2, 1865, p. 6.
[1. ]MS at the Pierpont MorganLibrary. Not in JSM’s hand.
[2. ]Probably the address of condolence to Andrew Johnson adopted May 13, 1865, by the Central Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, London. The text of the address is in the Beehive (May 20, 1865), the New York Daily Tribune, June 1, 1865, p. 4, and the Liberator, XXXV (June 16, 1865), 93. The Beehive lists 37 signatories, headed by George Odger, president, and W. R. Cremer, hon. secretary, of the Central Council.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins. Published, except for penultimate paragraph, in Elliot, II, 27-28, and in part in C. H. Chomley, Protection in Canada and Australasia (London, 1904), pp. 81-82. In reply to Soden’s of Feb. 25, MS also at Johns Hopkins.
Soden has been identified only as a resident of Melbourne.
[2. ]Soden in his letter informed Mill that the paragraph on the protection of industry in a new country (paragraph beginning “the only case in which,” Pol. Econ., Book V, chap. x, sec. 1) was being used as a theoretical defence for protective tariffs in Australia. He enclosed clippings from Australian newspapers on this point.
[1. ]MS at Huntington. MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also Hickson’s letter of April 29, to which this is a reply. Part published in Elliot, II, 28.
[2. ]See Letter 803, n. 5.
[3. ]Probably the sister of JSM’s longtime colleague at the India House, Horace Grant, who like Hickson lived at Fairseat, Wrotham, in Kent.
[1. ]MS at Arsenal. Published in part in D’Eichthal Corresp., pp. 202-203, and in Cosmopolis, pp. 781-82.
[2. ]John Stuart Blackie (1809-1895), professor of Greek at Edinburgh, 1852-82; author of books on and translations from Greek literature and life.
[3. ]“Far from it, indeed, since more than anything I would wish to.”
[4. ]Victor Duruy (1811-1894), French historian, whose books include two on Greek history.
[5. ]A new constitution was adopted Oct. 29, 1864. Among its provisions was one abolishing the Senate and establishing an advisory body called the Council of State. See The Times, Nov. 2, 1864, pp. 7, 10.
[6. ]De l’Usage pratique de la langue grecque (Paris, 1864).
[7. ]One of d’Eichthal’s publications was given a paragraph notice: Étude sur les Origines Bouddhiques de la Civilisation Américaine, in WR, n.s. XXIX (Jan., 1866), 229.
[8. ]George James Pennington, An essay on the pronunciation of the Greek language (London, 1844).
[9. ]Sir George Ferguson Bowen, who, at the time of JSM’s trip to Greece in 1855 was chief secretary to the government of the Ionian Islands. See Letter 231.
[10. ]“St. John’s Gospel,” WR, n.s. XXVII (April, 1865), 406-45. Among books under review were some by the following German theologians: Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792-1860); Adolf Hilgenfeld (1823-1907); and Albert Schwegler (1819-1857).
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins. Published in Elliot, II, 30-31. In reply to Littré’s of May 5, MS also at Johns Hopkins.
[2. ]See Letter 763, n. 3.
[3. ]A summary of the relation of Littré’s Auguste Comte et la philosophie positive (Paris, 1863) to the writing of JSM’s Auguste Comte and Positivism is to be found in the Textual Introduction to Collected Works, X, cxxxi-cxxxiii.
[4. ]Paul Louis Courier (1772-1825), soldier, Hellenist, and pamphleteer.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also Maurice’s letter of May 2 to which this is a reply. Published in Elliot, II, 29-30.
[2. ]Hamilton.
[3. ]Chap. vii, “The Philosophy of the Conditioned, as Applied by Mr. Mansel to the Limits of Religious Thought.” A bitter controversy between Maurice and Mansel had followed the publication in 1858 of the latter’s Bampton Lectures, The Limits of Religious Thought. Maurice replied in What is Revelation? (Cambridge, London, 1859). Mansel responded with An Examination of F. D. Maurice’s Strictures on the Bampton Lectures of 1858 (London, 1859). Maurice then published a reply to this in A Sequel to the Enquiry What is Revelation? (Cambridge, London, 1860).
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[2. ]See Letter 772, n. 1.
[1. ]MS at NLS.
Henry Bowie (d. Jan. 31, 1885), secretary and cashier of the Edinburgh Philosophical Institution from 1847 until his death.
[2. ]The Edinburgh Philosophical Institution was founded in 1846 to provide popular lectures on science, literature, and art. For an account of its history, including the session of 1865-66, see W. Addis Miller, The “Philosophical” (Edinburgh, 1949).
[1. ]MS at UCL. MS draft at Johns Hopkins. Published in Elliot, II, 33-34. In reply to Chadwick’s of April 29, 1865, MS also at Johns Hopkins.
[2. ]Chadwick reported in his letter of April 29 that Charles Westerton and Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, dean of Westminster, had decided to support JSM. Chadwick also reported on the contradictory opinions stimulated by Letter 799, and on the need for a photograph of JSM for campaign purposes.
[3. ]William Henry Smith (1825-1891), newsagent and politician, son of the founder of the firm of W. H. Smith and Son. He led the poll for Westminster in the election of 1868 in which JSM was defeated.
[4. ]Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton Lytton, who led the election for Hertfordshire as a Conservative.
[5. ]See Amberley’s letter in support of JSM, dated April 30, 1865, in The Times, May 6, 1865, p. 9.
[6. ]For the members of the committee for JSM, as of May 27, see The Times, May 27, p. 5.
[7. ]Probably the one reproduced in Elliot, II, opp. p. 233.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins. Published in the Liberator, June 30, 1865, p. 101, and in Elliot, II, 31-33. In reply to Godwin’s of April 8, MS at Johns Hopkins, as is also his rejoinder of June 27.
[2. ]The day before Lee’s surrender to Grant.
[3. ]The Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, passed by Congress on Jan. 31, 1865, was ratified by the States before the end of the year.
[4. ]See Letter 440, n. 3.
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[2. ]Probably Frederic Harrison, “The Iron-Masters’ Trade-Union,” or the first instalment of Walter Bagehot, “The English Constitution,” FR, I (May 15, 1865), 1-23, 96-116.
[1. ]MS at Arsenal. Published in part in D’Eichthal Corresp., pp. 203-205, and in Cosmopolis, pp. 782-83.
[2. ]See Letter 813, n. 6.
[3. ]One of these was probably the periodical referred to in n. 6.
[4. ]“The general management of Greek steamships informs . . . .”
[5. ]Probably “Hugues Capet,” a review of Hugues Capet, Chanson de Geste, publiée pour la première fois d’après le manuscrit unique de Paris, par M. le Marquis de la Grange (1864), in Journal des Savants (Feb., 1865), pp. 88-105. In this article, Littré is primarily concerned with linguistic changes in the French language as they can be deduced from the original of the epic through various changes made by contemporary and later copyists, and thus the article may have been of special interest to d’Eichthal at the time he was working on the evolution of the Greek language.
[6. ]Clio was a Greek paper published in Trieste.
[7. ]John Stuart Blackie.
[8. ]Victor Ambroise Lanjuinais (1802-1869), politician and economist, an old friend of d’Eichthal. See Earlier Letters, p. 38. Lanjuinais then held a seat in the Chamber of Deputies.
