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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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September 1832 to August 1833

179.

RECOMMENDATIONS OF CANDIDATES TO PARLIAMENT

EXAMINER, 2 SEPT., 1832, P. 569

This article is prompted by the candidacy in the Radical interest of some of Mill’s acquaintances in the elections for the first post-Reform Parliament. The unheaded article is described in Mill’s bibliography as “Recommendations of several candidates for seats in Parliament in the Exam. of 20 Sept. 1832. (Some were not mine. Mine were J. & E. Romilly, C. Buller, T.H. Lloyd, Hyde Villiers, Hutt, Hawkins, and W.H. Ord.)” (MacMinn, p. 22.) In the set of the Examiner in Somerville College, it is listed as “Recommendations of several candidates to Parliament,” with the relevant portions enclosed in square brackets, and two corrections indicated: at 508.4 “Love” is altered to “Looe”; and at 508.19 “districts, at” is altered to “districts. At”. Probably Albany Fonblanque, the editor of the Examiner, who wrote most of the material in the paper, was responsible for the paragraphs not here included, that is, the opening three (a first paragraph rejoicing that there are candidates of intellectual attainments, a recommendation of Grote for a City of London seat, and a note of regret that Birkbeck was too unwell to stand for Finsbury) and three interspersed with Mill’s (Bulwer for Lincoln, Roebuck for Bath, and Davenport Hill for Hull). One cannot, of course, infer that Mill disapproved of these.

bridport.—The patriotic electors of this place are expected to return, (along with the present valuable member Mr. Warburton) Mr. John Romilly,¹ second son of the late Sir Samuel Romilly. They could not have found a more courageous or a more enlightened reformer, or a person more devoted, through good and evil report to the people’s cause. To this it should be added, that Mr. Romilly, though a professional lawyer, and practising in the most defective of all our law courts, the Court of Chancery, is yet among the warmest friends of a radical and systematic Law Reform.

ludlow.—In this stronghold of the Clive Family, Mr. Edward Romilly, a worthy participator in his brother’s opinions and purposes, is said to be certain of prevailing over the nominee of the Boroughmonger.²

liskeard.—The inhabitants of this borough, which is in Schedule B, and was a pocket borough of the St. Germain’s family are about to do themselves great honour by electing Mr. Charles Buller, nephew of Mr. Buller, of Morval, lately the patron of the (now happily disfranchised) borough of West Looe.³ Mr. Charles Buller is not one of those sprigs of Toryism who have only become reformers since it was no longer their interest to be otherwise. He has always been a reformer, and his disinterested adherence to the people’s cause under circumstances of great temptation, could not fail to recommend him to the suffrages of any of the reformed constituencies. He was brought into Parliament early in the Wellington administration by his family, whose ministerial influence together with his own talents, might easily have obtained for him place and favour, but he resisted all allurements, and would not compromise his independence. After the retirement of the Duke of Wellington, Mr. C. Buller was one of the minority of five or six who voted with Mr. Hume, against the increase of the army.⁴ In the interval between Earl Grey’s accession to power, and the introduction of the reform bill, Mr. C. Buller published one of the ablest of the pamphlets in favour of reform, in which he proposed a plan, still more extensive than that, afterwards adopted by the ministry, including the ballot, and a new division of the country, into electoral districts.⁵ At the general elections he lost his seat, for having voted for the bill. His support, both by word and vote, will certainly be given to all measures of enlightened reform.

lymington.—In this borough, the liberal candidate is Mr. Hyde Villiers, a member of the present government, but deserving of support from all reformers, especially when opposed as he is at present, only by Tory candidates. He is one of the most valuable of the young and rising official men; his opinions are in accordance with the spirit of the age, and the nation is likely to be well served by him, both in Parliament and in office. Mr. Villiers also, was one of the members of the last Parliament, who voted for the disfranchisement of his family borough, and lost his seat in consequence.

stockport.—We know of no candidate for the new Parliament, more deserving the support of all true reformers, than Mr. J.H. Lloyd, one of the candidates for this place, well known as a rising commercial lawyer, a thorough reformer in the fullest extent of the term, long before reform seemed likely to be accomplished in our own times, and well capable of supporting the popular cause, not only as a voter, but as a speaker.⁶

hull.—Mr. William Hutt, a candidate for this important place, is, though a young man, an old and genuine reformer.⁷

newport.—(Isle of Wight).—This patriotic place is about to return two highly meritorious members to Parliament; Mr. Hawkins, whose speeches on reform, the public will not soon forget, and who was thrown out of his family borough, because he voted for its disfranchisement; and Mr. W.H. Ord, (son of Mr. Ord, the member for Morpeth), whom we can certify to have been, in the worst times, an honest and enlightened reformer.⁸

180.

FRENCH NEWS [68]

EXAMINER, 9 SEPT., 1832, P. 585

After making a three-week walking tour (19 July to 6 Aug.) and then writing three major essays (“Corporation and Church Property,” “Austin’s Lectures on Jurisprudence,” and “On Genius”) and No. 179, Mill returns in this article to French affairs, with further comment on his Saint-Simonian friends and the trial of Carrel, soon to be taken by Mill as the model of a radical publicist. Writing to Carlyle, who shared his interest in the Saint-Simonians, on 17 Sept., he summarizes the article in a gossipy fashion, and mentions it again to him on 22 Oct. (EL, CW, Vol. XII, pp. 119-20, 125). The article, headed “London, September 9, 1832,” is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A summary of French affairs in the Examiner of 9th September 1832” (MacMinn, p. 22). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets.

the head of the st. simonian sect, and two of its principal members, have been sentenced to a year’s imprisonment and a fine.¹ This contemptible mode of putting down speculative opinions has been treated by the liberal press, both here and in France, as it deserves. The Times, it is true, with the ingrained vulgarity which so constantly distinguishes it even when advocating a right cause, recommends “ducking in a horsepond” as a substitute for fine and imprisonment.² For our part, if the base and brutal propensity to illtreat those who think differently from us is to be indulged, we had rather that the operation, like the rest of the dirty work of society, should be executed by rule, and by a hired officer, than that the hands or the souls of the people themselves should be contaminated with it.

With regard to the St. Simonians, the strange attitude which their leaders have assumed since the retirement to Ménilmontant, is of itself enough to prevent any further good or harm that could have arisen from their exertions.³En France c’est le ridicule qui tue, has often been said: and if the St. Simonians have been kept alive till now, it is because they have never till now been actually and truly ridiculous. We hope better things yet from several of them. Of their doctrines we still think, what we have in a measure stated, more than once,—that there is, out of all reckoning, more truth and substance in them than in any other of the numerous Utopian systems which are afloat. We agree in but few of their conclusions, yet we see an undeniable and permanent value in many of their premises; and we venture to assure any person who may desire to know more of them, that he must be either very wise or very foolish if he can read their writings without getting rid of many errors, and gaining a clearer insight into various important truths.

The editor of the National has been tried on a capital charge, for an article published just before the insurrection, and construed as an act of participation in it.⁴ He has been acquitted not only of the capital, but of the minor, offence. The trial was most interesting. General Pajol, who commanded the military on the 5th and 6th of June, was called as a witness for the defence. One of his own official reports was shown to him, in which he informed the Government that the conflict commenced on the part of the troops; who attacked the people merely because an attempt was made to change the course of the procession, in order to carry Lamarque’s remains to the Pantheon.⁵ General Pajol acknowledged the authenticity of the document; but, when the counsel for the defence attempted to interrogate him upon the truth of the statement which it contained, the public prosecutor objected, and the Court interfered, declaring that a witness could not be compelled to give publicity to the communications he might have made to the Government in the course of his duty.⁶

This is a curious specimen of the French law of evidence, which, indeed, is of a piece with the French law and practice in most other points; the rule there is, that all is fair in favour of the Government, and nothing against it. However, we think few will draw from the refusal of the Crown lawyer to allow General Pajol to confirm his own official statement, any inference but that the statement was true, and known by the Government to be such. If so, what condemnation can be too severe for the acharnement with which the Government pursues all who took part in a struggle, in which the military were the aggressors?

It will be remembered that warrants were issued against three deputies, MM. Garnier-Pagès (President of the Aide-toi Society), Cabet, and Laboissière, who refused to stand their trial before a court-martial, but surrendered as soon as the decree of the Court of Cassation had restored the course of law.⁷ The Chambre des mises en accusation, a court exercising the functions of our grand jury, has set these gentlemen at liberty, on the ground, not that the evidence is insufficient to justify putting them on their trial, but that there is actually no charge against them.⁸ How long will the French people bear such a Ministry? The three injured representatives of the people will not; for they have published in the newspapers a joint letter, pledging themselves to seek justice from the Chambers against the authors of the injury.⁹

It is said that poor M. Barthe, the ex-carbonaro, after being used for a twelvemonth, and worn out, is to be turned off to make room for M. Dupin.¹⁰

181.

FRENCH NEWS [69]

EXAMINER, 21 OCT., 1832, PP. 680-1

A further walking tour in Cornwall left Mill refreshed for another series on France. In his letter to Carlyle of 22 Oct., Mill says the Examiner he is just sending will bring his article “on the Doctrinaires & the new French Ministry, & from this time you may expect to see these notices resumed. As for other newspaper-writing, it has been suspended by the more serious work mentioned in my last letter to you [see the headnote to No. 180], which being over, other things will now have once more their turn.” (EL, CW, Vol. XII, p. 125.) The series includes Nos. 182, 183, 185, 187, 188, 190, and 192. This article, headed “London, October 21, 1832,” is described in Mill’s bibliography as “The summary of French news in the Examiner from 21st Oct. 1832, to 24th Dec. of the same year, inclusive—comprising [ten articles]” (MacMinn, p. 22). In the Somerville College set, this item is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets.

the present french ministry is a Tory Ministry.¹ We say this advisedly. It is true, that the Doctrinaires originally swore by our Whigs; but this was while the Whigs differed only by a shade from the Tories. The beau idéal of a Government, in the eyes of the Doctrinaires, is the British Constitution as settled in 1688, and Mr. Pitt the paragon of a patriot Minister. M. de Broglie passed a short time in England a few months since, and, it is well known, was perfectly aghast at the Reform Bill, bewailing our madness in casting away from us institutions so well proved by time, and which had showered down upon us so many blessings. The distinction between these men and the Carlists is but the difference between a Pittite and a Jacobite.

This is deeply to be lamented; for it is undeniable that the Doctrinaire leaders are among the most instructed and accomplished men in France—incomparably superior, as thinkers and writers, to any English Whigs, though they had the weakness to make these last their models. No French Ministry, probably, ever contained so much literary talent, and such extensive political and philosophical acquirements, as that which numbers among its members MM. de Broglie, Guizot, and Thiers, yet none ever was more certain of misgoverning France, and coming to a speedy and disgraceful end. In fact, it is the real mental superiority of these men, which, by becoming the foundation of a more than proportionate superstructure of philosophic pedantry and self-conceit, has rendered them far unfitter for actual dealing with the world than their English prototypes. One scarcely knew whether to smile or to sigh, when a man of M. Guizot’s real erudition and powers of thought, appeared sincerely to look up to a mere superficial pretender to learning and philosophy like Sir James Mackintosh; yet Sir James, like the rest of his party, could bend to the exigencies of the age, while M. Guizot is resolved to be the last person who gives up any of M. Guizot’s opinions.

The rise of Doctrinarism is naturally accounted for by the circumstances of France during the fifteen years of the Restoration. The dynasty which the Revolution had expelled, had just been replaced on the throne of France by foreign bayonets. The people, however, remained attached to the Revolution, and to the institutions and the habits which had grown up under it. The two rival powers being placed, as it were, en face, and the consequence of their continued hostility being inevitably another convulsion, a class of philosophers and politicians arose, who attempted to negotiate a compromise between the old dynasty and the spirit of the revolution: who professed attachment at once to liberty, and to legitimacy as the only sure guarantee of stability,—who professed to set both the Royalists and the Revolutionists right, as to the errors and excesses by which both alternately had been ruined, and to have found the way by which France, after so long vibrating between contrary extremes, might at last settle down into the golden mean, and find freedom, tranquillity, and happiness.

Unfortunately, these speculators, thinking it a fine thing to profit by the lessons of history,—and being a kind of people for whom history has no lessons, because they bring to its study no real knowledge of the human mind, or of the character of their own age,—could hit upon nothing better than erecting into universal maxims the conditions of the compromise which they fancied had been made at our Revolution of 1688, between the monarchical and the popular principle. This is an instructive experiment upon what is to be expected from those who affect to found their political wisdom principally on history, instead of looking to history merely for suggestions, to be brought to the test of a larger and surer experience. M. Guizot’s is no ordinary knowledge of history: that subject has been the pursuit of his life; he has written on it, and lectured on it, with great success; and has brought no ordinary powers of philosophising to bear upon the analysis of its evidences, and the explanation of its most remarkable events; as his Essais sur l’Histoire de France (to say nothing of any of his other works) amply evince.² He has even produced an elaborate work on English history;³ and yet when he comes to judge of the English constitution, the historical knowledge which alone could be of use to him is precisely that in which he is found deficient, namely, a knowledge how that constitution actually works, in the country for which it was made—in the very age in which he lives and moves, and in three hours’ sail may personally commune with thousands of living witnesses, and have leave to cross-examine them as he will.

