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 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 36.: THE INHABITANTS OF QUEENBOROUGH THE TIMES, 28 DEC., 1827, P. 3 - The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I

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Subject Area: Political Theory
Collection: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill

36.: THE INHABITANTS OF QUEENBOROUGH THE TIMES, 28 DEC., 1827, P. 3 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I [1822]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

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.


36.

THE INHABITANTS OF QUEENBOROUGH

THE TIMES, 28 DEC., 1827, P. 3

This letter and its enclosed £1 were elicited by “Meeting of the Inhabitants of Queenborough,” The Times, 26 Dec., 1827, p. 3, in which a subscription was suggested. On 27 Dec., p. 3, The Times printed three letters with subscriptions, with an editorial note saying a responsible gentleman would distribute the money. The Times’ account of the long-lasting distress of the fishing town in the Isle of Sheppy, Kent, emphasized the restrictions on the trade enacted by the ruling “select body,” the kind of closed corporation to which the Philosophic Radicals strongly objected. The letter, Mill’s first to The Times, is headed as title, subheaded “To the Editor of The Times,” and described in his bibliography as “A letter on the Queenborough case, inclosing a subscription for the inhabitants of Queenborough, signed Ph., in the Times of 28th December 1827”

(MacMinn, p. 8).

sir,—

I shall feel obliged by your consenting to be the depositary of the enclosed subscription, towards an object which a nation, which makes greater pretension to humanity than any other will not, I trust, disgrace itself by neglecting—the relief of the ruined and destitute inhabitants of Queenborough, whose misery is so affectingly depicted in your paper of Wednesday.

But if it be a duty to relieve the miserable, the punishment of those who have rendered them so is a still more imperative one. And the 1l. herewith transmitted shall cheerfully be increased to 10l., so soon as any practicable course shall be entered upon to effect that righteous purpose.

Can it be endured that proprietary rights, on which thousands depended as their sole means of support, should be seized by a self-elected body of seven persons, under pretence that the common property of the corporation is their property—that they, the trustees, the depositaries, the executive officers, the servants of the burgesses, have a right to say to their masters, “Go and starve”? Is it to be borne, that when those whom a court of law has declared to have a right to employment in the fisheries, are compelled by starvation to sue for it as a favour, they should be told, with an oath, by one of their magistrates, that he would never give them any employment while breath was in his body, or tauntingly exhorted to go and ask employment of him for whom they had voted? Can Englishmen suffer this, and listen without a blush to the congratulations of foreigners on the felicity with which our Constitution has reconciled the apparently conflicting advantages of freedom and law? No, Sir, I cannot persuade myself that the means of enforcing their right will be withheld from these unfortunate people by a nation which maintains more charitable institutions than all the rest of the world taken together. Our countrymen, whatever may be their faults, have rarely forgotten their reverence for the two great blessings of human life—liberty and property. And will they tamely suffer the whole population of a considerable town to be illegally deprived of the one as a punishment for their inflexible constancy in adhering to the other?

Ph.

Received a pound [Editor].