[9. ]See Letters 838 and 839. In the event, JSM went to four electioneering meetings: on July 5, 6, 8, and 10. See the advertisements placed by his committee in The Times, July 5, p. 10; July 8, p. 5; July 10, p. 8. JSM also met with his committee on July 3, 1865. The meeting attracted many other than those on the committee and turned into a public meeting. See The Times, July 4, 1865. See also Letter 842.
[1. ]MS at Harvard; MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also Godkin’s letter of April 1, to which this is a reply. Published in Elliot, II, 35-36, and in Rollo Ogden, Life and Letters of E. L. Godkin (2 vols., London, 1907), II, 42-44.
Edwin Lawrence Godkin (1831-1902), editor and author, who emigrated to the United States in 1856. In July, 1865, he became the first editor of the Nation; he was later editor of the New York Evening Post.
[2. ]“Aristocratic Opinions of Democracy,” No. Am. Rev., C (Jan., 1865), 194-232. A review of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (Cambridge, 1863), 3rd Am. ed., and of JSM’s review of Tocqueville in Dissertations, Brit. ed., II, 1-83, Am. ed., II, 79-161.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also Whewell’s letter of May 15 acknowledging JSM’s gift of a copy of his Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. Published in Elliot, II, 36-37.
[2. ]JSM in 1863 wrote Motley that Whewell was so strongly for the North that he would not suffer TheTimes to be in his house. See Letter 581, n. 11.
[1. ]MS at LSE. Cairnes’s reply of June 2 is in a MS copy at LSE.
[2. ]See Letters 809, 812, and 819.
[3. ]Jefferson Davis (1808-1889), president of the Confederacy, was captured May 10, 1865, and kept in prison until May 13, 1867, when he was released on bail. He was never tried.
[4. ]Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), the vice president, had become president upon the death of Abraham Lincoln.
[5. ]“Liberalism and Democracy,” Reader, V (May 20, 1865), 566-67. On a speech in the House of Commons on May 3 by Robert Lowe, attacking de Tocqueville and the advance of democracy. Robert Lowe, later 1st Viscount Sherbrooke (1811-1892), politician, MP for Kidderminster, 1852-59, for Calne, 1859-67, and for London University, 1868-80; chancellor of the exchequer, 1868-73.
[6. ]“Emancipation—Black and White” (signed T.H.H.), Reader, V (May 20, 1865), 561-62. An appeal for the emancipation and education of women.
[7. ]JSM probably means the new editor of the Reader. William Fraser Rae, rather than John Douglas Cook (1808?-1868), editor of SR, 1855-68.
[8. ]The July 7 meeting of the Political Economy Club. See Letter 761, n. 5.
[1. ]MS at UCL. MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also Chadwick’s of May 25, to which this is a reply.
[2. ]Chadwick had reported that it was the unanimous opinion that JSM should return to London for meetings with the Committee and with electors.
[3. ]Letter 765.
[4. ]Harriet’s article of 1851. See Letter 28, n. 2.
[5. ]John Robinson McLean (1813-1873), engineer, later (1868-73) MP for East Staffordshire, in 1864-65 president of the Institution of Civil Engineers, a professional organization chartered in 1828. Chadwick had reported that McLean’s only son had introduced JSM’s books to the family, and that McLean, though differing with JSM on the franchise, had subscribed £100 to his election.
[6. ]Grosvenor had written to Westerton protesting that “Mr. Mill’s party appeared to be joining with the Tories against him [Grosvenor] in the Saturday Review, and also in the Standard.”
[1. ]MS in 1943 in the possession of Mrs. K. E. Roberts.
[2. ]See Letter 782, n. 3.
[3. ]The meeting was reported in the Daily News, April 11, 1865, p. 2. There was also correspondence on the subject: a letter signed Publicola, one signed W. L. Clay in the issue of April 12, 1865, and a letter from Hare in the issue of April 18, 1865.
[4. ]See Letter 795, n. 2. For extracts from Lubbock’s speech, see The Times, April 21, 1865, p. 10. On plural voting he is reported to have said: “The plan suggested by Mr. Hare, and advocated by Mr. Mill, of giving members to minorities, was worthy of consideration; but he could not say that he was ready to support such a plan at present.”
[5. ]Thomas Hughes’s address to the electors of Lambeth on May 6, 1865, in which he endorsed Hare’s plan, was published in the Beehive, May 13, 1865, p. 6.
[6. ]“Mr. F. W. Newman on Mr. J. S. Mill” (a letter to James Beal), Daily News, May 3, 1865, p. 5. Newman’s chief reason against supporting JSM was the latter’s opposition to the Permissive Bill, which would permit local governmentsto control or prohibit the liquor traffic.
[7. ]See Letter 769.
[8. ]See Letter 761, n. 6.
[1. ]MS draft and MS copy at Northwestern. In reply to Spencer’s of May 26, MS also at Northwestern. First paragraph of JSM’s letter is in Spencer, Autobiography, II, 141, and most of the second paragraph in Duncan, I, 154-55.
[2. ]It appeared with the title “Mill versus Hamilton—The Test of Truth,” in FR, I (July, 1865), 531-50.
[3. ]See the Reader, April 22, 1865, p. 452, and April 29, 1865, p. 473.
[4. ]The article, so noted in April 22, 1865, p. 452, of the Reader, was “The Law of Patents,” ER, CXXI (April, 1865), 578-610, identified in the Wellesley Index as by T. E. Cliffe Leslie.
[5. ]See Letter 791, n. 3.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins. Published in Elliot, II, 39-40.
[2. ]See Letter 826, n. 5.
[3. ]See ibid., n. 6.
[4. ]The following passage has been cancelled in the draft at this point: “But this affair has greatly increased my influence: it has opened a communication between me & the general mind of the country: thousands will look to me now who knew nothing of me before: I am getting the ear of England, & I have already that of America. & between the two I have no anxiety but how to make the best use of my influence during such years of life & work as remain to me.”
[1. ]MS in the Osborn Collection, Yale.
[2. ]An article by Helen Taylor, Reader, V (May 13, 1865), 539-40.
[3. ]Appeared as “The Election of Representatives,” Reader, V (June 10, 1865), 651-52.
[1. ]MS not located. Excerpt published in The Life of Charles Loring Brace chiefly told in his own Letters, edited by his Daughter (New York, 1894), p. 333. Reprinted from Charles L. Brace, “A reminiscence of John Stuart Mill,” in the N. Y. Christian Union (June, 1873) and the Victoria Magazine, XXI (1873), 265-70.
[2. ]Brace reports that, on reaching England just after the close of the Civil War, he had written JSM how disgusted he was “at the sudden conversion of many Englishmen to the side of the North after the defeat of General Lee.”
[1. ]MS at Rhode Island Historical Society. MS copy at Columbia University.
[2. ]See Letter 738, n. 2.
[3. ]Book II of Hazard’s treatise is entitled “Review of Edwards on the Will” (Jonathan Edwards’ A Careful and Strict Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will which is Supposed Essential to Moral Agency, Vertue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame, first published in 1754).
[4. ]Chap. xvi, “Sir William Hamilton’s Theory of Causation.”