Now, whoever knows the French and the English, knows, among other things, this—that in England few, except the very greatest thinkers, think systematically, or aim at connecting their scattered opinions into a consistent scheme of general principles, from which they may reason downwards to fresh particulars; but in France everybody who thinks, be it never so contractedly, weaves a regular web of opinions, suspends it cunningly on one or some greater number of “principes,” and sits spider-like in the centre, surveying complacently the whole of the web, or, as he fancies, of the world. In England, accordingly, since Whig has ceased to be the correlative and opposite of Jacobite, no person has been able to tell what Whiggery is, or what a Whig believes. “Whig principles” simply meant, feeling and acting with the men called Whigs; who were united, no doubt, by a common spirit, and a general disposition to take similar views of most political questions as they arose, but not by any definite creed or profession of faith. The Whigs, therefore, gave up nothing, renounced no political doctrines, when they proposed the recent great change in the constitution. They did but, under the guidance of the same inclinations and general objects, take what seemed to be the measures required by the actual circumstances of the time. They were for the old system while they thought it worked well, and for a new one when the old would hold together no longer. Not so the Doctrinaires. They took the phrase “Whig principles” au pied de la lettre. For them it was the symbol of a real creed, got at by induction from the mere occasional dicta of their English instructors. Whig principles, with the Whigs themselves, are in the state of judiciary or common law: the Doctrinaires are the authors of the only Whig code in existence. The theory of the British Constitution, with the annotations of its Whig commentators, is in their eyes a system of absolute truth, and its realization the acme of political improvement. Whatever deviates from it, either to the right or to the left, is so far false and wrong, and a proof that the nation which sanctions or requires such deviation falls proportionally short of that highest point in civilization, of which, when attained, that Constitution is the natural and certain result. Of this political religion the main articles of faith are, hereditary Monarchy—a hereditary House of Peers—a powerful Aristocracy of wealth, to hold the balance between the King and the people—the elective franchise limited by requiring a very high property qualification, both from the elector and the elected—the Liberty of the Press, that is, no censorship, but a libel law as indefinite as the English, and to be executed, if necessary, as strictly and severely as the French is at this moment—trial by jury, namely, a special jury, to be composed as exclusively as possible of persons who think with the Doctrinaires—and so forth.

Now these principles having been once dovetailed together into a system, no departure from them, no modification of any sort, is to be conceded to any pressure of circumstances. They are an unchangeable rule of right, and are to be stickled for as if they concerned mankind’s eternal salvation. The Doctrinaires have not the wisdom of the beaver; they will never yield a part to save the remainder. They would not, like M. Casimir Périer, have given up the hereditary Peerage; and they in fact resisted its abolition to the last gasp, and would re-establish it to-morrow, if the Chambers could be induced to pass a bill to that effect. They are the most inflexible and impracticable of politicians. The men of the world and of temporary expediency, who are the other leaders of the juste milieu, consequently look upon them as Bonaparte looked upon ideologists and metaphysicians. M. Casimir Périer disliked nothing so much as to be identified with the doctrinaires; and one of the chief causes of the failure of the attempt to induce M. Dupin to take office, was (it is understood) his determined refusal to form part of any administration of which they were members.

At least it cannot be said that this Ministry, like the last, is composed of men mediocre in every respect, mere second-rate clerks in an office. The Times, which has chopped round so briskly in its French politics, but which has changed only its tack, not its mode of sailing, has permitted itself a very pitiful sneer at the abilities and reputation of M. Thiers.⁴ We dislike M. Theirs’ politics much, and his unbounded suffisance still more; but nobody is entitled to speak scornfully of the author of the best history in the French language, and the best specimen of historical narrative, of any length, perhaps in all modern literature.⁵ M. de Broglie’s speech on primogeniture, some years ago, gave tokens of a far other man than he has proved himself,⁶ and his writings on the administrative institutions of France have great merit.⁷ M. Guizot is one of the most instructed men, as well as one of the first orators in France. With so much talent and knowledge, it would have been impossible to form any other ministry so destitute of wisdom.

It is difficult to believe that they can stand. All parties dislike them. They are understood to have been the advisers of the ordonnance putting Paris under martial law.⁸ M. de Broglie has been the chief instigator of the Chamber of Peers to all its collisions with the other House. M. Guizot is probably at this moment the most unpopular man in France. Whilst he is odious to the Liberals and to the Republicans, by the contumelious language which he habitually uses towards them, he is offensive to the deputies of the juste milieu party by his tranchant dogmatical tone and professorial airs of superiority. Poor M. Thiers, on his late visit to his birth-place, Provence, took care to avoid the large towns for fear of a charivari, but reckoned without his host; for, no sooner did he stop for the night, though it were but in a village, than straightway the people assembled with cat-calls, frying-pans, and saucepan-lids, and gave him the unwelcome serenade which he had gone out of his way to avoid. As for the place-hunter Soult, the humble servant of all governments, minister under Louis XVIII, made a Peer by Charles X, as corrupt and rapacious as the rest of Napoleon’s military banditti, and said to have already filled his pockets largely by fraudulent contracts since he has been Minister of War; he is placed at the head of the ministry only that the King may be the real minister, it being believed that a Doctrinaire, if he were called Prime Minister, would expect to be so, and not simply a cat’s-paw.

The first act of the Ministry has been to create a batch of fifty-nine Peers.⁹ The list of names, to any one versed in the personnel of French politics, is amusing enough. Nearly twenty are ejected Deputies of the juste-milieu or the moderate Royalist party of the Martignac Chamber; men, who, even under the present law of election, which returns a decided majority of the stationary party, have not been able to get themselves re-elected any where, though some of them have tried in three or four places. The remainder are generals, préfets, ambassadors, and other public functionaries, of no political character at all, and full half of them either of notorious and laughable imbecility, or bad private character. The only men of real merit in the batch are two or three such as MM. Allent and De Fréville, hard-working and able men of business, of flexible and easy political convictions; together with the well-known M. de Montlosier; M. Thenard, eminent as a chemist and experimental philosopher, but the feeblest of politicians; and MM. Cousin and Villemain, the celebrated lecturers at the Sorbonne, doctrinaires of the first water.¹⁰ This last was once a Deputy for about three months, vacated his seat by accepting a place, and has ever since been vainly knocking at the door of one electoral college after another, without being able to obtain admission. Three hundred of the party could get into the Chamber, yet a man of M. Villemain’s merit as a writer and orator could not, simply because he was a doctrinaire.

One fact deserves notice. Forty or fifty of the supporters of the Government party in the present Chamber of Deputies, thought themselves entitled to Peerages, yet two only have obtained their wish—Marshal Gérard, and M. Bertin de Vaux,¹¹ chief proprietor and editor of the Journal des Débats. Why is this? It must be because the Ministry dreads the consequences of any considerable number of new elections in the present state of the public mind.

182.

FRENCH NEWS [70]

EXAMINER, 28 OCT., 1832, P. 696

For the entry in Mill’s bibliography, see No. 181. The item, headed “London, October 28, 1832,” is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets in the Somerville College set of the Examiner.

in reading the trial of M. Berryer, we almost doubt whether the scenes that are unfolded took place in a civilized country.¹ The papers of the accused falsified in order to manufacture evidence against him; the chief witness for the prosecution, indeed the only one who testified to anything, a man calling himself a Lieutenant-Colonel, so manifestly perjured that the avocat général was obliged to throw up the accusation;² the procureur du roi at Nantes convicted by his own admission of having sent up to his official superiors a pretended confession of M. Berryer, on which three other persons were seized and thrown into prison,³ when in truth he had never seen M. Berryer, nor had M. Berryer made any disclosure to any one; this same procureur du roi now saying, by way of excuse, that if it was not M. Berryer who made the disclosures to him, it was another person;⁴ the avowed author of this manifest forgery not instantly dismissed from his situation, but called to Paris, as the Moniteur phrases it,⁵ to explain his conduct; then the reflection that on such evidence a Deputy was to have been tried by a Court-Martial, if the decree of the Court of Cassation had not averted the dire infliction⁶ —altogether the picture of the French government and of the administration of justice and the state of public morality in France, is such as it is frightful to witness.

Another incident not unworthy of notice has recently happened. M. Audry de Puyraveau is one of the most steady and incorruptible members of the côtégauche, and one of the most esteemed private characters in France.⁷ He was one of the very small number of Deputies who gave active aid in the resistance to the Ordinances of Charles X; and, like so many other persons, he has been rewarded by the ruin of his private fortunes; for the greater part of his property was embarked in a roulage speculation; his fixed capital of carts and waggons was mostly taken to make barricades of, and rendered useless; he participated, too, in the losses occasioned by the subsequent commercial distress. His remaining property, consisting of three landed estates, being mortgaged for more than it would now sell for, M. Audry determined to dispose of it by lottery, as the only means of making the proceeds suffice to clear off the entire debt. Now there is a law, passed in the time of the French Republic, by which private lotteries are illegal.⁸ That law has never been deemed applicable to lotteries of this description. M. de Chateaubriand a few years ago was permitted to take this particular mode of selling an estate; and a lottery took place not many months since, for the benefit of the Poles. No matter: an Opposition Deputy had brought himself within the letter of the law; the Government pounced upon him, and not content with annulling the transaction, obtained from the Court of First Instance a judgment condemning M. Audry to fine, imprisonment, and the confiscation of the three landed estates! M. Audry appealed to a higher court, which set aside the confiscation as contrary to the charter, but confirmed the remainder of the judgment, and imposed a much larger fine upon M. Audry. There is another court of appeal still in reserve, and to this M. Audry has had recourse. We have here a specimen of the Citizen King: for the King it is, and not the Minister, who is the author of this, as well as of the persecution of the Press, and all the other odious proceedings of the Government. His Ministers are only the base instruments of his individual will.

The late préfet of Grenoble, M. Maurice Duval, who charged the unarmed people from both ends of a street at once, so that they had no escape, and were forced to remain and be butchered—a man whose conduct even Casimir Périer condemned in private, though he had the dishonesty to defend it in public—this man has been made a peer of France, and promoted to be préfet of Nantes.⁹ That hitherto peaceful city, in which the best understanding existed between the people and the former préfet,¹⁰ would not brook this insolent appointment. On the day of M. Duval’s arrival, he underwent a charivari of four hours; this was repeated the next day on a still grander scale, until the troops were called out, and the people dispersed.¹¹

M. Guizot once said in a speech in the Chamber, that, in a well-constituted government, a good minister must expect to be unpopular.¹² The ministry of which he himself forms a part, bears a very close resemblance to a good ministry in this particular. It is likely to prove too good, to be popular even with the Chamber of Deputies; and the newspapers already talk of a new modification, turning out M. Guizot, at least.¹³

183.

FRENCH NEWS [71]

EXAMINER, 4 NOV., 1832, PP. 710-11

For the entry in Mill’s bibliography, see No. 181. The item, headed “London, November 4, 1832,” is listed in the Somerville College set of the Examiner as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets, with two corrections: at 520.25 “bar” is altered to “ban” and at 520.31 “history; and” is altered to “history and”.

the french government has performed an act worthy of commendation, if it be followed up in the spirit in which it is conceived, and which has escaped the notice of the English Newspapers,—the re-establishment of the Department of Moral and Political Science in the Institute.¹

In the original scheme of the Institute, as suggested by Talleyrand in his report to the Constituent Assembly on National Education,² as re-touched by Condorcet in another report submitted to the Assemblée Législative,³ and as ultimately adopted by the Convention on the proposition of one of the still surviving ornaments of that great period of history, M. Daunou,⁴ (and long may he yet survive!) the moral and political sciences occupied the prominent place which justly belongs to them in any attempt to bring together into one body the men who have done the greatest things for science and philosophy. But a despot came, in whose sight all which savoured of thought and inquiry in politics or morals was odious; and, with a stroke of the pen, the Department of Moral and Political Science was blotted out from the Institute.⁵ The Bourbons were as little disposed as Bonaparte to look with favour upon such pursuits. Casimir Périer, we suspect, would have fully sympathised with the “hero” and the “descendant of St. Louis”⁶ in an aversion so natural, and, for a selfish government, so reasonable. But the Doctrinaires, setting up for philosophers themselves, and owing all their reputation to the cultivation of philosophy, have no prejudice against it.

The new Academy of Moral and Political Science will, we suppose, publish Transactions, at the public expense; and the members will be allowed pensions sufficient to enable them to confine themselves to philosophic pursuits. This is so far good; provided the appointments are not given to favour, but bestowed exclusively on persons who, by what they have already done, have proved that it is for the interest of society to place them in such a situation that philosophy may have an exclusive claim upon their time and exertions. Further than this, we know not that such bodies are ever likely to be of much use; but if an institution exists which professes to embody the most distinguished men in all branches of science, it is a disgrace to the nation that the most important sciences of all should be excluded; and by removing this ban from moral and political philosophy, and publicly proclaiming that in the estimation of France they are sciences, and sciences of transcendant value, an impulse will be given to a really scientific study of them, for which the Guizot ministry are entitled to all praise.

The Academy is to consist of thirty members, and to be divided into five sections; namely, moral philosophy; legislation; droit public et jurisprudence; political economy and statistics; general history and the history of philosophy.

