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

141.: HICKSON’S THE NEW CHARTER EXAMINER, 5 FEB., 1832, P. 84 - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II [1831]

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The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II, 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.

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141.

HICKSON’S THE NEW CHARTER

EXAMINER, 5 FEB., 1832, P. 84

This review, another of Mill’s infrequent newspaper comments on the current battle for British reform, indicates his early acquaintance with William Hickson (1803-70), philanthropist and educational reformer, with whom he was later intimately involved in journalism and municipal reform. The review, in the “Literary Examiner,” is headed “The New Charter. Humbly addressed to the King and both Houses of Parliament. Proposed as the basis of a Constitution for the Government of Great Britain and Ireland; and as a substitute for the Reform Bill rejected by the Lords. [London:] Strange, Paternoster-row. 1831. pp. 16.” It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A review of a pamphlet entitled ‘The New Charter’ (by William Hickson), in the Examiner of 5th February 1832” (MacMinn, p. 19), and is listed as “Review of ‘The New Charter,’ a pamphlet by William Hickson” and enclosed in square brackets in the Somerville College set of the Examiner.

this little tract, the production of one who enjoys great and deserved influence among the middle classes of London, to whom he himself belongs, is well-deserving of attention from all who wish to know what is passing in the minds of the most intelligent leaders of the people. It displays considerable reflection, and some reach of thought. The writer has a mind sufficiently enlarged to feel the value of principles in politics, without falling into the common error of those who, having a little cleverness and a large stock of self-conceit, imagine that some one principle, which they have caught a glimpse of, contains all political science within itself.

After a brief introduction, the author enumerates the leading maxims on which, in his opinion, governments should be founded. We think we can perceive a tendency in the writer, which we regret, to a belief that his principles are of universal application; that the science of politics is fixed and unchangeable, like a system of abstract truth, instead of being, as we consider it, progressive with civilization, and fluctuating with the exigencies of society. But to most of his maxims, as applied to the present state of Great Britain and Ireland, we have little to object. Some of them, when stated in a general way, have the air of barren truisms; but even these, when interpreted according to the explanations and remarks which accompany them like a running commentary, will occasionally, we might say invariably, be found to rise into unexpected significance and importance.

Among the principles enumerated, will be observed, along with some which are familiar texts of the democratic reformers, several which have probably been the result of the author’s individual meditations, there being few accessible sources whence he can have derived them. His most valuable idea, in our estimation, is that of the importance of local representative bodies for the management of local affairs: his greatest error, the opinion that, by the aid of such local arrangements, portions of the human race so heterogeneous as the people of England and those of India, for instance, or our Slave Colonies, can possibly be united under a uniform representative government. His plan, too, of a ladder of elections, mounting by successive stages from the village to the empire—A electing B, who elects C, who elects D—is a part of his system which we strongly urge him to reconsider.