[5. ]JSM’s criticisms in this letter were replied to at length in Hazard’s Two Letters on Causation and Freedom in Willing, addressed to John Stuart Mill. With an Appendix on the existence of matter, and our notions of infinite space (Boston, 1869).
[6. ]President Lincoln, at the beginning of his second term, had chosen as Secretary of the Treasury Hugh McCulloch (1808-1895), formerly comptroller of the currency.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]See Letters 765 and 799.
[3. ]Chadwick’s proposed address to the electors of Westminster.
[1. ]MS draft at Yale. Partly published in Mrs. Harriet Grote, The Personal Life of George Grote (London, 1873), p. 276. Mrs. Grote also published portions (pp. 274-75) of Grote’s letter to Mill to which this is an answer.
[2. ]Vol. III, chap. xxxvii, of Grote’s Plato.
[3. ]Chap. xxxviii, “Other Companions of Sokrates,” and chap. xxxix, “Xenophon.”
[4. ]See Letter 769.
[5. ]“Grote’s Plato,” Reader, V (June 10, 1865), 644-45.
[6. ]“The whole fabric of the Hamiltonian philosophy is not only demolished, but its very stones are ground to powder.” M[ark] P[attison], “J. S. Mill on Hamilton,” Reader, V (May 20, 1865), 562-63.
[7. ]“The Record on the Westminster Election,” Sp., June 10, 1865, pp. 631-32.
[8. ]“The Religious Views of Mr Mill—Representation of Westminster,” Morning Advertiser, June 3, 1865, p. 5.
[9. ]“The Philosophy of the Conditioned, as applied by Mr. Mansel to the Limits of Religious Thought,” Hamilton, chap. vii. See Letter 847, n. 2, for the passage which aroused most criticism.
[10. ]The Record, June 2, p. 3,and June 14, 1865, p. 2.
[1. ]Copied in Letter 836 to Chadwick, MS at UCL. Published in The Times, June 24, 1865, p. 5, and in the Reasoner, XXVIII (July 1, 1865), 34.
[2. ]Letter 825.
[3. ]See the leading articles in the Record, June 19, p. 2, and June 26, 1865, p. 2. See also preceding Letter, n. 10.
[4. ]“Mr. J. S. Mill and his Supporters,” Morning Advertiser, June 28, 1865, p. 2. See also preceding Letter, n. 8.
[5. ]Connop Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David’s, in the Sp. (June 17, 1865) pp. 667-68. For the sentence in question, see Letter 847, n. 2.
[6. ]“Mr. J. S. Mill on Sir William Hamilton” (the first of a three-part review), Sp., May 27, 1865, pp. 584-85.
[7. ]For JSM’s opinion of Mansel’s theology, see Hamilton, chap. v.
[1. ]Copied in letter to Chadwick of June 22, 1865 (Letter 836), MS at UCL.
[2. ]But see Letters 837 and 838.
[3. ]At the meeting of the Political Economy Club, for which JSM had proposed the question. See Letter 761, n. 5.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]See 834, n. 3, and n. 4.
[3. ]Sir John Villiers Shelley (1808-1867), MP for Westminster, 1852-65.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]For JSM’s meetings with his committee and the electors, see Letters 821, n. 9, 838, and 839.
[1. ]MS at NYP. Envelope addressed: Angleterre / Charles Westerton Esq., / 27, St. George’s Place / Hyde Park Corner / London. Postmark: AVIGNON / 26 JUIN 1865.
[1. ]MS in the possession of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
[1. ]MS in 1944 in the possession of Mrs. Hugh Gemmel of East London. Envelope addressed: Miss Harriet Mill / 2 Langton Grove / Upper Sydenham / S.E. Endorsed in another hand: “On signing of last Legal Document for Sale of Lund in July 1865.”
Harriet I. Mill was the executor and beneficiary of the estate of James Bentham Mill, included in which was the farm named Lund, in the island of Unst, where he had settled after his retirement from the East India Co. See Letter 542.
[2. ]John Paterson, of the firm of Dymock and Paterson, solicitors-at-law, 56 George St., Edinburgh.
[1. ]MS in the Hollander Collection, University of Illinois.
Edwin (later Sir Edwin) Arnold (1832-1904), poet and journalist; from 1861 a leader writer on the Daily Telegraph.
[2. ]See next Letter, n. 2.
[3. ]See Letters 833, n. 8, and 834, n. 4.
[4. ]Possibly JSM’s Malthusian instead of religious views. On July 8, at a meeting in the Pimlico Rooms, questions on population were put to JSM. The Standard, on July 10, published a strong attack on him for his “dangerous and disgusting” theories on population and marriage. The attack was reprinted as “Mr. J. S. Mill on Marriage,” in Public Opinion, July 15, 1865, pp. 55-56.
[5. ]See Letter 834, n. 5 and n. 6.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]For JSM to meet the electors of Westminster, at St. James’s Hall, Wednesday, July 5, at 8 p.m. See The Times, July 6, p. 9.
[3. ]The committee for R. W. Grosvenor, the other Liberal candidate, and JSM’s committee agreed to work together against W.H. Smith, the Tory candidate. The coalition was announced in The Times, July 10, p. 5.
[4. ]On Monday, July 3, 1865, at St. James’s Hall, for JSM to meet with his committee. The gathering was far larger and more public than he had anticipated. In his speech, he paid tribute to the radicalism learned from his father. See The Times, July 4, 1865, p. 14.
[5. ]Daily News, July 6, 1865, p. 2; Daily Telegraph, July 6, 1865, p. 3.
[6. ]The Times, July 6, 1865, p. 9. But The Times, July 10, 1865, p. 5, summarized JSM’s remarks, made at the meeting of July 8, on the costs of election and the consequent restriction of candidates to the wealthy.
[7. ]Tuesday, July 11, was nomination day; Wednesday, July 12, election day. Grosvenor and JSM were elected with votes of 4,534 and 4,525 respectively; W. H. Smith with 3,824 votes was defeated. For a young American’s contemporary account of JSM’s July 10 meeting at St. Martin’s Hall, see Moses Coit Tyler, “John Stuart Mill as a Stump Speaker,” in Glimpses of England (New York and London, 1898), pp. 13-23, reprinted from the Independent, vol. XVII (Aug. 17, 1865), 1.
[1. ]MS not located. Published in The Times, July 17, 1865, p. 7. W. L. Harvey Esq. of 47, Bessborough Gardens, is named as a member of JSM’s committee, the list of which takes up two columns of The Times, May 27, 1865, p. 5.
[2. ]In his letter of transmittal to The Times, Harvey explained that JSM had been asked the following: “Would the demand for the ballot by a very large number of tradesmen and employés, who are, or are duly qualified to be, on the electoral register, on the ground they object to being canvassed by any person or party whatever, and many of the latter of whom, as is well known, keep their assessed taxes unpaid until after the 20th of July to avoid being on the register and so escape being canvassed, justify exceptional legislation in the form of the ballot being permitted in boroughs in conjunction with open voting, each elector having the option of using which of the two modes he preferred?”
[1. ]MS not located. Excerpt published in the Co-operator, VI (Aug. 1, 1865), 92.