All who were members of this branch of the Institute when it was dissolved by Napoleon, and who still survive, are retained as the nucleus of the new Academy. It is interesting to review the list of these distinguished relics of the last age. Sieyès, Talleyrand, Daunou, Garat, Merlin (de Douai), Roederer, Pastoret, Lacuée de Cessac, Reinhardt, Dacier.⁷ To these are added those of the surviving corresponding members, who have since become members of the other branches of the Institute; namely, MM. Destutt-Tracy and de Gérando.⁸ These were to elect, by ballot, four more, which completes the number sixteen, (necessary by the former statutes) to supply the remaining vacancies. These sixteen are then to elect seven others, and those twenty-three are to elect the remaining seven. The first four were to be selected (for no good reason that we can see) from the ranks of the Institute itself. The successful candidates were, MM. Cousin, Dupin (the advocate), Alexandre Delaborde, and Naudet.⁹ The remaining fourteen are not yet elected. It is from their names that we shall judge whether the new institution is intended as an encouragement to philosophy, or as a mere trick for popularity.

Several of the Doctrinaires themselves ought unquestionably to be members of the body; especially M. Guizot himself, (who ought not, however, to draw the salary,) and MM. Royer-Collard and Jouffroy.¹⁰ These, we have no doubt, will be elected. But the list ought to contain various names, some of which are less acceptable to the party now in power. It ought to comprehend Say, the eminent political economist; Comte, and Dunoyer,¹¹ the authors of the Censeur Européen, and various important works; Cormenin, the ablest political writer in France, whose works on Administration have earned him so well-merited a reputation;¹² and others whom it would be tedious to enumerate. We shall see whether the suffrages of the Academy fall on such men, or what others are preferred to them.

184.

THE CORN LAWS

EXAMINER, 18 NOV., 1832, P. 739

This comment is appended, in square brackets, to a long letter to the editor in the “Political Examiner” signed “W.P.G.,” and headed: “A Plan for Admitting Foreign Corn, Yet limiting the Extent of Importation, so far as is necessary for preserving some given Minimum of Price to the British Farmer.” The correspondent argues that the attempt to regulate grain imports according to previous prices is inefficient because fictitious sales cannot be prevented, and immense quantities of grain can be warehoused when the duty is low. He proposes an alternative, regulating the duty according to the quantity imported and sold. The item is described in Mill’s bibliography as “Two paragraphs of observations on a letter respecting the Corn Laws; in the Exam. of 18th Nov. 1832” (MacMinn, p. 23). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Paragraphs on the Corn Laws” and enclosed in a second set of square brackets.

we have great pleasure in giving publicity to this plan, which is founded on a just train of thought, though we think it unsuited to the character which the Corn Question has now assumed. The idea of facilitating the transition to free trade by limiting (for a time) the quantity imported, instead of imposing a gradually decreasing duty, was suggested a few years ago by some able and enlightened writers in the Parliamentary Review, a work which had not the success it deserved.¹

But we should object to the plan of our correspondent, as applicable to the Corn Laws, on two grounds. First, because a small difference in the quantity of food makes a great difference in its price, so that no one could judge what number of quarters must be admitted to bring the price to 54s. And secondly, on a more enlarged ground, agreeing with W.P.G. that 54s. is a price that any reasonable farmer would now be contented with, we are convinced that the importation of Corn, duty free, would not sink the price below that point. Our reason is this:—Under the present Corn Law² the wheat which has been imported has paid, on an average, no more than from 6s. to 7s. of duty. The present Corn Law, therefore, cannot be much more than equivalent to a fixed duty of that amount; consequently, if the average price in our Corn Market be, as our correspondent affirms, 63s., you might take off the duty entirely, and wheat could not be sold for much less than 56s.

185.

FRENCH NEWS [72]

EXAMINER, 25 NOV., 1832, P. 760

Mill here resumes his detailed account of the French legislative chambers, at the beginning of their new session on 19 Nov. The article is memorable for its tribute to Jean Baptiste Say, in whose house Mill had stayed during his boyhood visit to France. For the entry in Mill’s bibliography, see No. 181. The item, headed “London, November 25, 1832,” is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets in the Somerville College set of the Examiner.

the french chambers have met. As the King was on his way to open the session, a pistol was fired at him. This will probably be found to be one of the low tricks with which the French police has long familiarised us. A real attempt to assassinate Louis-Philippe would probably prolong his lease of bad government for several years. Such acts have always, in modern times, proved fatal to the party in whose name they were perpetrated. We firmly believe that but for the murder of Marat by the unfortunate enthusiast Charlotte Corday, the heads of the Girondists would not have fallen under the guillotine;¹ and every one knows that the assassination of the Duc de Berri was the signal of the reaction which brought the royalists into power, and kept them there for ten years.

The King’s speech evinces an obstinacy not unworthy of his Dutch counterpart.² He means to brazen out the violation of the Charter and virtual suspension of all law through the arbitrary measures of June last,³ and to defy the constantly increasing strength of the hostile public opinion.

It was expected that the contest for the Presidentship of the Chamber would have been decisive of the strength of parties; but the ministry have eluded this trial by instructing their adherents to vote for M. Dupin, who, with a body of supporters, has gone into a qualified opposition. If, by the aid of this junction, M. Dupin obtain the majority over the other candidate, M. Laffitte, the result, we suppose, will be crowed over as a ministerial triumph.

A far greater event than these wretched ephemeral victories or defeats, is the death of an eminent man. France has this week lost another of her most distinguished writers and citizens, the celebrated political economist, M. Say. The invaluable branch of knowledge to which the greatest of his intellectual exertions were devoted, is indebted to him, amongst others, for those great and all-pervading truths which have elevated it to the rank of a science; and to him, far more than to any others, for its popularization and diffusion. Nor was M. Say a mere political economist; else had he been necessarily a bad one. He knew that a subject so “immersed in matter” (to use the fine expression of Lord Bacon)⁴ as a nation’s prosperity, must be looked at on many sides, in order to be seen rightly even on one. M. Say was one of the most accomplished minds of his age and country. Though he had given his chief attention to one particular aspect of human affairs, all their aspects were interesting to him; not one was excluded from his survey. His private life was a model of the domestic virtues. From the time when with Chamfort and Ginguené he founded the Décade Philosophique, the first work which attempted to revive literary and scientific pursuits during the storms of the French Revolution⁵ —alike when courted by Napoleon and when persecuted by him, (he was expelled from the Tribunat for presuming to have an independent opinion); unchanged equally during the sixteen years of the Bourbons and the two of Louis Philippe—he passed unsullied through all the trials and temptations which have left a stain on every man of feeble virtue among his conspicuous contemporaries. He kept aloof from public life, but was the friend and trusted adviser of some of its brightest ornaments; and few have contributed more, though in a private station, to keep alive in the hearts and in the contemplation of men a lofty standard of public virtue.

If this feeble testimony, from one not wholly unknown to him, should meet the eye of any who loved him, may it, in so far as such things can, afford that comfort under the loss, which can be derived from the knowledge that others know and feel all its irreparableness!

186.

FRENCH AND ENGLISH JOURNALS

EXAMINER, 2 DEC., 1832, PP. 772-3

Mill mentions in passing this article as well as Nos. 191 and 195 (already written) to Carlyle in a letter of 27 Dec., 1832 (EL, CW, Vol. XII, p. 133), in which he again summarizes his strenuous activities, including the composition of “The Currency Juggle” and “What Is Poetry?” The long quotation from Le National and Mill’s comment on it signal his continuing, indeed growing, interest in its editor, Armand Carrel, who probably wrote the article Mill quotes (“Des correspondances des journaux anglais,” 31 Oct., 1832, pp. 2-3). The article, headed as title, is in the “Political Examiner.” It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article headed ‘French and English Journals’ in the Ex. of 2d December” (MacMinn, p. 23). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “French and English Journals” and enclosed in square brackets.

we quote the following article from the National:

The English Newspapers have a very convenient method of treating the affairs of France. Their editors seem never to take the trouble of studying, or even of reading, the organs of public opinion in this country. The only Parisian Journals which reach London are those which have been long established. The wiseacres of London affect to despise our Newspapers, and seem to imagine that the French are too light-headed, too destitute of reason, to be judges of their own affairs. Even as narrators of facts we are completely disdained by our insular brethren. Their custom is to have a correspondent here, to whose statements and to whose single opinion they give implicit confidence. So long as these correspondents have merely put forth contradictions and absurdities, we have paid no attention to them; but as they have evinced a peculiar animosity against the National, we must at least request that the editor who treats us with so much incivility will take the trouble to inform himself who and what we are.

For a long time past, the Paris correspondent of the London Globe has made us the subject of violent attacks: a week never goes by without his throwing out against us an epigram obligato: and frequently the London editor, without even deigning to cast his eyes upon his antagonist, re-echoes the witticism as from himself.¹ We were at first surprised, we admit, at this want of fair-dealing and politeness in a Journal which is not destitute either of liberality or of enlightened views. But the Globe is essentially doctrinaire: it has all the qualities of that coterie, even down to their pedantry; and as we are naturally honoured with the hatred of that amphibious breed of political writers, it was quite simple that their English brethren, the half-Tories, half-Whigs, should follow the example. We, therefore, do not complain of their animosity, but of their dishonesty; of which the following is an instance:—

Last week there appeared in our columns an article on the state of Ireland, and the progress which the question of the Repeal of the Union is making in that country.² In confirmation of our assertion, we said, that the accession of Mr. Sheil to the Repeal Party was one of the surest signs of that progress, and of the ultimate success of the proposition.³ We reasoned thus, not because Mr. Sheil possesses sufficient personal influence to determine the adoption of the measure, but because he is essentially a man of moderation and prudence, an enemy of extreme courses, and embracing them only when it is impossible or impolitic to delay longer, that is, when extreme courses begin to prevail. We announced Mr. Sheil’s conversion not as a cause, but as a presage of the great measure of a legislative separation of England and Ireland. This conclusion may not be relished by the Globe, the organ of Mr. Stanley;⁴ but the editor would not have contemned our argument if he had taken the trouble to know what it was.

The Galignani’s Messenger had cut down the article of the National into these few words, that the repeal must be carried, because Mr. Sheil has become a convert to it.⁵ Hereupon the Globe, who, it seems, reads Galignani but not the National, quotes the version which the former gave of the opinion of the latter, and adds to the quotation a disdainful remark.⁶

This is but one example among a thousand of the dishonesty and levity with which all French affairs are treated in the juste-milieu Papers of London, while their brethren here are preaching about the possibility of an alliance with England. Within this day or two another Paper, the Courier, observed, that it was much to be regretted that French troops should have gone into Don Pedro’s service, because their presence in the constitutional army served only to exasperate the Miguelites. Such is the funeral oration which that Paper pronounces on the brave French battalion which has been almost exterminated in defending Oporto!⁷

From our complaints against the soi-disant liberal English Journals, we must however except the Times, whose columns are open to correspondents of all opinions on French affairs. One of the correspondents, evidently and avowedly a Frenchman, is lavish of eulogium on the doctrinaires;⁸ but the language of good society is not unknown to him. The Times too, and the Times alone, seems to be conversant with the French Papers; and though its spirit of exclusive and selfish nationality makes it substantially our antagonist, it often redeems this fault by touches of generosity for which we are bound to give it credit.

We subscribe to the justice of the above strictures on the English Journalists, who, however, must not be confounded with the English people. One reason why our Newspaper Editors do not judge of France by the French Newspapers is, that they cannot help feeling how erroneously England would be judged if it were judged by them. The truth is (and our friends of the National must not allow themselves to forget it), that while the French Journals represent the most generous and high-minded portion of the French public, our Newspapers represent, almost exclusively, the baser and more sordid part of ours. The French Papers are written by the most enthusiastic, or the most ambitious,—either way the most aspiring,—among the youth of the educated and refined classes. Ours are conducted by hirelings, and as a trade. The French Journalists, in powers of thought and scientific acquirements, are the élite of their country; the English, as a class, are little if at all above the average of theirs. Nor does there exist in France any class corresponding to one sort of the persons connected with the English newspapers,—adventurers, uneducated and low-bred, whose connexion with the Press gives them a power which they never could have gained by any other means, which they are wholly unfit to be trusted with, and with which they play such “fantastic tricks before high heaven”⁹ as are naturally to be looked for in men intoxicated with unmerited and unexpected importance.

There are exceptions to the general low state of the English press. The Editor of the Globe, for instance, who has used our brother of the National so ill, is a gentleman and a scholar; and not without a conscience either, though he squares it a little too much by respectability.¹⁰ But he labours under a grievous misfortune,—a misfortune to his country, whom it deprives of the enthusiastic services of such a man; but a misfortune beyond all measure or limit to the man himself, the very heart of whose moral being it eats out,—the affliction of despising every one who is in earnest. His literary career has been that of a man who not only has no faith, no convictions of his own, but in whose estimation, to have any strong convictions, and to care any thing about them, is a proof of weakness, rawness, and ignorance of the world. He should prefix a motto to his Paper, and that motto should be “Rub on.” We will paraphrase it thus: “Mankind are foolish enough to care about certain things, and to believe that their lot might be better than it is. No wise man will share any such delusion; but, also, no wise man will fly in the face of mankind, and tell them that they are following an ignis fatuus, because they would be angry, and their anger would disturb his tranquillity, and a wise man values his tranquillity above all things. Therefore, a wise man does not like change; but when it would be more troublesome to resist than to yield, a wise man will let the fools have their way.”

Of course, such a man must despise the writers of the National, together with all persons else who are for any kind of “movement,” and, in general, all who have any aspirations beyond quietness and respectability. The National will remember Signor Pococurante in Candide, and how all great men, even of past ages, appeared little in his eyes.¹¹ Voltaire has nowhere shewn a deeper insight into human nature.