[2. ]Matthew Davenport Hill (1792-1872), reformer of the criminal law; MP for Hull, 1832-34; recorder of Birmingham, 1839-65; commissioner in bankruptcy for Bristol, 1851-69; active in the NAPSS and the co-operative movement. In a letter of May 21, 1865 (published in the Co-operator, June 15, 1865, p. 37), to Henry Pitman, Hill expressed his disagreement with the position of the Wolverhampton Plate Lock Makers’ Co-operative. See also the Co-operator, Aug. 15, 1865, p. 99 and Letters 776 and 781.
[3. ]The report in the Birmingham Gazette has not been located, but it was probably the letter headed “The Co-operative Plate-Lock Makers,” reprinted in the Beehive, April 22, 1865, p. 5, and in abridged form in the Co-operator, June 15, 1865, pp. 36-37.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
[2. ]Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907), American Unitarian minister and man of letters, from Feb., 1864, pastor of South Place Chapel, London. His lodgings were in the same house as those of Cairnes, Notting Hill Square, and through Cairnes Conway met JSM. See Mary Elizabeth Burtis, Moncure Conway (New Brunswick, N.J., 1952).
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[2. ]Helen Taylor in a letter to Chadwick of July 19, 1865, MS at UCL, reported that JSM had agreed to sit for a photograph but had not yet made an appointment.
[1. ]MS not located. Excerpt published in Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward and the Catholic Revival, p. 281, as part of JSM’s reply to Ward’s letter of July 17, 1865, pp. 279-81. Passage in brackets is Wilfrid Ward’s summary.
[2. ]Wilfrid Ward (pp. 280-81) cites the passage from JSM’s Hamilton chap. vii (in which he attacks the views of Hamilton’s disciple, Henry Mansel, on the limits of religious thought): “If, instead of the ‘glad tidings’ that there exists a Being in whom all the excellences which the highest human mind can conceive, exist in a degree inconceivable to us, I am informed that the world is ruled by a being whose attributes are infinite, but what they are we cannot learn, nor what are the principles of his government, except that ‘the highest human morality which we are capable of conceiving’ does not sanction them; convince me of it, and I will bear my fate as I may. But when I am told that I must believe this, and at the same time call this being by the names which express and affirm the highest human morality, I say in plain terms that I will not. Whatever power such a being may have over me, there is one thing which he shall not do: he shall not compel me to worship him. I will call no being good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go” (pp. 102-103).
[3. ]W. G. Ward, On Nature and Grace. A Theological Treatise (London, 1860), which JSM cited with praise in his Hamilton, pp. 174-75n. See also Letter 423.
[4. ]Ward had written in his letter of July 17, 1865: “That I am not simply a ‘bigot’, in the ordinary sense, I persuade myself, were it only from my great interest in everything you [JSM] write. I may take the opportunity of saying how heartily I agree with the drift of that passage about God which has so excited the bitterness of many Christians.” (See n. 2 above.)
[5. ]Ward had asked for help from JSM in preparing an essay on Galileo, which appeared with the title “Doctrinal Decrees of a Pontifical Congregation.—The Case of Galileo,” in Dublin Review, n.s. V (Oct., 1865), 376-425. Ward quotes from JSM’s Hamilton in a footnote on p. 397.
[1. ]MS at LSE.
[2. ]On his election to Parliament.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins. Published in Elliot, II, 41. In reply to Franks’s letter of July 14, also at Johns Hopkins. He has not been identified.
[2. ]Franks had raised the question apropos of JSM’s statement in On Liberty (chap. ii): “No reasonable person can doubt that Christianity might have been extirpated in the Roman Empire.”
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also Lyttelton’s letter of July 8 to which this is a reply. Published in Elliot, II, 40-41.
William Henry Lyttelton (1820-1884), rector of Hagley, Worcester, later canon of Gloucester.
[2. ]The Testimony of Scripture to the Authority of Conscience and of Reason, No. 12 in the series Tracts for Priests and People, 14 Nos. plus Supplement (Cambridge and London, 1861-62).
[3. ]In his Bampton Lectures of 1858. See Letter 815. Lyttelton charged Mansel with advocating “complete philosophical scepticism. . . . If human morality and Divine are different in kind, we had better leave off speaking of the Divine attributes at all. If ‘just,’ ‘merciful,’ ‘true,’ as predicated of God, do not mean what they do when predicated of men, they are evidently utterly unmeaning to us.”
[4. ]Including F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley.
[5. ]See Letter 833.
[6. ]Probably one of several letters in an exchange between Lyttelton and the Rev. S. C. Malan, published in the Guardian from April to June, 1865. Lyttelton’s letters appeared on April 19, pp. 387-88; May 10, p. 459; June 7, p. 579; and June 28, p. 659.
The controversy had arisen over a sermon preached by Frederick Temple (1821-1902), then headmaster of Rugby, later Archbishop of Canterbury, as the fifth of the Lenten Sermons in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall. As reported in the Guardian, April 5, 1865, Temple had said that attempts to reconcile the account of the Creation in Genesis with the discoveries of modern science were doomed to failure. “It was clear . . . that the first chapter of Genesis was not the same thing they learned from geology. . . . They had, in all probability, in that account of creation a poem, just as the whole of the Apocalypse was a poem.” Lyttelton defended Temple’s position.
[1. ]MS at Brit. Mus.
[2. ]Gladstone was elected for South Lancashire on July 20, after having lost for the University of Oxford on July 18, for which he had been MP since 1847. He was defeated by non-resident electors, many of them disturbed by his attitude towards the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, which he had proposed. See Philip Magnus, Gladstone (London, 1954), pp. 165-77.
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[1. ]MS at Canberra.
[2. ]See Letter 801.
[3. ]See Letters 746 and 751.
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[1. ]MS at Canberra.
[2. ]See Letter 769, n. 3.
[3. ]Chapman did secure a reviewer; “Mr. Grote’s Plato,” WR, n.s. XXVIII (Oct., 1865), 459-82.
[4. ]Bain reviewed it in Macmillan’s: “Grote’s Plato: The Negative or Search Dialogues,” XII (July, 1865), 193-208, and “Grote’s Plato: the Affirmative, or Exposition, Dialogues,” XII (Oct., 1865), 457-72.
[1. ]MS copy (possibly incomplete) at UCL.
[2. ]The 6th, 1865. For the correction JSM made, see Letter 861, n. 3.
[1. ]MS at Johns Hopkins. Envelope addressed: Miss Helen Taylor / Blackheath Park / Kent / S. E. Postmark: PENZANCE / E AU 2 / 65.
[2. ]No letter to W. T. Thornton at this time appears to have survived.
[3. ]No doubt from W. H. Smith, the defeated Tory candidate for Westminster.
[4. ]See Letter 469, n. 2.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins. Published in Elliot, II, 42. In reply to Congreve’s of Aug. 3, 1865, MS also at Johns Hopkins.
Congreve had been converted to positivism in 1848, had resigned his fellowship at Oriel in 1855, and had established a positivist community that year.
[2. ]Congreve’s letter of Aug. 3, 1865, was one of courteously worded complaint about JSM’s treatment of Comte and his ideas in the two essays on Comte, published earlier this year. Congreve quoted as an example the following sentence: “We cannot go on any longer with this trash.” The sentence is in “Later Speculations of Auguste Comte,” WR, n.s. XXVIII (July, 1865) p. 39. When reprinted in Auguste Comte and Positivism, the sentence was changed to, “We cannot go on any longer with this.” (Collected Works, X, 365.)
[1. ]MS in the possession of Co-operative Union Ltd., Holyoake House, Manchester.
[2. ]Joseph, later Sir Joseph, Cowen (1800-1873), a mine owner and firebrick and clay retort manufacturer; MP for Newcastle, 1865-73.
[3. ]Cowen, alarmed at newspaper attacks on Holyoake’s radicalism and atheism, did not appoint him his private secretary as he had originally planned. See Joseph McCabe, Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake (2 vols., London, 1908), II, 19-20.
[4. ]A bill to permit all persons to make affirmations “where there is inability to take an oath from defect or want of religious knowledge or belief.” If JSM was referring to Trelawny’s Affirmations (Scotland) Bill, it had finally been adopted the previous March and had received Royal Assent (see The Times, April 8, 1865, p. 5). What JSM may well have had in mind, however, was the continuing struggle to modify the Parliamentary Oath, which was accomplished in the 1866 session. Not until 1888, in the famous Bradlaugh case, was the Oath modified so as to permit an atheist to take it. See W. L. Arnstein, The Bradlaugh Case (Oxford, 1965), pp. 66-67, 317-18.
[5. ]Sir John Salusbury Trelawny, 9th baronet (1816-1885), MP for Tavistock, 1843-52, 1857-65, and for East Cornwall, 1868-74. Sir John had been the original sponsor of the Affirmations Bill. He did not run for Parliament in 1865.
[1. ]MS at the Imperial College of Science, London. MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also Huxley’s letter of Aug. 1, to which this is a reply.
[2. ]A society founded in response to a prize offered at the Paris Universal Exposition for the best essay on the advantages of educating children of different nationalities together. Richard Cobden was the first chairman. The Society’s most important work was the establishment of schools in Paris, Godesberg, and London. The one in London, International College, opened in 1866 and lasted until 1889. Its curriculum stressed the study of science and modern languages, and its student body included French, Germans, Spaniards, Indians, and North and South Americans. The schools on the Continent, however, failed because of the Franco-Prussian war. The plan was outlined in “International Education,” the Reader, V (June 17, 1865), 678-79. For further details, see Cyril Bibby, T. H. Huxley (New York, 1959), pp. 168-72.
[3. ]For James Lorimer’s views on education, see G. E. Davie, The Democratic Intellect (Edinburgh, 1961), pp. 47-56.
[4. ]In his letter of Aug. 1, Huxley had said, “The object of its founders may be concisely stated to be to create a system of education in which modern literature and science on the one hand, and theology, on the other, shall occupy their proper places.”
[1. ]MS and MS copy at UCL.
[2. ]Of these letters only De Morgan’s of Aug. 3, 1865 (MS copy at UCL) appears to have survived.
[3. ]Logic (8th ed., 1872), II, 135-36 (III, xxiii, 6, para. 4).
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[2. ]Plummer’s article, “Remarkable Men: Members of the New Parliament No. I. John Stuart Mill,” Cassell’s Illustrated Family Paper, Sept. 16, 1865, pp. 87-88. A pen and ink sketch accompanied the article.
[1. ]MS draft and MS copy at Northwestern. Published in Duncan, I, 156-58.
[2. ]See Letter 827, n. 2.
[3. ]See Spencer’s article, pp. 534-35.
[4. ]See ibid., p. 535, and Hamilton, p. 150.
[5. ]See Spencer, pp. 539-40.
[6. ]Spencer, p. 550.
[7. ]“Mr. Spencer on Mr. Mill,” SR, XX (Aug. 12, 1865), 199-201, attributed to James Fitzjames Stephen by Merle M. Bevington in his The Saturday Review, 1855-1868 (New York, 1941), p. 379.
[1. ]MS in the possession of Mr. Peter M. Jackson.
Edward Wilson (1813-1878), journalist and philanthropist, publisher of the Melbourne Argus, 1847-64.
[2. ]Possibly Enquiry into the Principles of Representation: a reprint of several letters and leading articles from the Argus newspaper. With an introduction by E. Wilson (Melbourne, 1857). Wilson later published “Principles of Representation,” FR, IV (April 1, 1866), 421-36; reprinted as a pamphlet, London, 1866.
[1. ]MS in 1965 in the possession of Joseph H. Schaffner of New York.
[2. ]John Jacob Edwin Mayall (1810-1901), an American photographer in London, highly successful in making and selling daguerreotypes.
[3. ]Probably the London Stereoscopic Company, founded in 1858, and specializing in stereoscopic slides.
[1. ]MS at Imperial College of Science, London. MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as are also Huxley’s letter of Aug. 14, to which this is a reply, and Huxley’s rejoinder of Aug. 20. Published in Elliot, II, 43-44.
[2. ]See Letter 860.
[3. ]George Birkbeck (1776-1841), physician and philanthropist, contributed to the founding and endowing of Mechanics’ Institutions in London and Glasgow to provide instruction in science for working men. The name of the London establishment was later changed to the Birkbeck Institution (or College).
[4. ]A school opened in 1830, attendant upon the founding of the London University in 1828. It did not teach theology.
[5. ]See Letter 860.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also Kinnear’s letter of July 7, to which this is a reply. Published, except for first two paragraphs, in Elliot, II, 44-45.
John Boyd Kinnear (1828-1920), Scottish advocate and English barrister, MP for East Fife, 1885-86. During the 1860’s he worked as a leader writer on various London papers, including the Daily News, the Morning Star, and the Pall Mall Gazette.
[2. ]Principles of Reform: Political and Legal (London, 1865).
[3. ]Ibid., chap. ii, “Foreign Policy and Non-Intervention.”
[4. ]Ibid., chap. i, “The Franchise on the Basis of Education.”
[1. ]MS at LSE. The address has been cut off. In reply to Cairnes’s of Aug. 20, MS copy also at LSE.
[2. ]“Irish Education,” Economist, Aug. 19, 1865, pp. 1000-1002. The occasion for the letter was an attack upon the university system of Ireland by Daniel O’Donoghue, MP for Tipperary, 1857-65, for Tralee, 1865-85. “The O’Donoghue,” as he was known, in effect charged the system with being discriminatory against Roman Catholics. For the attack and the ensuing debate in Parliament, see Hansard, CLXXX, cols. 541-55.
[3. ]Queen’s University was established in 1850 as the degree-granting institution for the Queen’s Colleges, Belfast, Cork, and Galway, established in 1845 by the administration of Sir Robert Peel. For details, see T. W. Moody and J. C. Becket, Queen’s Belfast (2 vols., London, 1959).
[4. ]That is, mixed religiously, with both Roman Catholic and Protestant students.
[5. ]To permit students to take degrees from Queen’s University through examination only rather than through residence at one of the Queen’s colleges and through examination. The concession was granted by the home secretary, Sir George Grey, in response to The O’Donoghue’s attack. See n. 2 above.
[1. ]MS at Brit. Mus.