The Editor of the National, (let us drop the idle circumlocution, and call him by his name,) M. Carrel, then, should know that he does too much honour to such a Paper as the Courier, when he condescends to censure it.¹² Nothing goes farther to convince us how ignorant the French Journalists are of the state of public opinion in England, than their continuing to quote from the Courier in 1832, because it was the Treasury Journal in 1817. We beg to assure them that nobody in this country ever seeks or cares to know what the Courier thinks or says on any one thing, or on any person. Englishmen, to their shame be it said, can bear a large measure of political profligacy, when combined with talent; but a Paper which changes its Editor and its principles every three months, without any change in the proprietorship,¹³ and never once in ten years says one word deserving to be remembered, is too much for our stomachs.

It is difficult to explain, in the limits of an article, all the causes which render the English Newspapers an imperfect exponent of the feelings of the English people towards the French. We may just allude to a few of them. The enormous stamp duty on Newspapers, which is six or seven times higher than in France, is one cause why our Daily Press is limited in its circulation almost exclusively to the monied classes, and if it represents any opinion at all, represents that of those classes. Now M. Carrel will allow that the corresponding classes in France, the subscribers to the Débats and the Constitutionnel,¹⁴ are a miserably bad sample of the French nation; and we implore him to believe that ours represent the English nation quite as ill. Another circumstance, the force of which we cannot expect him to feel in the same degree, is the engrossing character of the avocation of a London daily journalist. As a piece of complex and elaborate machinery, a French Daily Newspaper to an English is a wheelbarrow to the steam-carriages on the Manchester railway. The man whose hand gives the impulse and whose head the guidance to that great engine, cannot stir from his post: he can neither read, think, nor converse with the world: he can but write. He neither strengthens his powers nor adds to his knowledge: such as he at first was, he remains,—spinning a lengthening thread of thin talk out of his original raw material of thought, or improvising a judgment on passing events with such share of untutored sagacity as God gave him, and no more. Now, most of our Newspaper writers began to write in the piping times of Toryism and national antipathy; and the wonder is, not that so little but that so much of the new ideas and new feelings of the English public should have reached them. M. Carrel compliments the Times on its occasional relaxations of its anti-French spirit: we can assure him that the “touches of generosity” which he speaks of, find a responding chord in every English bosom which Toryism has not petrified; while the spirit to which those touches are exceptions is very generally regarded as an instance of the antiquated John-Bullism, which, in many other things besides this, distinguishes that Journal. We can assure him, moreover, that the close union between France and England, which he seems to think chimerical, is earnestly desired by all parties in this country except the Tories; for our juste-milieu feels its cause bound up with the French juste-milieu, and our mouvement with the French mouvement. The popular party in England think as ill of the present French Government as M. Carrel himself, and are as anxious as he can be that republican institutions, whether with an elective or hereditary chief, should be firmly established in France. It is true we are imperfectly acquainted with France, and are therefore, perhaps, the more fearful; and we often tremble lest some imprudence or precipitation on the part of our friends and brothers the French patriots, should compromise their avenir and our own. But though we may occasionally advise and deprecate, and even remonstrate, their cause is still our cause: it is the cause of improvement against stagnation, of public spirit and virtue against corruption and intrigue; it is the cause to which, and to all who in singleness of purpose have espoused it, our souls are wedded without possibility of divorce; and by that and them, in good or evil fortune, in good report or bad, and whether our advice is followed or not, we have made our election to stand.

187.

FRENCH NEWS [73]

EXAMINER, 2 DEC., 1832, P. 777

For the entry in Mill’s bibliography, see No. 181. The item, headed “London, December 2, 1832,” is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets in the Somerville College set of the Examiner.

m. dupin has the ball at his feet. He has been elected President of the Chamber of Deputies by an overwhelming majority.¹ MM. Bérenger and Etienne, the leaders of the intermediate party which has rallied round him, stand highest on the list of the Vice-Presidents.² The Opposition is completely defeated. Of the nine office-bearers of the Chamber, (the President, four Vice-Presidents, and four Secretaries,) only one Secretary, M. Félix Réal, has been chosen from the ranks of the mouvement, and he stands lowest on the list.³ The strength of the Opposition in the Chamber amounts to about 150 members, being ten more than the number who signed the compte rendu.

This result coincides with our previous anticipations.⁴ The Chamber, as at present constituted, is for the status quo; it approves all that has been done hitherto, but is for doing nothing more. It is thus distinguished equally from the mouvement party, who advocate the further extension of popular rights, and from the doctrinaires, who advised the recent violation of the Constitution, who supported the hereditary peerage, and would restore it to-morrow if they could, who regret the downfal of the exiled dynasty, and accept the Revolution of 1830 only as an unavoidable misfortune. The bourgeois oligarchy, who have enthroned themselves in the yet warm seats of the feudal aristocracy, have that very common taste which makes men desire to level down to themselves, but not an inch lower.

In the Commission for preparing the address, not one single Deputy of the Opposition found a place, but MM. Etienne and Bérenger did.⁵ We expect to meet these gentlemen everywhere for some time to come. The former of them, who is the principal proprietor of the Constitutionnel, is already spoken of as the probable successor to M. Guizot, if the illness under which the latter is now suffering should cause a vacancy in his office.

We are somewhat impatient to know the part which the leaders of the intermediate party will take in the debate on the address. As for M. Dupin himself, his office of President will save him from the disagreeable necessity of committing himself to any opinion.

The King’s speech promised to bring forward the bills so long expected, for the education of the people, the responsibility of Ministers, municipal institutions, &c.; and also threatened the country with laws for strengthening the hands of justice, or some such phrase;—laws, we suppose, for gagging the press.⁶ Our chief anxiety is to see whether the Intermediates offer any vigorous opposition to these iniquitous projects.

If M. Dupin becomes Prime Minister by a total change of Ministry, he will, we suppose, bring in with him MM. Bérenger as Minister of Justice; Bignon, Foreign Affairs; Etienne, Public Instruction; probably M. Teste⁷ in some capacity or other; and so on. But if he comes in by an understanding with the present Cabinet, it is impossible to foresee how he will be forced to compose his own.

The pistol-plot would appear to be a trick of the young woman (Mademoiselle Boury) who pretended to have frustrated it.⁸ There is strong reason to believe that the pistol was loaded only with powder, and was fired by herself, on speculation, to obtain money from the Royal Family, and a place for a young man to whom she is attached.

188.

FRENCH NEWS [74]

EXAMINER, 9 DEC., 1832, P. 792

For the entry in Mill’s bibliography, see No. 181. The item is headed “London, December 9, 1832.” In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Article on France” with this portion enclosed in square brackets (two preceding paragraphs deal with the siege of Antwerp).

the address of the French Chamber of Deputies was an exact echo of the King’s speech; with the single exception of a passage of ineffectual sympathy with the Poles, inserted on the motion of M. Bignon, and carried almost unanimously.¹ All the amendments of the Opposition, or compte rendu party, in condemnation of the état de siége, or of any part of the policy of the present French Government, were defeated by large majorities. The Intermediates, or M. Dupin’s party, have for the present thrown their entire weight into the Ministerial scale. The address was drawn up by one of their leaders, M. Etienne.

The pistol-plot becomes every day more evidently apocryphal; but it has served the turn of the Ministry, by furnishing an excuse to those who only needed one, for rallying round the Government.²

189.

DEATH OF HYDE VILLIERS

EXAMINER, 9 DEC., 1832, P. 792

This unheaded obituary of Mill’s friend is described in his bibliography as “Paragraph on the death of Mr. Hyde Villiers, in the Ex. of 9th December 1832” (MacMinn, p. 23). In the Somerville Collge copy of the Examiner, it is listed as “Obituary notice of Mr. Hyde Villiers” and enclosed in square brackets.

the nation has sustained a loss which will not soon be repaired, by the premature death of Mr. Hyde Villiers, the Secretary to the India Board.¹ His intelligence and laborious habits, joined to his advantages of connexion and position, could not have failed to raise him, early in life, to great influence in the councils of his country; and few among the rising men in office, or those likely to be in office, were comparable to him in that public spirit, and enlarged liberality of sentiment and principle, which would have made his influence a source of benefits to his country and the world, whereof it is lamentable to think that they should thus unexpectedly be deprived. To his personal friends the loss is most severe, and will be felt even by those who only knew him in the way of official intercourse. Few men ever conciliated in a higher degree the esteem and good will even of political adversaries.

190.

FRENCH NEWS [75]

EXAMINER, 16 DEC., 1832, P. 808

For the entry in Mill’s bibliography, see No. 181. The item, headed “London, December 16, 1832,” is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets in the Somerville College set of the Examiner.

there seems reason to believe that something will, at last, be done by the French Government to relax the absurd restrictions upon the importation of English and other foreign commodities.¹

The Ministry have introduced most of the promised bills;² and, among others, the dreaded one for regulating the power of Government to declare a town in a state of siege. But as we have not yet seen the bills themselves, we defer till next week any particular notice of them.

191.

ON THE NECESSITY OF UNITING THE QUESTION OF CORN LAWS WITH THAT OF TITHES

EXAMINER, 23 DEC., 1832, PP. 817-18

Mentioned in Mill’s letter to Carlyle of 27 Dec. (see No. 186), this article, headed as title, is the first leader in the “Political Examiner.” It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article headed ‘On the Necessity of Uniting the question of Corn Laws with that of Tithes.’ Exam. 23d Dec. 1832.” (MacMinn, p. 23.) In the Somerville College copy of the Examiner, it is listed as title and enclosed (including the final footnote) in square brackets.

on looking round and surveying the attitude and movements of the constituencies, both new and reformed, which have been created by the late Act, we see reason to congratulate the friends of improvement upon the definiteness of their objects, and the zeal and unanimity of their exertions. Scarcely a voice has been raised for any causeless or fantastic change, nor has any captiousness been exhibited about mere forms and phrases. This, indeed, would have been inconsistent with the positive, practical, matter-of-fact character of the English mind. Almost as seldom has the advocacy of any act of individual wrong—of the plunder of any man’s property, or the blighting of his reasonable prospects,—met with encouraging reception from any body of electors. There is enough of integrity and self-control, and respect for the just rights of others, in the English character, to forbid this. The reforming spirit has fastened upon the real grievances, and with the greatest intenseness upon the most crying and barefaced of these. General rectitude of purpose has produced unity of purpose. The Reformers in all parts of the island proclaim the same objects, proclaim them as with one voice—a voice destined ere long to silence all other sounds except its own echo.

To this unanimity one question forms a solitary exception. That indeed is an alarming one, and may even yet become a firebrand of discord in the ranks of the sincere Reformers, unless disposed of soon and well,—not with the kind of prudence which is synonymous with indecision and cowardice, but with that true and statesman-like kind which can foresee as well as see, and of which the foremost ingredient is courage. This question, the only one within the compass of probability from which a Tory reaction, among any considerable part of our population, can ever again be apprehended, is the Corn Laws.

On this question alone, among the many which are now vehemently agitated, is Reformer at variance with Reformer. On all other subjects the contest will be solely between the Stationary principle and the Progressive: between the spirit of Toryism, whether under its own or under Whig colours, and the spirit of Reform. On this alone a division is manifesting itself between the two great sections of the people; and there is imminent (though not immediate) danger, that the representatives of the manufacturing and commercial towns, and the representatives of the counties, the agricultural towns, and Ireland, will, by the artifices of the common enemy, be set one against the other;—the agriculturists under a total misapprehension of the nature of their interest in the question, the manufacturers greatly over-estimating the degree of theirs.

We may be sure that nothing would serve the purposes of the Tories so well, as to be able to pick a quarrel between the two great divisions of the reforming host, on this the only subject of dissension ever likely to afford them such an opportunity.

So deeply are we impressed with the importance of frustrating these tactics of our enemies, that if a question which affects, be it ever in so slight a degree, the condition of the most numerous class, were not in our eyes important beyond any other, we would gladly put off the discussion of this question, until others, on which there is less difference of sentiment and of apparent interest, shall have been set at rest. We do not, indeed, think that the immediate interests of the working classes are so deeply concerned in this as in several other questions. The effects of the present Corn Laws¹ in any way, be it for good or for evil, are in our estimation far short of what either party habitually assumes. But when we consider the transcendant importance of the principle which is at issue, where the dispute is (what it here is) between the drones of society and the bees; when we see that both the drones and the bees think, however erroneously, that it is a question of life and death between them—when, too, we perceive how generally the members, both for the counties and for the towns, are coming to the new Parliament, if not positively pledged, at least with a distinct expectation on the part of their constituents, that they will give their strongest support or opposition to any abatement of the existing “protection to agriculture;” we cannot doubt that this discussion must be among the earliest which will come on, and that it is not too soon to begin to consider by what means it may be prevented from becoming a source of disunion among the Reformers, and of strength to the Conservatives, by rallying round the standard of Anti-reform in general, the enemies of one particular Reform.

An opportunity now offers itself, such as does not occur once in a century, and which might seem as if sent on purpose to carry England safely through this difficult passage.

The cry is now irresistible for the extinction of Tithes. There is not a rational person throughout the country, whatever be his wishes, who thinks it possible that this odious impost can exist one year longer. Now, the way to make peace for ever between the agriculturists and the manufacturers would be this: Unite the question of the Corn Laws with the question of Tithes. Throw yourselves upon the country with the boon of relief, at one stroke, from the two most flagrant of its grievances, the two most keenly felt of its burthens. Come with the Tithe in one hand—the freedom of the Corn trade in the other: hold out the one to the farmer, the other to the manufacturer. A minister who should thus act, would save the country from its worst chance of prolonged intestine divisions, himself from a perilous shoal on which even a strong administration can with difficulty avoid being wrecked, and would obtain a new lease of public confidence, which would enable him, with ordinary good sense and good intention, to retain as long as he pleased the control of the Movement in his own hands.