[2. ]The 6th ed., 1865.
[3. ]See Letter 769, n. 3.
[4. ]John Grote (1813-1866), younger brother of George Grote, in 1855 succeeded William Whewell as Knightbridge Professor of moral philosophy at Cambridge. The book referred to was his Exploratio Philosophica: Rough Notes on Modern Intellectual Science (Cambridge, 1865).
[5. ]See Logic, 6th ed. (1865), Book I, chap. iii, sec. 8, p. 67, n.
[6. ]Henry Reeve, editor of ER.
[7. ]Leonidas Sgouta or Sgoutas (1820-1878), Greek jurist, founder in 1846 of the law journal Themis, to which he contributed on many subjects. None of his correspondence with JSM has been located.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]Sic. Robert Lowe in 1859 became vice-president of the Council of Education and was placed in charge of the distribution of public grants to the schools of the kingdom. He was responsible for the “Revised Code” of 1862 and a system of “payment by results” by the administration of examinations in the three R’s. In 1864 Lowe was accused of altering the reports of school inspectors (of whom Matthew Arnold was the best known) to support his own views on education. Lowe was censured in the House of Commons and resigned his office on April 18, 1864 (see Hansard, CLXXIV, cols. 897 ff. and 1203 ff.). In the spring of 1865 a select committee was appointed to investigate the matter and a report was issued on June 19, 1865 (see Parl. Papers, 1865, Reports of Committees, vol. VI). This is probably the “official correspondence” to which JSM is referring.
[3. ]Probably a draft of an address on the dangers and difficulties for lives and property in the merchant marine. See “Address on Economy and Trade,” NAPSS, Transactions, 1865, pp. 77-101.
[4. ]Hugh Fortescue, 3rd Earl, Viscount Ebrington, Public Schools for the Middle Classes (London, 1864).
[1. ]MS at Yale. Published in William M. Dickson, Absolute Equality before the Law, the Only Basis of Reconstruction. An Address, delivered at Oberlin, Ohio, October 3, 1865, with an Appendix, containing John Stuart Mill’s Letter on Reconstruction, and the Correspondence Therewith Connected (Cincinnati, 1865), pp. 21-24. Also published in the Liberator (Oct. 6, 1865), p. 157, in various other newspapers, and in Littell’s Living Age, LXXXVII (Oct. 7, 1865), 46-48, and Yale University Library Gazette, XXX (April, 1956), 163-66.
William Martin Dickson (1827-1889), a judge of Cincinnati, Ohio, and a Unionist politician.
[2. ]Jacob Dolson Cox (1828-1900), major-general in the Union army, governor of Ohio, 1866-68. In response to a question on Negro suffrage, Cox, then starting his campaign for governor, had written on July 20, 1865, that he favoured separating Negroes from whites by establishing a federal dependency in the south where the Negroes would live and govern themselves. See George H. Porter, Ohio Politics during the Civil War Period (New York, 1911), pp. 210-12.
[3. ]Dickson’s letter, published in the Cincinnati Commercial, Aug. 11, 1865. See Porter, Ohio Politics, p. 212.
[1. ]MS at LSE. In reply to Cairnes’s of Aug. 28, MS copy also at LSE.
[2. ]In his letter of Aug. 28, 1865, Cairnes doubted whether JSM’s suggestion (in Letter 868) not to permit anyone to serve on the Senate of Queen’s University who did not believe in the mixed educational system was a feasible solution to the Irish university problem. Cairnes further pointed out that if entirely Roman Catholic institutions were placed under Queen’s University, that too would change the mixed system.
[3. ]A degree-granting institution, which would have the advantage of not confusing the issue between mixed and denominational colleges.
[4. ]The Irish Roman Catholic prelates wished to have the Catholic University placed on a footing of equality with the Queen’s colleges and endowed by the government.
[5. ]“The die is cast.”
[1. ]MS in the Osborn Collection, Yale. Mounted on the fly-leaf of Howell’s copy of JSM’s Pol. Econ. (6th ed., 1865).
George Howell (1833-1910), originally a bricklayer, became an influential labour leader and writer on workers’ causes. Secretary of the Reform League, 1864-67; member of the council of the International Workingmen’s Assoc., 1865; for years a successful parliamentary lobbyist; MP for Bethnal Green, 1885-95.
[2. ]These probably included an early article by Howell on strikes, but it has not been identified.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also Kinnear’s letter of Sept. 11 to which this is a reply. Published, except for last paragraph, in Elliot, II, 45-46.
[2. ]In his letter of Sept. 11, Kinnear argued for his beliefs on race, the representation of minorities, and classes in England. See also Letter 867.
[3. ]Since 1846.
[4. ]1 Corinthians, 10:15.
[5. ]See Letter 867, n. 2.
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[2. ]Edward Walford (1823-1897), bibliographer, antiquarian, subeditor and editor of Once a Week from 1859 to 1865, and of the Gentleman’s Magazine, 1866-68.
[1. ]MS in the Osborn Collection, Yale.
[2. ]Of English Language and Literature, University College, London, in succession to David Masson, who held the chair from 1852 to 1865. See Letter 897, n. 2.
[3. ]The Reader had been purchased in Aug., 1865, by Thomas Bendyshe (1827-1886), Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and barrister, who ran it until Jan., 1867, when it was suspended. Bendyshe had been expelled from the Conservative Club for voting for JSM in July, 1865.
[1. ]MS not located. From facsimile of MS reproduced in Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences (2 vols., Boston and New York, 1904), II, 16.
[2. ]Probably copies of speeches printed in numbers of the Liberator or the National Anti-Slavery Standard rather than the 1863 collected edition of Phillips’s speeches, which does not contain speeches referred to in this letter. Four of these have been located: one of Oct. 20, 1864, on “The Presidential Election,” at the Tremont Temple, Boston, published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Nov. 5, 1864; two on Jan. 26, 1865, at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, published in the Liberator, Feb. 10 and 17, 1865; one on May 9, 1865, at the 32nd anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society at the Church of the Puritans in New York City, published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard of May 13 and in the Liberator of May 19. Major emphasis in all four speeches was upon advocating the immediate extension of the suffrage to the emancipated slaves as well as to poor whites.
[3. ]In his speech of May 9 Phillips had said: “In Revolutionary times, every man in this country, black and white, who was born free, except in South Carolina, voted—with the limitation, in some of the States, of a property qualification. Our fathers were too wise to require book learning as a preliminary condition of the ballot. I am surprised, and marvel greatly, that so masterly a mind as Stuart Mill should proclaim that in his theory a man must read before he votes. Does he not remember that for four men out of five, education does not come from books? Does he suppose there was no education in the world before printing was invented? . . . The mass of men have their faculties educated by work, not by reading. . . .”
[4. ]As early as Oct., 1851, at a convention at Worcester, Mass., Phillips had presented resolutions on women’s rights in part framed from Mrs. Mill’s WR article, “Enfranchisement of Women.” See “Woman’s Rights,” in Phillips’s Speeches, Lectures, and Letters (Boston, 1863), pp. 11-34.
In his speech of May 9, 1865, Phillips had advocated a constitutional amendment that “ ‘No state shall ever make any distinctions in civil privileges among those born on her soil . . . on account of race, color, or condition.’ I hope in time to be as bold as Stuart Mill, and add to that last clause ‘sex’. But this hour belongs to the Negro.”
[5. ]The Liberator.
[1. ]MS at Bodleian; the bracketed portions indicate defects in the MS.
[2. ]One of these is presumably De Morgan’s letter of Sept. 28, 1865, which survives in a MS copy at UCL.
[3. ]See Letter 861. JSM inserted a passage in the 6th ed. (1865) of the Logic as a result of this correspondence, but later transferred the passage, in altered and reconsidered form, to a footnote. See 8th ed. (1872), II, 135-37.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as are also Wakeman’s letter of Sept. 29 and rejoinders of Nov. 17 and 23. Published in Elliot, II, 46-48.
Maurice Wakeman (1801-1870), earlier in the flour business in Boston, at this time resident in Southport, Conn.
[2. ]Wakeman did not remain good-tempered towards JSM. The following quotation from Wakeman’s letter of Nov. 23, 1865, is typical of his attitude towards all Englishmen and of the tone of all his letters: “I have just got through reading your essay on liberty, or the right of thought and free discussion. You certainly have indulged this right with a vengeance. You appear to be a man of education, and some reading, yet lack the great essentials of manhood, namely sound morals, common sense, and honesty.”
[1. ]MS at Arsenal. Published in part in D’Eichthal Corresp., pp. 205-206, and in Cosmopolis, p. 783.
[2. ]Etude sur les origines bouddhiques de la civilisation américaine (Paris, 1865).
[3. ]The Ethnological Society, founded in 1843, met several times a year to listen to papers. Its president at this time was John Crawfurd (1783-1868), orientalist, best known for his History of the Indian Archipelago (3 vols., London, 1820).
[4. ]See Letter 777.
[1. ]MS draft and MS copy at Northwestern. Published in Duncan, I, 160-61. In reply to Spencer’s of Oct. 11 (MS at Northwestern), also published in Duncan, I, 158-60.
[2. ]For JSM’s disagreements with Spencer, see JSM’s Logic, Book II, chap. vii. For Spencer’s side, see “Mill versus Hamilton - the Test of Truth,” FR, I (July 15, 1865), 531-50. See also Letter 863.
[3. ]Logic, Book II, chap. vii, sec. 3. JSM introduced a footnote and a few minor changes in this passage in the 7th ed. See 8th ed., I, 312.
[1. ]MS and MS copy at NLI.
[1. ]MS not located. Excerpt quoted in 1962 catalogue of Collectors’ Corner, The Folio Society, 6, Stratford Place, London, W.1.
John Macrae Moir (1827-1881), journalist; editor, Illustrated Times, London; secretary of the Scottish Corporation, 1862-81.
[2. ]David Masson had been appointed successor to William Edmonstoune Aytoun (1813-1865) as professor of rhetoric and English literature.
[1. ]MS at Bibliothèque Nationale.
[2. ]To Christine Graff, a German.
[1. ]MS not located. Excerpt published in John, Viscount Morley, Recollections (2 vols., New York, 1917), I, 52.
John Morley, later Viscount Morley of Blackburn (1838-1923), author and statesman. See also Letter 1155.
[2. ]Morley’s article, “New Ideas,” SR, XX (Oct. 21, 1865), 508-509. From this point a close friendship developed between JSM and Morley.
[1. ]MS not located. Excerpt quoted in Leroy H. Fischer, Lincoln’s Gadfly, Adam Gurowski (Norman, Okla., 1964), pp. 188-89, from a letter by Gurowski to Horatio Woodman of April 9, 1866, published in Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, LVI (Jan., 1923), pp. 238-39. According to Fischer, the passage was also quoted in a letter to Gerrit Smith, Nov. 16, 1865 (MS in Archives and Museum, Polish Roman Catholic Union of America). Gurowski wrote Woodman: “Before I published this third volume [of his Diary] I asked advise [sic] of John Stuart Mill. He is impartial and disinterested. Herewith an extract from his letter, for such use as you will find proper. I asked the opinion of Mill, because I was puzzled by the abuse showered upon me [because of the first two volumes of his published Diary] . . . (Mill is my friend of more than thirty-five years standing and I asked his advice as that of a physician for a disease.)” The Diary contains a number of highly laudatory comments on JSM, including this one, under the date of Feb. 8, 1864: “I wish every American would read and learn J. S. Mill’s book on Liberty, in the same way as most of them learn the Scriptures. Many, very many verses of Mill’s gospel are more full of life than some of the worshipped Hebrew hallucinations” (Diary, III, p. 96).
Count Adam Gurowski (1805-1866), Polish author and agitator, in exile from his native country. JSM had become acquainted with him in Paris in the 1830’s, possibly through Mazzini, Godefroi Cavaignac, or mutual Saint-Simonian friends. In 1849 Gurowski emigrated to the United States, where he engaged chiefly in journalism.
[2. ]In England. The first two volumes of Gurowski’s Diary had been published in America (vol. I, Boston, 1862; vol. II, New York, 1864). Gurowski had sent JSM a proof copy of vol. III before publication in Washington, 1866. The Diary concerns chiefly the Washington political scene during the Civil War, and contains many severely critical comments on Lincoln and his secretary of state, William Seward. JSM declined either to edit an English edition or to write an introduction to it (see next Letter), and no English edition appears to have been published.
[1. ]MS at Pierpont Morgan Library.
[2. ]See preceding Letter.
[3. ]Trübner was publishing JSM’s articles on Comte in book form.
[4. ]Gustave Germer Baillière (1837-1884), French publisher.
[5. ]JSM’s book on Comte was eventually translated as Comte und der Positivismus by Elise Gomperz, and published in Theodor Gomperz’s edition of JSM’s Gesammelte Werke (12 vols., Leipzig, 1869-80), vol. IX.
[6. ]John Stephens Storr (1829-1895), son of a proprietor of the Great Metropolitan Auction Mart, at 26 King St., Covent Garden, known as the firm of Debenham, Storr and Sons. Storr had been active in the campaign to elect JSM as MP, and had served as treasurer of his election fund.
[7. ]William Brewer (d. 1881), prominent physician and medical writer; MP for Colchester, 1868-74.
[1. ]MS at Yale, as is Grote’s answer of Nov. 20, 1865.
[2. ]In Plato, and the other Companions of Sokrates, vol. I, chap. vii, p. 281, n.a., Grote refers to the opinions of Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher (1768-1834) and Friedrich Ueberweg (1826-1871).
[3. ]Xenophon, Socrates’ Defence, 2-19.
[4. ]Plato, Phaedo, 59 B.
[5. ]Socrates’ Defence, 20-23.
[6. ]Xenophon, Socrates’ Defence, 26; Plato, Apology, 41. Palamedes, one of the heroes who besieged Troy.
[7. ]A “difficulty” for which I greatly need “someone to provide a solution.”
[8. ]See Letter 769, n. 3.
[9. ]See Letter 855.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins. In envelope labelled in JSM’s hand: W. O. Adams / (schoolboy). Published in Elliot, II, 48. In reply to Adams’s undated letter, MS also at Johns Hopkins.
Adams has not been identified.