These two questions, of which policy so strongly dictates the union, are besides in their own nature so intimately allied, that no philosophical statesman would ever think of looking at either of the two, except with immediate reference to the other.

The people of England are supplied with food by two channels—home production, and importation. Both are taxed: what is Tithe, but a tax on the home growth? What are the Corn Laws, but a tax on the importation? Now, it is not only admitted by every one whose opinion is worth counting, but is obvious to the merest tyro in the principles of commerce, that these two modes of procuring corn, if taxed at all, ought to be taxed exactly alike. To lay any burthen exclusively on either of the two, is to tax the community for the sake of a factitious encouragement to the other. If, for instance, there were a Tithe, and no Corn Laws, the effect would be to force an importation, when additional food might be grown with less labour from our own soil. If, again, there were Corn Laws, and no Tithe there would be virtually a bounty on home production; forcing cultivation on bad soils, to raise a portion of food which the nation could obtain with a less expenditure of labour and capital by importing.

Accordingly, the only argument among those urged in favour of Corn Laws, to which a thinking man would pay the slightest regard, is the existence of Tithe, or of other burthens on the cultivation of the soil, generally, but erroneously, supposed to be analogous to Tithe. Take away the Tithe, and there is not a word to be said for the Corn Laws; but take away the Tithe, leaving the Corn Laws, and you add just so much to their pressure. Every weight taken off the shoulders of one of two competitors is tantamount to laying an exactly equal burthen upon the other.

Only consider how all the practical difficulties of both questions will be alleviated by disposing of them in conjunction. What, in truth, is the leading objection felt by every one to the total extinction of Tithes? The fear lest what is taken from the clergyman should be merely given to the landlord. To obviate this (a consequence which all agree in deprecating), fifty cumbrous, and trouble-some, and uncertain contrivances have been thought of and propounded, for not abolishing but commuting the Tithe into a land-tax, or rent-charge, to be collected on account of the Church or on account of the State. All this operose machinery is but needless perplexity. For giving the benefit of the remission of Tithe to the consumer, instead of the landlord, there is a far simpler way. Abolish the Corn Laws. That is the true commutation of Tithe. Do away with both the bread-taxes, utterly and at once. Let the Tithe disappear and be no more heard of. A provision, of course, must be made for lay impropriators and existing incumbents; at present, too, the time has not yet come when the endowments of the Church of England will be cut down to the value of the Church lands: some equivalent, probably, will this time be given to the clergy, for at least a portion of the Tithe. Let these expenses, then, be borne by the nation at large. Let them be included in the estimates of every session, with the other yearly expenses; or let stock to the necessary amount be created for the purpose, and placed, as Lord Henley proposes, in the name of a Parliamentary Commission.² To grudge such a price for the repeal of the Corn Laws, would be that penny-wisdom which is pound-foolishness. The penny, it is true, may be taken before your face, and the pound behind your back: yet a penny is but a penny, and a pound is a pound.

This course, it will be found, and no other, will do justice to all. Yet, instead of being intricate, it is the simplest—instead of being difficult of execution, it is the easiest and most commodious—of all means of adjustment which have been proposed. It has the advantage, rare among reforms, that it alienates no one, not even those who profited by the abuse, since the redress of one wrong is made to operate as an indemnity to those who would suffer by the removal of another.

The agriculturists, indeed, if the matter were propounded in the abstract, might question the sufficiency of the compensation. But they could scarcely do so when their attention was drawn to the fact, to how very low a fixed duty the present Corn Law is equivalent. The whole of the wheat which has been imported since the act of 1828 came into force, has paid, on an average, not more than 6s. 6d. per quarter. The Tithe, if it were exacted in full, would, at the present average prices, be about an equal sum. It is not so, we know, in fact; because much of the land of the United Kingdom is either tithe-free or under a modus, and because the parson seldom obtains his full dues. But the inconvenience, and annoyance, and litigation arising from the tax in its present form, are of themselves a substantive burthen upon the occupation of a farmer, at least sufficient, we cannot but suppose, to make up all that the Tithe falls short of a full tenth of the produce. The gain of the Tithe, then, would be a full equivalent, both to the landlord and the farmer, for the loss of the Corn Laws: while, in common with the entire community, they would gain in the cheapness of their food, and the impulse given to the industry and wealth of the country; and the farmer, as a capitalist, would gain in addition, along with other capitalists, in the greater facility of maintaining his labourers.

With the exception of Tithe, there are no peculiar burthens on the growth of food which can form a reasonable pretext for keeping up a peculiar tax upon its importation.

The poor-rates are often erected into such a pretext, but improperly; as is apparent for several reasons:—

In the first place, a free trade in corn, by cheapening food, will reduce the burthen of the poor-rates. Take away the Corn Laws, then, and you take away, to a very great extent, this argument for having Corn Laws.

Secondly, if the poor-rates press more severely on the agriculturists than on other people, why is this? Solely because in the purely agricultural parishes the condition of the poor is worst, and those abuses of the poor-laws which have pauperised and demoralised the labouring classes have there been carried to the highest pitch. But of these abuses the landlords themselves, in their capacity of magistrates, have been the authors. They have no right to come upon the general public for an indemnity from the consequences of their own ignorance and imprudence.

Then, too, as they have been the causes of their own burthens, which by means of Corn Laws they now strive to shift off upon other people, so it rests with them, by reversing the cause which did the mischief, to undo it: either by a more judicious exercise of their powers, or (and to that they must at last come) by abdicating their functions into the hands of wiser men. We know from the best authority, that the inquiries recently made by the Poor Law Commission have ascertained that, in the very worst districts of the worst counties in England, parishes exist, where the exertions even of one wise and energetic country gentleman or clergyman have sufficed not only to correct the maladministration, and greatly diminish the amount, of the rates, but in a few years actually to unpauperise the whole labouring population.³ If this can be done in one parish, it can in another. Let the landlords then bestir themselves, or make way for better men; and cease to plead, as an argument for taxing every one who lives by bread (and putting the money into their own pockets), the enormity of a burthen which owes its very existence to their mismanagement, and which will continue to press upon them so long and no longer than that mismanagement shall endure.

As for the county rates, to claim “protection” on that score is absurd: other people pay for roads, and gaols, and paving and lighting, and police, as well as the landlords, and are not disposed to pay for themselves and the landlords too. We shall be told, perhaps, of the land-tax; but the landlords have no more title to be indemnified for that than for their debts. It is not a tax taken from the landlords, for they never had it. They bought their estates subject to that deduction from the income. The land-tax is a rent-charge in favour of the State, which is to that extent a co-proprietor in the soil. Besides, if the landlords bring to account every trifle they pay to the State, we on our side must be permitted to raise up in judgment against them every thing that they do not pay. They have exempted their land from the legacy duty,—a heavy tax, which is levied upon all other property without exception.⁴ This fact ought to stop their mouths whenever they presume to talk of their peculiar burthens.

Our conviction is, that if Tithes were abolished, the simultaneous removal of the present import duties (which we regard as little if any thing more than an equivalent for the Tithe) would not increase the importation of corn in a perceptible degree—would not throw a single acre out of cultivation, or a single agricultural labourer out of employment. But if the event should prove otherwise, the course of good sense and justice would be plain. Let it be ascertained what are the parishes which, from the prevalence of poor soils or other causes, had suffered by the change. Let it be found out in what parishes the rates had greatly and suddenly increased, without any assignable cause except the repeal of the Corn Laws. Wherever this fact could be established, the State ought to relieve that parish from this artificial increase of its poor, and should either assist them to emigrate, locate them on waste lands, or provide for them other permanent employment, if any more eligible can be found. To do that for labourers pauperised by a salutary reform, which it has so often been in contemplation to do for the whole surplus labouring population, is what no person with any pretensions to reason will, we presume, object to.

There is thus every imaginable motive for joining in one great scheme of national policy these three measures—the extinction of Tithe, the total abolition of the Corn Laws, and a vote of credit for the emigration of unemployed labourers, with the alternative of home colonisation. And to this, as part of a suitable programme of the approaching session, we invite the attention of public men.

We are fully satisfied that it would be the part of true prudence to face all the three questions at once. Such, however, is rarely the prudence of practical legislators. From those in whose hands the destinies of England are for the moment placed (though they are not worse, but, on the contrary, far better, than the generality of public men,) we wish rather than hope for any of the wisdom of which boldness is an ingredient. We have our fears that, shrinking from the difficulty of dealing with more than one question at a time, they will look only at half a question at a time; will never see where one reform would impede, and where, on the contrary, it would help another; and so will never accomplish any thing but some paltry botching, which will require to be undone in a future session by themselves or others—something which, instead of calming agitation, will prolong it—instead of settling men’s minds, will keep them unsettled, until they insist upon settling every thing their own way. An exaggerated dread of innovation, at this crisis, will adjourn the possibility of a stable government in England for an indefinite period.

But let us, in all conscience, see before we decide: let no man be condemned untried. A great change in the constitution should make a tabula rasa⁵ of past conduct and professions, and give every statesman who chooses to claim it, a clean character to set up with. Such a character the present ministers shall have with our hearty good will: but beware the first spot!^*

192.

FRENCH NEWS [76]

EXAMINER, 23 DEC., 1832, P. 825

For the entry in Mill’s bibliography, see No. 181. The item, headed “London, December 23, 1832,” is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets in the Somerville College set of the Examiner.

the french minister of commerce has introduced a highly important bill for lowering various duties on importation, and removing various prohibitions; and in doing so, he announced that this was only the first of a series of measures for relaxing the restrictive and prohibitory system.¹

We suppose even the most inveterate “reciprocity” men will now be satisfied that our relaxations of that absurd system were well judged.² They were not only wise in themselves, but they have inspired corresponding wisdom in the councils of other nations. The first receding step has been taken from the mischievous measures which have forced capital out of its natural channels in America,³ and now the French Government has entered boldly and decidedly into a course of liberal commercial policy.

193.

DEATH OF CHARLES LAMETH

EXAMINER, 6 JAN., 1833, P. 8

This article, headed “London, January 6, 1833,” is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An obituary notice of Charles Lameth in the Examiner of 6th Jany 1833” (MacMinn, p. 24). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets (including the note), with three corrections: at 542.15, “survivors” is altered to “survivor”, at 542n.15 “Marre” is altered to “Marne”, and at 542n.16 “Martin” is altered to “Merlin” (but “Douni” is not corrected to “Douai”).

charles lameth is dead.¹ He was one of the few survivors of the Constituent Assembly; that illustrious body which contained within it so much of wisdom and virtue, and to which mankind have never yet acknowledged all the debt they owe. At the opening of the Revolution Charles de Lameth, then a high-spirited, young officer, of noble birth and high prospects, yet espoused warmly the cause of the Revolution. He was the friend of Barnave,² and along with that lofty and pure spirit, with his own brother Alexandre de Lameth, and the most instructed and reflecting statesman in the assembly, Adrien Duport, formed what was then considered the extreme democratic party. Barnave, the greatest orator but one³ of that brilliant period, perished by the guillotine, when the Revolution (to use the words of Danton on the scaffold) began like Saturn to devour her children.⁴ Duport died in exile. The two Lameths returned to France with the Bourbons, and distinguished themselves in the côté gauche of the Chamber of Deputies. The elder died a few years since. Charles de Lameth, always the least conspicuous of the four in intellectual endowments, may be pardoned if his own personal sufferings, and the disappointment of his early enthusiastic hopes, made him go the way of the timid, and resist the democratic tendency of the times. He was a strenuous supporter of the juste milieu, or resistance party, after the July Revolution; but he never was false to the recollections of his better days, and but a few months since, he made a speech in the Chamber in affectionate vindication of the memory of his illustrious friend Barnave.⁵ Peace be with them both, and with the last immortal honour!

How few remain of that noble representative body, and these few how various! Lafayette is still spared to us. There are still alive Talleyrand, Sieyès, Montlosier, Roederer, Pontécoulant, the only survivor of the proscribed Girondists; Barrère,⁶ the only survivor of the terrible Committee of Public Safety:^* and probably a few others whom we remember not. None now remain of that still nobler body, the signers of the American Declaration of Independence. The last of them, Carroll of Carrolton, died a few months ago at a most advanced age.⁷

194.

THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

EXAMINER, 13 JAN., 1833, P. 19

In one of his rare early comments on the United States, Mill discusses Andrew Jackson’s Fourth Annual Message of 4 Dec., 1832, reported in The Times, 2 Jan., 1833, p. 3, where all the quotations will be found. This item, headed as title, appears in the “Political Examiner.” It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article headed ‘The President’s Message’ in the Examiner of 13th January 1833” (MacMinn, p. 24). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, where it is listed as title, it is enclosed in square brackets, with two corrections: at 544.5, “busy” is altered to “losing”, and at 545.6 “prepared” is altered to “proposed”.

happy will it be for britain when the annual address of her first Magistrate on calling together her Parliament, shall be like that of the American President—an argumentative review of all the great political questions of the time, a full and clear, though condensed statement of the views of the head of the Government on every subject likely to come before the Legislature during the session, and particularly of the grounds of all the amendments which he deems requisite in every branch of the national institutions.

On the present occasion one of these amendments is no less than the entire abandonment of what is called the Tariff system, in other words the “protection” of domestic industry. General Jackson condemns the “American system” in toto, and proposes that the idea of forcing manufactures by means of duties should be given up, except with regard to articles for which it would be dangerous to depend on foreigners: (what these are, he does not specify.)

It was not too soon for Congress to begin repealing their absurd commercial laws. The Union was on the verge of civil war. The Southern States, having no manufactures, but exporting an immense quantity of raw produce, suffered in a twofold manner by the Tariff; first, by being compelled to buy dear and bad manufactures in New England, when they could have cheap and good ones in Europe; and, secondly, by the consequent limitation of the European market for their own commodities. The Legislature of one of the greatest of these States, South Carolina, has recently passed an Act, declaring that Congress has exceeded its powers in enacting the Tariff, being authorized by the Constitution to impose taxes for revenue only, but not for protection; and that, consequently, the Tariff laws are inoperative, and ought not to be obeyed.¹

The President, in his message, comments in very measured terms on this bold proceeding;² but there is no doubt that the Federal Government will be too strong for this single State, as none of the other anti-Tariff States are showing any disposition to follow the example. Let us hope, at least, that this act of resistance will draw universal attention to the iniquity of taxing the whole American people to enable a few manufacturers to carry on a losing trade; and that in this, as in so many other cases, intemperate violence may procure the redress which was denied to gentle remonstrance.

Another of the President’s suggestions appears to us of far more questionable policy, or rather decidedly and grossly impolitic. He declares himself in favour of giving up the revenue hitherto accruing to the United States from the sale of unoccupied lands; and proposes that the price be henceforth limited to an equivalent for the expence of surveying the land and granting a title. It is curious enough that the American Government should think of abandoning their own more rational mode of disposing of land and adopting ours, at the very time when our Colonial Office is abandoning its own and adopting theirs; the very time, too, when Mr. Wakefield’s admirable pamphlets have so clearly demonstrated that the great source of rapid growth and prosperity in a new colony is concentration, whether produced by natural causes, or by means artificially employed to promote it.³

The rent of land being a mere Godsent, coming into the possession of individuals by mere occupancy, and increasing as population and wealth increases, without any exertion on the part of the owner, ought, in all new countries, to be reserved in the hands of the State, as a fund which would in time be sufficient to supersede the necessity of taxation. But if for an immediate consideration the State chooses to dispose of this invaluable resource, it should at least put as high a price upon grants of land as it can get. If the United States adopt the President’s recommendation, they will give up a revenue, which costs nothing, to any body, and which must be replaced by taxes on industry or on the profits of capital; while they will add still further to their greatest social evil—that rapid dispersion of the inhabitants, which keeps the people of the more recently settled territories in a state of semibarbarism, and is prejudicial even to what alone it can ever have been supposed to promote—the increase of the national wealth.

Half the revenue of the last year has been applied to the liquidation of debt; and the National Debt of the United States is now almost entirely paid off. The small remainder consists chiefly of stock not redeemable for two or three years to come, which however it is proposed to buy up at the market price. The United States will then present the unique phenomenon of a great nation entirely free from debt. Several indeed of the State Governments have debts, but these were mostly contracted for productive purposes, such as the construction of canals and roads. Such debts are not like those of a spendthrift, but like those of a wealthy manufacturer or merchant, with whom to be in debt is merely to have the use, for profitable purposes, of other men’s capital as well as his own. The more he is in debt the greater are his gains. Such debts make the debtor rich instead of making him poor.

195.

NECESSITY OF REVISING THE PRESENT SYSTEM OF TAXATION

EXAMINER, 13 JAN., 1833, PP. 19-20

This article (probably with its continuation, No. 196) is said by Mill in his letter of 27 Dec., 1832, to have been already written (see No. 186); they are referred to again in a letter to Carlyle of 16 Jan., in which Mill says he has written little and published only this (EL, CW, Vol. XII, p. 141). Both are leading articles in the “Political Examiner,” headed as title. This one is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article headed ‘Necessity of revising the present system of taxation,’ in the Examiner of the same date [as No. 194]” (MacMinn, p. 24). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Necessity of revising the present method of Taxation” and enclosed in square brackets.

among the most urgent duties of the parliament which is about to assemble, will be the revisal of our present fiscal system. Others of our abuses and grievances may be equally great, some possibly greater, but none are more palpable and glaring. We are overtaxed, and mistaxed. To the overtaxation many eyes have long been open; to the mistaxation, fewer. But the manner of our taxation begins at length to be thought of by popular constituencies, as well as the amount: and the voice which is raised for the repeal of so many taxes is not, as it was wont to be, a mere inarticulate outcry of the overburthened, eager to have the weight taken off their own particular shoulders, but a deliberate protest against an unjust mode of distributing the common load, and a claim to have the apportionment made on principle, with a due regard to the strength and convenience of all.

The two pervading evils of most fiscal systems, and of our own among others, are inequality and waste. There is inequality, when, to supply the public revenue, a greater sacrifice is required from one part of the people than from another part. There is waste, when a needlessly large portion of the proceeds of a tax is swallowed up in the expense of collection, or when the tax necessitates or encourages bad processes of production, or diverts labour and capital from the channels into which, being the most productive, they would spontaneously flow. In the revenue system of this country all these forms of evil abound. Nor are there wanting striking examples of a still worse mischief, taxes operating immorally; by precluding or discouraging the exercise of some virtue, (as the taxes on soap, and on insurance,)¹ by obstructing access to wholesome instruction, (as the taxes on paper, pamphlets, newspapers, and book advertisements,)² or, finally, by holding out a premium to smuggling; as is done by all high duties on importation, and in England, particularly, by those on foreign spirits and tobacco.³ But the objection of immorality applies to some parts only of our revenue system; the vices of inequality and waste pervade nearly the whole.

For instance, all our direct taxes proceed on the avowed principle of sparing the rich: the very poor are also, in some instances, spared; but the rich invariably. Thus the window tax stops at a certain maximum: a limit is fixed, beyond which windows in any number may be added without being taxed.⁴ The disgraceful inequalities of the house tax⁵ have lately attracted universal attention, though the whole extent of them is not even yet known to the public. The house tax besides, even if fairly assessed according to the common standard of fairness, that is, in proportion to the bonâ fide rent, must still be an unequal tax; for a person of moderate income generally expends a larger proportion of that income in the rent of his house or apartments, than the very rich: and the houseroom a man requires is proportioned, not to his riches, but rather to the number of his children; that is, to his poverty. The tax on probates of wills, a most objectionable impost on many accounts, stops, like the window tax, at a maximum.⁶ The same principle is carried into some branches of our indirect taxation. Thus the stamp duty on receipts does not rise in proportion to the amount of the sum paid: the ascending scale stops at a certain value.⁷ The legacy duty presents an inequality which, to a person unacquainted with the composition of the legislature by whom that duty was imposed, would look like an unaccountable anomaly: it is laid exclusively on what is called personal property; land is exempted.⁸

Further, all taxes on articles of consumption, which either nature or universal habit has placed among the necessaries of life, are unequal in the highest degree: for of such articles the poor consume as much, or nearly as much, as the rich, sometimes far more. The tax on foreign corn, considered merely as a source of revenue, and apart from its other evils, has all the iniquity of a poll tax; for the poor man, unless he is actually starving, must eat as much bread as the rich, and (if we count children only, and not servants) has as many mouths to feed. The duty on raw cotton, recently substituted for the still worse tax on the manufactured article, is objectionable on the same ground.⁹ Cottons are the dress, not so much of the rich as of the poor; and the coarser article consumed by the poorer purchaser, contains more of the raw material, and consequently pays a higher duty thereon, than the fine muslins worn by the higher ranks.

Not only is inequality chargeable upon nearly the whole of our taxes, but from the additional evil of waste, in some one or other of its forms, very few of them are exempt. There are not many of our excise duties which do not subject the producers or dealers to vexatious and burthensome regulations, interfering, in many ways, with the best and cheapest processes of production. Our custom duties cause much unnecessary expense and annoyance to the merchants, for which the latter indemnify themselves at the cost of the consumer; and so far as those duties affect articles which can be produced in the country itself, or in the colonies, they are almost always purposely shaped to protect (as the phrase is) home and colonial industry; a term which always means, to set home or colonial industry upon producing some particular article (which it would not naturally take to) in preference to producing some other article, through the medium of which it could obtain the first in greater quantity and at a less expense. The loss to the mother country, from the discriminating duties on timber alone,¹⁰ is moderately estimated at a million sterling a-year. The measure, an approximation to which the machinations of the Tories defeated in 1831,¹¹ would, if carried, have saved such a sum to the nation, as would have enabled us, without adding to any of the public burthens, to get rid of all the taxes on knowledge at one blow.

We had no intention to enter into a minute analysis of the vices of our revenue system; as a brief abstract the above may suffice. The question of most moment is, seeing the badness of most of the existing taxes, seeing, at the same time, that taxes of some one or other kind must be had, what should they be?

On this matter a principle is establishing itself in the public mind, which we consider an extremely salutary one; that among the modes of raising a revenue, those are commonly the most eligible which are the most direct. A tax which blends itself with the price of a commodity has indeed the seeming advantage, that by consenting to forego the use of the commodity it is possible to escape the tax, while from a direct tax on income or on property there is no escape: and this, no doubt, is one of the causes why a nation will submit to be taxed much more heavily when the taxes come in that shape. But this increased willingness to endure a burthen, which hitherto has almost always been too readily borne, is at least a doubtful advantage. On the other hand, the more direct you make your taxation—that is, the nearer you approach to making the person who is to pay it ultimately, pay it at once and avowedly—the greater is your security both against inequality and against waste. In the case of all indirect taxes, there is an apparent uncertainty hanging over the question, who pays them? an uncertainty at least sufficient to leave room for doubt and cavil; so that there being no sure standard acknowledged by all, to determine the real weight with which the taxes fall on different classes of the payers, an excuse may always be found for overcharging those who ought, on the contrary, to be relieved. We had an example of this in Lord Althorp’s budget, when it was proposed to tax the fundholder on the unfounded hypothesis that he was greatly undertaxed.¹² It is further to be remarked, that all taxes on commodities, and on the transfer of commodities, have more or less effect in diverting production from its natural and most beneficial course; independently of which, by limiting the demand for the taxed article, they operate as a discouragement to all those improvements in production, which in order to be introduced with advantage, require that the productive operations should be on a large scale.

Taxes, therefore, ought, if possible, to be direct. But a direct tax, if it aims at equality at all, must be a property tax. To a property tax, therefore, we must come. There are difficulties of detail in valuing the different kinds of property, and assessing them to the revenue so as to avoid inequality, without doing violence to the feelings of individuals. But, to surmount these difficulties, we cannot believe anything more to be necessary, than that the practical skill and sagacity which exist in the community, should fairly turn themselves to the task. That skill and sagacity daily effect things far more difficult. In the meanwhile, now is the time for clearing up thoroughly the question of principle; setting right every incorrectness in any of the conceptions commonly entertained of a property tax, and rendering the idea of such a tax definite and tangible. And this we propose to attempt in our next number.¹³

196.

ERRORS AND TRUTHS ON A PROPERTY TAX

EXAMINER, 27 JAN., 1833, PP. 51-2

Under the title appears “(Continued from the week before last.)”; for the first half, see No. 195. The item is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article in continuation of the foregoing [No. 195] and headed ‘Errors and Truths in a Property Tax’ in the Examiner of 27th January 1833, and signed A.B.” (MacMinn, p. 24). It is listed as title and enclosed in square brackets in the Somerville College set of the Examiner.

two contrary errors prevail with respect to a property tax. One of these was realized in practice, when a tax actually existed bearing that name:¹ the other is of recent growth, and is the logical opposite of the former. Both arise out of an indistinctness of meaning in the word property.

When we speak of a man’s property, we sometimes mean all that is his; all that constitutes his means of living; all he has to spend and to save. But sometimes the term is confined to actual accumulations; the saleable value of what he has actually belonging to him at any given instant. Thus, a physician or lawyer who gains 5000l. a-year by his practice, and spends it all, may be said in one sense to be a man of property; to have a property equal, or bearing some proportion to, the price of an annuity of that amount upon his life. But in the other sense, he may have no property, except the furniture of his house, and whatever other articles he may have momentarily in his possession for immediate use.

Now it would be a monstrous absurdity and injustice to enact that this man, though benefiting as much by legal protection as any other man in the nation, should remain untaxed merely because he spends all he gets; while the expense of protecting him is thrown upon the man who saves, to provide for old age or for a family, or to have leisure to employ himself in literature, science, or works of benevolence. On the other hand, it seems equally monstrous that one whose income is derived from his personal exertions, and depends on the continuance of his life, should be taxed at the same rate as he who derives his from land or capital, which remain permanently with him and can be transmitted to his descendants. Yet these contrary errors, that of leaving the wages of all kinds of labour untaxed, and that of taxing the earnings of labour at the same per centage as the income from land or stock, have gained a footing in many minds; and the latter, when the income tax existed in this kingdom, had established itself in our laws. The last circumstance, indeed, will surprise no one, who duly considers by whom those laws were made.

If there is to be a property tax, all income ought to be considered as property; but a temporary income ought to be deemed a less valuable property than a permanent one. It may be said, indeed, that if an income worth ten years’ purchase pays a given per centage for ten years, and an income worth twenty years’ purchase pays the same per centage for twenty years, the just proportion of taxation is observed, since there is the same ratio between the two payments as there is between the values of the two incomes. And this is true, if we confine our attention to a mere numerical equality; but not if we consider what is alone of any importance, equality of pressure upon the feelings of individuals. Suppose two men with equal incomes, one arising from land or capital, which can be transmitted to descendants, the other terminating with the life of the possessor: these two persons cannot afford to live in the same style of expence. The one may without imprudence spend his whole income; the other must lay by a part, as a provision for his children after his decease. It would be injustice if two men who for no purpose of comfort or enjoyment are equally rich, were to be treated as such solely for purposes of taxation.