[2. ]Adams had written in his letter: “ ‘Is flogging good or bad for boys?’
“A few lines, written in your usual clear, lucid manner, would form the staple of an essay, on the above subject, which I am about to compose, in competition for a Prize offered by the Publisher of the ‘Boys’ Own Magazine.’ ”
[1. ]MS at Rhode Island Historical Society, as is also MS copy of Hazard’s of July 1. MS copy at Columbia.
[2. ]The so-called Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica had broken out on Oct. 11; Governor Edward John Eyre (1815-1901) had proclaimed martial law on Oct. 13. The first announcement of the revolt did not appear in The Times until Nov. 3, and the news of the trial and the execution on Oct. 23 of the Negro leader, George William Gordon, had not yet reached London on the day of this letter. For an account of JSM’s activities in this controversy over Eyre’s conduct of his office, see Bernard Semmel, The Governor Eyre Controversy (London, 1962); Am. ed., Jamaican Blood and Victorian Conscience: The Governor Eyre Controversy (Boston, 1963).
[3. ]George Luther Stearns (1809-1867), radical abolitionist, a supporter of John Brown, and a recruiter of Negro regiments during the Civil War. On Oct. 24 he published an account of a September interview with President Andrew Johnson, which indicated a favourable attitude toward Negro suffrage.
[1. ]MS at Harvard. Published in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, L (1916-17), 11-12.
Charles Eliot Norton (1827-1908), American scholar and man of letters; ed. with James Russell Lowell of the No. Am. Rev., 1864-68; professor of history of the arts, Harvard, 1874-98; ed. of Carlyle letters.
[2. ]“American Political Ideas,” No. Am. Rev., CI (Oct., 1865), 550-66.
[1. ]MS at Yale. In reply to Grote’s letter of Nov. 20, also at Yale.
[2. ]See Letter 887.
[3. ]This sentence summarizes Grote’s letter of Nov. 20, 1865. For JSM’s treatment of Socrates as described by Xenophon, see “Grote’s Plato,” ER, CXXIII (April, 1866), 319-20.
[4. ]“John Stuart Mill on the Philosophy of Sir Wm. Hamilton,” WR, n.s. XXIX (Jan., 1866), 1-39.
[5. ]On pp. 4-5 of the review Grote pays tribute to James Mill. The paragraph begins as follows: “Mr. John Stuart Mill has not been the first to bestow honour on the surname which he bears. His father, Mr. James Mill, had already ennobled the name. An ampler title to distinction in history and philosophy can seldom be produced than that which Mr. James Mill left behind him.”
[6. ]Autobiography, published posthumously in 1873, edited by Helen Taylor.
[1. ]MS at Melbourne.
[2. ]The Working Man, A weekly record of social and industrial progress, published from Jan. 6, 1866, through Dec. 22, 1866.
[3. ]See Letter 874.
[1. ]MS in St. Andrews University Library. Envelope addressed: Charles K. Watt Esq. / St Mary’s College / St Andrews / N.B. Published by Dr. Anna J. Mill in “The First Ornamental Rector at St Andrews University,” Scottish Historical Review, XLIII (Oct., 1964), 135-36.
Charles Kinnear Watt, a theological student at St. Andrews, and chairman of the committee for the election of JSM as rector of St. Andrews. JSM had been elected on Nov. 23 by 95 votes against 48 for George William Fox Kinnaird, 9th Baron Kinnaird (1807-1878).
[2. ]On Feb. 1, 1866.
[3. ]He subsequently accepted. See Letter 899.
[1. ]MS at Bibliothèque Nationale.
[2. ]“Lettre de Londres,” Le Temps, Nov. 30, 1865, p. 1. An earlier “Lettre” had appeared on Nov. 24, p. 2.
[3. ]Jean Baptiste Carrier (1756-1794), French Revolutionist and Terrorist, notorious for the Noyades of Nantes, the drowning of large numbers of prisoners.
[4. ]Jean Marie Collot (1749-1796), French Revolutionist, known especially for his savage administration of the Terror in Lyons in 1793.
[5. ]The squadron maintained there to block the slave trade.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also MacCormac’s letter of Nov. 29 to which this is a reply. Published in Elliot, II, 48-49.
Henry MacCormac (1800-1886), visiting physician to the Belfast District Lunatic Asylum, from 1832 head of the Cholera Hospital at Belfast, and author of works on medical and other topics.
[2. ]In his letter of Nov. 29, MacCormac had objected to the following statement as being inconsistent with JSM’s theories: “The laws which, in many countries on the Continent, forbid marriage unless the parties can show that they have the means of supporting a family, do not exceed the legitimate powers of the state: and whether such laws be expedient or not (a question mainly dependent on local circumstances and feelings), they are not objectionable as violations of liberty.” On Liberty (London, 1859), p. 194 (chap. v).
[1. ]MS not located. Published in The Times, Dec. 20, 1865, p. 6, and in the Journal of Social Science, I (1866), 207.
[2. ]For the motion presented by Beal, see “Metropolitan Government,” The Times, Dec. 5, 1865, p. 7.
[3. ]Aided by Beal, JSM on May 21, 1867, presented to the Commons a measure to establish municipal corporations in the several districts of London. See Letters 1342, n. 4 and 1388, n. 2.
[1. ]MS in the Osborn Collection, Yale.
[2. ]Henry Morley (1822-1894), author, professor of English literature at University College, London, 1865-89. See also Letter 875.
[3. ]David and Charles Livingstone, Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its tributaries, and of the discovery of Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa, 1858-1864 (London, 1865).
[4. ]See Letter 889, n. 2.
[1. ]MS draft at Johns Hopkins, as is also White’s letter of Nov. 3 to which this is a reply. Published in part in Elliot, II, 49-50.
Horace White (1834-1916), journalist; editor of the Chicago Tribune, 1864-74; later, editor of the New York Evening Post.
[2. ]In his letter of Nov. 3, 1865, White had said, “I therefore beg leave to propose that you write a letter or essay suitable for the columns of a daily newspaper, to explain in the simplest manner how it is that low wages in England, for instance, do not give the English manufacturer an advantage over the American manufacturer who pays high wages.”
[1. ]MS in St. Andrews University Muniments. Published by Dr. Anna J. Mill in the Scottish Historical Review, XLIII (Oct., 1964), 136-37.
[2. ]Tulloch himself was then the vice-chancellor.
[1. ]MS at UCL.
[2. ]Francis Richard Charteris, Lord Elcho, and later 10th Earl of Wemyss (1818-1914), MP for Haddingtonshire, 1847-83.
After the House of Commons had voted down, on May 8, 1865, an attempt to reduce the borough franchise from £10 to £6, Lord Elcho asked that a royal commission be appointed to inquire how many of the “wage-paid” class have the franchise, how many are excluded, and the reasons for exclusion, and how far the franchise can be extended in relation to the various classes in boroughs and the relative value of money and property. The royal commission was not appointed during the session of 1865. See the Annual Register, 1865, Part I, p. 115.
[3. ]Whether Chadwick visited Algeria has not been ascertained. He had been interested for some time in the marked improvement in sanitary conditions there, and in 1864 had persuaded the minister of war to direct a special committee bound for Gibraltar to include Algeria in its itinerary.