The tax should, therefore, be so adjusted upon the person whose income is derived from the earnings of labour, as to enable him to exercise the forethought which duty requires of him, and does not require of the other, without any greater sacrifice of personal comforts and indulgences than is demanded from the owner of the permanent income. It would be impossible, indeed, to adapt the rate of taxation to the peculiarities of every individual case. There is no alternative but to be content with an average, and (what must so often be done in legislation) to cut the knot which it is found impracticable to untie. If a man whose income depends on his personal exertions, supposing him to live for the ordinary length of time, and to have the ordinary number of children, ought in prudence to lay by, throughout life (say) one-tenth part of his income; then an income of one hundred pounds, from the earnings of labour, ought to pay no more to the state, than an income of ninety pounds from a permanent source. By taking some such estimate as this for the foundation of a general rule, justice would be done in gross, though not in detail: to the class of labourers, though not to every individual contained in the class.

Reasons of an analogous kind may, perhaps, be found for taxing the incomes which persons in business derive from their stock in trade, at a lower percentage than those of the landholder, the fundholder, and other persons who can live in idleness, and whose income is not liable to vary. The income of a person in trade is partly the reward of his personal exertions, and comes within the proviso already made in favour of incomes which are the earnings of labour. It is also precarious, in a peculiar degree: and in the same manner as we would exempt from taxation that portion of income which prudence requires should be laid by as a provision for children, there seems equal reason for exempting such other portion, as may be considered equivalent to an insurance against peculiar risks or casualties.

But, if we may judge from newspapers, many well-meaning persons who desire a property tax, seem to understand by it a tax which is to fall solely upon landed and funded property, money lent, and (sometimes) stock in trade, and not at all (as the phrase is) upon industry. This doctrine appears to us fundamentally erroneous: yet in the prevalence of it we see proof of a very gratifying fact, namely, that there is no danger whatever of a confiscation of the funds. The demand for relief from taxes has taken another direction. A less noxious error, though still an error, has supplanted that worst of errors. The cry is not, to throw the whole load of the national debt on a single class, the fundholders, whose incomes are mostly small or moderate, and the bonâ fide earning of honest industry; but to lay this, together with the other public burthens, upon the collective body of the owners of accumulated property. The injustice here is far less heinous, because, being spread over a much larger body of persons, it would fall less heavily upon each: that body including, moreover, all the richest, and none of the absolutely poor. Still it is injustice, for it is partial taxation. The man who lives by his exertions, benefits by the existence of government as much as he who subsists by his accumulations, or by the accumulations of his forefathers. Without legal protection, the one could no more get what he spends, than the other could keep what he has saved: and both ought to contribute in the just ratio of their ability, to the support of that without which the existence of both would be alike precarious. Furthermore, a partial tax of the kind proposed would be a penalty on prudence; an encouragement held out to every man to dissipate all he gets, by taxing him if he saves, and leaving him untaxed if he squanders. And as the fund from which all labourers subsist while they labour, is derived from the savings of former labour, it may be judged what kind of relief that is, which could be afforded to industry by a tax on saving.

There is one case, and no more, in which the justice of laying an exclusive contribution on accumulations actually made, might admit of a valid defence. If a great national effort were to be made for paying off the national debt, there would be much to be said for demanding the sacrifice exclusively from the owners of property already in existence, and not requiring those whose sole property is their labour, to mortgage the future earnings of that labour in order to defray their share. The pecuniary engagements of a government (it may with much show of justice be contended) are a mortgage upon the property which existed in the country when those engagements were entered into. It is for him who inherited his father’s property to pay his father’s debts. In public as in private, the heir or successor is freed from the burthen of fulfilling his predecessor’s obligations, if he faithfully gives up the whole of the inheritance to the creditors.

We rather invite attention to this argument, than express any opinion as to its conclusiveness. The strongest objection to it which we can anticipate, is the impossibility of distinguishing, after the lapse of years, property inherited, from property acquired by industry and frugality since the national debt was contracted. Property accumulated during the interval, would have as good a title to exemption on the principle laid down, as property to be acquired hereafter. In proportion as the latter was relieved, the burthen would press heavier upon the former; and we seem to be placed in the alternative of continuing to do a smaller injustice to a larger number, or beginning to do a greater injustice to a smaller number.

A notice of motion was given on the last day of the session, by Mr. W.B. Evans, (who, we regret to observe, has retired from parliament,) for throwing the national debt upon property.² Mr. Evans was probably moved to this proceeding by some such arguments as those we have now thrown out. But we must suggest to him that this idea, however good for paying off the national debt, is altogether unfit to be adopted in merely paying the interest of it. For, that way, the tax would extend to future accumulations as well as past: the burthen would not be taken off the coming generation, but, on the contrary, would be imposed with double weight upon as many of that generation as save. Those alone who spend all they get, and, as far as depends on themselves, add nothing permanently to the national wealth, would in consideration of their prodigality, and of their comparative uselessness to society, obtain exemption from the heaviest of the national burthens. This, therefore, would be not only in every way an inequitable, but a highly immoral tax.

There remains the question of what is called a graduated property tax; that is, a tax which demands from the larger incomes not only a larger quantity, but a larger proportion than from the smaller ones. We have not left ourselves space to treat this question at any length, and we will merely suggest the leading considerations which influence our own minds.

All persons who profess any regard for justice or morality, are advocates, at least in words, of equal taxation. To tax any class exclusively, though it be the class of rich; or to tax any class in a greater proportion than other classes, all men admit to be unjust. Now primâ facie it would appear that the only mode of taxing all members of the community equally, is to take the same percentage from all property alike; whatever that per centage be, whether the twentieth penny, (to use the ancient expression,) the hundredth penny, or the thousandth.

To this, however, it is answered, that equal taxation consists not in taking equal proportions from the incomes of individuals, but in taking equal proportions from their enjoyments. If you abstract from a rich man one-tenth of his income, and from a poor man one-tenth of his, you demand a greater sacrifice of enjoyment from the poor man than from the rich. The one you only compel to forego some object of fancy or luxury, while to the other you may cause actual physical distress.

Up to a certain point there is truth in this. If from the man who has only ten shillings a-week you take one shilling, he is probably put to greater inconvenience than the man who has 1000l. a-year and from whom you demand 100l. But why? Because in the case of the poorer man the tax trenches upon the actual necessaries of life; upon the things which nature, not custom or convention, has rendered indispensable. If the tax spares actual necessaries, the maxim no longer holds: beyond that point it is scarcely true that numerical equality is real inequality. One-tenth of each man’s superfluities would seem to be no heavier tax on one man than on another, whatever may be the difference in their fortunes. And by superfluities we mean all that they possess beyond what suffices for the natural wants common to all mankind. Of artificial wants, created by fashion or habit, legislation can in this case take no cognizance; for if these be taken into the account, there are no such things as superfluities. Every class has its own standard of the comforts and indulgences necessary to its station; a standard proportional to its income, and usually determined by what that income is: and if, in deference to such conventional wants, the burthen of taxation were lightened upon any class, the sole effect would be to raise the conventional standard so much the higher.

Our plan therefore would be, to relieve the smaller incomes from direct taxation entirely, up to the income which might be deemed fully sufficient to satisfy those physical wants of a human being which are independent of habit and convention: to keep off hunger and cold, and provide for old age, and for the ordinary chances of sickness, or other inability to work. Having fixed this minimum for entire exemption, we would tax all permanent incomes exceeding this, in exact proportion to the excess. Thus, if 50l. a-year be the minimum, (we take the figures at random,) if it be deemed that any man, with a family such as all men might have without overstocking the labour market, cannot exist, free from physical discomfort, upon less than 50l.; incomes of that amount, or less, should be exempted from the tax, while all others should be taxed a certain per centage on whatever surplus they possess beyond 50l. If, for example, the tax were ten per cent., a man with 60l. a-year should pay out of the odd ten, one pound; the man of 100l. a-year, of the odd fifty, five pounds; the man of 1000l. a-year, of the odd 950, ninety-five. This kind of graduated property tax appears to us to be just, and no other. We would apply the same principle to incomes of temporary duration, such as those derived from the earnings of industry; with the reservation already made, that of leaving untaxed such portion of the income as ought to be saved to form the inheritance of descendants. If this portion be estimated at one-tenth,^* the taxable part of the income of a professional man would be not the whole but nine-tenths only of the surplus which he earns beyond 50l. a-year; upon these nine-tenths however we would levy the same per centage as upon income from a permanent source.

We would not, however, leave all incomes below a given minimum wholly untaxed; we are inclined to retain a few such taxes on luxuries, at any rate on stimulants, as might by possibility touch those lowest incomes. It is but just that the indulgence which we suppose the state to extend to a poor man, because all his income is required for actual necessaries, should be contingent upon his really so expending it; and that if he thinks fit to encroach upon his own or his family’s necessaries, for the purchase of mere indulgences, he should contribute his share to the public revenue like the rest of the community. It is equally just that if the owner of a life income chooses to spend on his pleasures that proportion of his income which the state exempts from direct taxation, on the presumption that it is to be saved, he should, by means of that very expenditure, contribute indirectly to the necessities of the state, through taxes on consumption.

A.B.

197.

FLOWER’S HYMN OF THE POLISH EXILES

EXAMINER, 17 FEB., 1833, P. 101

After the military revolt late in 1830 against Russian domination was put down in September 1831, the rebel leaders were exiled to Siberia; many other Poles took part in the “great emigration” of the 1830s to 1850s to France, Britain, and other countries. Mill’s review of Eliza Flower’s Hymn of the Polish Exiles by the Siberian Sea (London: Novello and Fox, 1833) indicates his political sympathies as well as his interest in music (he played the piano and composed airs for his own pleasure), and his continuing encouragement of the work of Miss Flower (see Nos. 112 and 155). The review, in the “Musical” section, is headed “Hymn of the Polish Exiles by the Siberian Sea; composed by the Author of ‘Musical Illustrations of the Waverley Novels,’ ‘Songs of the Seasons,’ &c. The words from ‘The Charmed Sea,’ a Tale, by Harriet Martineau.” The Charmed Sea was No. 13 of the Illustrations of Political Economy, 9 vols. (London: Fox, 1833) by Harriet Martineau (1802-76), the prolific writer who was at this time contributing essays to the Monthly Repository for W.J. Fox. The “Hymn” that provided Flower’s text is on p. 104 of The Charmed Sea. The review is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A notice of Miss Flower’s ‘Hymn of the Polish Exiles’ in the Examiner of 17th February 1833” (MacMinn, p. 25). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is similarly listed (“Review” replacing “A notice”) and enclosed in square brackets.

the words of this hymn or prayer, notwithstanding some faults, were not unworthy to be chosen by Miss Flower, as the vehicle of one of her inspired strains: and Miss Martineau, or any one else who writes with a meaning, may be congratulated on meeting with a composer who is able and resolved to make that meaning felt, even when the collocation and rhythm of the words renders this a task of some difficulty. The skilful manner in which the unpleasant effect of a fault in the metre of the first line is obviated in the music, exemplifies our remark.

The air is an Adagio in C minor, terminating in a chorus, and its expression accords with the imploring, desponding, yet not despairing character belonging to the words and to the situation. The composer has shown her usual command over the resources of her art, both in respect to harmony and modulation. The concluding passage, “Give us our heritage again,” is highly characteristic and beautiful. [P. 4.]

It is proper to mention that this composition, which, by the ordinary tricks of publishers, might easily have been spread over at least two sheets, is compressed into the compass of one.¹ It is printed, not engraved, and is sold for one shilling. We trust that this low price will be made up for by extensive circulation, and that the song will contribute largely to the diffusion of that sympathy with Polish heroism and misfortune, which may still administer consolation for the woes it cannot remedy.

198.

THE MONTHLY REPOSITORY FOR MARCH 1833

EXAMINER, 17 MAR., 1833, PP. 164-5

This is the first of six eulogistic notices by Mill (see Nos. 200, 207, 214, 225, and 229) of the Monthly Repository, a journal founded in 1806 as a Unitarian organ but transformed under the editorship (1828 to 1836) of Mill’s friend W.J. Fox into a wide-ranging journal of literature and politics. Mill himself had begun to contribute to the journal with “On Genius” in October 1832, followed by “What Is Poetry?” in January; he had nothing in the March number. The attack on marriage law in the notice may be compared with the contemporary essays on marriage by Mill and Harriet Taylor (CW, Vol. XXI, pp. 35-49 and 375-7). The review, in the “Literary Examiner,” is headed “The Monthly Repository for March 1833 [n.s. VII]. Edited by W.J. Fox”; the references are to this volume. The review is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A notice in the Examiner of 17th March 1833 of the number of the ‘Monthly Repository’ for the same month, incl. [sic]” (MacMinn, p. 25). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Review of the Monthly Repository for March 1833” and enclosed in square brackets.

this valuable periodical, though its reputation and influence are rapidly extending, has not yet made so much way among the general public, as it will when it is better known; chiefly, as we believe, from the impression that, although conducted by the least sectarian of all ministers of religion, it is still in some degree what it once was avowedly, the organ of the theological opinions of a sect. Mr. Fox, however, is well known as a man with whom religion is not a thing apart, an interest which supersedes and excludes all others, but one which heightens and purifies them; in whose estimation the duty of a christian man or of a christian teacher, is not to abstain from worldly concerns, but to pursue them in an unworldly spirit. With him, the temporal welfare of man and the eternal are not two objects conflicting and contradictory, but the first is part and parcel of the last; the last, but the prolongation and amplification of the first. Reversing the order in which commonplace divines present the two ideas, he holds, not that human beings will best perform their duty here by keeping the internal eye constantly fixed in mystical contemplation upon hereafter; but that whatever is best calculated to fit mankind for this world, fits them best also for the world to come.

It would be strange if under such editorship a work could be sectarian. The controversial theology which occupied a large part of the pages of the Repository under the former management, is now banished to a separate publication, the Unitarian Chronicle;¹ and the Repository has so completely divested itself of its original character, that the Unitarian Association, we are informed, have withdrawn their patronage from it; not from any disapprobation of its principles or tendencies, but on the declared ground that it is no longer a religious work.

A moral and political magazine, which in politics and legislation stedfastly advocates the principles of the philosophic reformers; which carries the same principles of really conservative reform through the whole range of social morality; and which, along with all that tends to improve the physical state and social relations of man, includes likewise in its comprehensive aim all that can elevate, refine, and beautify the individual mind; such a work ought not to be looked shyly upon by the general reader on suspicion of being sectarian, while it is losing the support of sectarians precisely because it is not so.

The most remarkable paper in the number which has just appeared—we might say one of the most remarkable which have appeared in any periodical for many months—is the recital, with its appropriate commentary, of an “ower true tale”² —the authentic history of the life of Mehetabel Wesley, a sister of the celebrated founder of Methodism.³ The writer has here given us the deeply affecting and most instructive narrative of the sufferings of a being formed to give and to enjoy happiness such as few are capable of, but whose life, from infancy till death, was a continued martyrdom. She was one of the most to be pitied of the victims of whom whole hecatombs have been and are sacrificed, first to a narrow and bigoted and chilling education, aiming deliberately to crush all independent exercise of the faculties whether of heart or of understanding: and next to a marriage-law, which, as at present constituted, is one of the worst of our social institutions—a law which permits the stronger party to evade with impunity every one of the essentials of the contract, while the misery of an ill-assorted union is left to press upon the weaker with unmitigated burden, and without a hope of relief, unless purchased by what the world have stamped as infamy.

Mehetabel Wesley had the misfortune “of being born into what is called a well-regulated family.” [P. 165.] After an animated description of the highly correct and respectable formalists whom she had the unhappiness to call father and mother,⁴ the writer proceeds as follows:

Under such auspices was the gentle, fragile, playful, lovely, loving, and sensitive Mehetabel Wesley ushered into the world. She sprang up like the chance seedling of a delicate acacia between the cold hard pebbles of a well-rolled gravel walk, in a square bedded garden, with its formal box and thorny fence, there to be trained, nailed up, and crucified to an iron frame, or a varnished brick-wall, and be tortured, chilled, and wither; beautiful even in her drooping and her death. Her first calamity was what there are too many who would still regard as the best of all possible educations. The industrious Mrs. Wesley, the paragon of moral and religious mothers, was soon hard at work upon her. The plans pursued are minutely detailed in a letter from the good lady herself, which is preserved as an almost infallible directory. It describes the law, order, and duty system, the fear, honour, reverence, and obey plan in its most complete development. Every thing is summed up in submission; submission of heart, mind, and limb, in thought, word, will, and deed.

[Pp. 166-7.]

Mrs. Wesley’s one thing needful⁵ in the education of children was to conquer their will.

To inform the understanding (we quote her words) is a work of time, and must proceed with children by slow degrees, as they are able to bear it; but the subjecting the will is a thing that must be done at once, and the sooner the better.

[P. 167; Fox’s parenthesis.]

Not one suspicion that it is possible in education to form and guide the will through the agency of the affections, ever seems to have crossed the mind of this paragon of mothers.

We had marked for extraction a passage which not only all parents but all human beings should lay to heart—a protest, noble in thought and animated in expression, against this servile and brutalizing theory of education, the favourite theory even now of the ascetic school of religionists. [Pp. 168-70.] But our readers should be readers of this admirable paper in its original integrity, not in such fragments as space permits us to transcribe.

It was not, indeed, in the power even of Mrs. Wesley and her well-regulated family to crush the feelings, or altogether deaden the intellect of a being in whom “the spirit of love could not be quenched—it was in her very frame;” [p. 170] but what her wretched education could do to corrupt such a being it accomplished; it did pervert her opinions; it taught her that the subjugation of her own will, and the sacrifice of the entire happiness of her life to the arbitrary commands and to the noxious superstitions of others, was a religious duty. Here was the primary evil; in this lay the origin of “a costly wreck of thoughts, feelings, hopes, and capacities of enjoyment, which surely nothing in nature rendered necessary or unavoidable,” [p. 170] and which needed not even thus to have been so utter and so hopeless, had not the institutions which pass for the highest and holiest safeguards of morality, predetermined that, for the most heart-withering of all miseries, though nature allows a remedy, law should allow none.

In the bitterness of a disappointment in love, she made a vow to marry the first man who offered himself to her. “A creature as low in mind as in condition, ignorant and grovelling,” wholly illiterate and wholly unfeeling,—“a Caliban civilized into vulgarity by the pot-house, had the audacity to offer the violence of marriage to this Miranda, and her father compelled her to submit to the brutality. His enforcement of his daughter’s vow in misery, was far worse than Jephtha’s consummation of his own vow in blood.” [P. 172.]⁶ The importunities of her whole family, who would have regarded the breach of this irrational vow as one of the deadliest of sins, prevailed over a will “effectually broken down” [p. 174] by the notable education of her notable mother, and she offered herself up as a sacrifice.

The victim is bound to the altar. A brand never to be erased marks her for the property of a brute. The truthful burst of agony from the lips of disappointed love was false in its form of expression, and superstition has made it a spell whereby to conjure up more vows, which are false in essence, and defy volition, which pledge her for ever to love the unlovely, and honour the dishonoured, and obey what there were immorality in not resisting. It is done; and the long train of hopeless years commence their lagging march through a world whose beauty should only echo the voice of joy and singing; a wretched procession, in tears and anguish, slow winding to the grave.—And this endured, or rather she endured, through the quarter of a century. It was only in the six and twentieth year of her suffering, that she was dismissed to tell Milton in heaven that his doctrine was still immoral upon earth.

[P. 174.]⁷

For the greater part of that period “she lived in the hope of death.” [P. 176.] Well and truly does the writer say of this state of endurance, that “it cannot be read of or imagined without acute sympathy or irrepressible indignation.” [P. 171.]

We will not weaken by any words of ours the impression which must be left upon all minds not utterly callous, by the lofty and moving eloquence of the concluding passage: a passage in which (as indeed in the whole article) the noble soul of the writer actually shines through his words.

Mehetabel Wesley was the victim, as woman is yet continually the victim, of bad education, perverted religion, and unequal institution. The finer the individual nature, the more costly is the sacrifice. The feeling, taste, mental power, and moral purity, which some of her poems, and many passages of her life indicate, are such as to prove her capability, in favourable circumstances, of ministering most largely to social improvement and enjoyment, and, at the same time, to individual happiness, and of having both blessings amply measured back into her own bosom. And all this was wasted upon one for whom a comely scullion, with not a thought above her avocation, would have been as satisfactory a companion, probably much more so, and would have received from him much better treatment. How is this? Her brothers would have said that it pleased Heaven sorely to try her; and that is true as far as it goes; but we rather think it also pleases Heaven to show by this, and similar examples, that the true morality, that which conducts to happiness, is not always correctly interpreted by society, not even by that portion of society which claims to be eminently religious. The restraint which crippled her faculties, the awful rod which made her an infant slave, was an immorality. This was the source of her own errors. The twig was twisted, and so grew the tree, though graceful even in its distortion. Her marriage was an immorality. So was her continuing through life in a sexual companionship where mutual affection was impossible; not that she was conscious of viciousness, but the contrary; she no doubt thought her misery was her duty. Ill fare the machinery that wrought the perversion and the suffering. For woman so situated there ought to be redress, open and honourable redress, in every country that calls itself civilized. Her situation was even worse than if she had committed that act which, by the law of Moses, would have subjected her to death by stoning;⁸ for then she might have been liberated from an enforced and intolerable bond, and even have entered on a new state, perchance of the affection and enjoyment for which she was framed. But her mind was enslaved; it had been scourged into the faith that she was a property, and not a being; her father had divorced himself for a twelvemonth; her husband probably did worse; but she never suspected reciprocity of right or equality of will. And they never suspected that there was degradation in the species of mastery which they arrogated. Savage man kicks and beats woman, and makes her toil in the fields; semi-civilized man locks her up in a harem; and man three-quarters civilized, which is as far as we are got, educates her for pleasure and dependency, keeps her in a state of pupilage, closes against her most of the avenues of self-support, and cheats her by the false forms of an irrevocable contract into a life of subservience to his will. The reason for all which is “that he is the stronger.” And the result of which is that he often lacks an intelligent and sympathizing companion when most he needs one; a high-minded helpmate to cheer him in noble toils and bitter sacrifices; and a mother for his children who will take care that the next generation shall advance on the mental and moral attainments of the present. Truly he makes as bad a bargain as he deserves.

[Pp. 176-7.]

199.

FRENCH NEWS [77]

EXAMINER, 31 MAR., 1833, P. 201

After a three-month gap, explained in his opening sentence, Mill here returns to French politics, though not on a weekly basis; his next summary, No. 204, was published five weeks later, on 5 May, as suggested in his concluding sentence. The article, headed “London, March 31, 1833,” is described in his bibliography as “The summary of French affairs in the Examiner of 31st March 1833” (MacMinn, p. 25). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets.

we have discontinued of late our usual notices of French affairs, because all which has been doing in that country is so paltry, so devoid alike of any importance in the immediate result, and of any indication respecting the future, that we felt no inducement to record in our columns, in addition to the trivialities of our own country, the still smaller trivialities of another country, which, as foreigners, we have so little power of shaming into better things. The national subscription for M. Laffitte compels us to break our silence.¹ Here, at least, is a manifestation worthy of the better days of France. As the French have been more fortunate than ourselves in the number of their examples of eminent public and private virtue in high stations, so the generosity of their national character has been more conspicuously called forth in behalf of such in the time of need. M. Laffitte is now enjoying the highest reward, next to his own self-approbation, of a life of unsullied and consistent nobleness in all public relations, and of a beneficence as unbounded as it was judicious and considerate, in the employment of a large fortune. The announcement for sale of his splendid mansion in the street which bears his name, (owing to the loss of almost all his property by the commercial crisis consequent upon the Revolution of 1830,) has been the occasion for this testimony of affectionate gratitude, in which the many whom he has personally obliged, often to the extent of saving them from ruin, participate with all classes of his countrymen,—from the banker, M. Aguado,² with his munificent contribution of four thousand pounds, to the workman of the faubourgs with his one or two francs. The subscription bids fair, even in these times of apathy and discouragement, to rival that for the orphan children of General Foy.³

The French Government has declared its intention of convoking the Chambers for a second session this year, in order to vote the budget of 1834, that the salutary practice may be resumed of voting each year’s estimates in the year preceding.⁴ The present session is therefore likely soon to close; perhaps without having effected a single important legislative improvement: certainly without having passed a fifth part of the bills, on subjects of the first magnitude, which have been laid before the two houses. The ministry (if ministry it can be called, which is only the king and a set of clerks,) appears to have a firm hold of office: the chamber has no wish to turn them out, though it has given them several most unpalatable checks; by making serious alterations in some of their bills, refusing various money grants, and several times disallowing expenses which had been already incurred: these will doubtless be covered by part of the immense amount of secret service money which the Chamber complaisantly grants. When the prorogation takes place, we shall give a brief summary of the results of the session:⁵ they really are not worth an earlier or a more detailed notice.

200.

THE MONTHLY REPOSITORY FOR APRIL 1833

EXAMINER, 14 APR., 1833, PP. 229-30

For the first of Mill’s notices of the Monthly Repository, see No. 198. Mill’s own “Writings of Junius Redivivus” was in the April number of the Monthly Repository. This review, in the “Literary Examiner,” is headed “The Monthly Repository for April [n.s. VII]”; the page numbers refer to this volume. The review is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A short notice in the Examiner of 14th April 1833 of the number of the Monthly Repository for the same month” (MacMinn, p. 26). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Notice of the Monthly Repository for April” and enclosed in square brackets.

this we think decidedly the best number which has yet appeared of Mr. Fox’s excellent periodical. There is no one article in it of the surpassing merit which distinguished the affecting paper in the last number on Mehetabel Wesley;¹ but the general average is decidedly higher than in that number; none of the articles, perhaps, are without some kind or degree of merit and usefulness, and several are almost too good to be limited to the transitory and perishable existence of articles in a magazine. Among these we must include the paper on the life, character, and writings of Dr. Priestley, the last of three articles on the same subject, exhibiting very considerable philosophical attainments and unusual skill in the analysis of character.²

There are many passages in this and other articles well worthy of extraction, but we prefer to copy out the following verses, which express feelings such as all poets must have expressed, with a perfect truth and yet with an originality of manner which marks, even in so slight a production, real genius:

To Kathleen
- Thou hast jetty eyes in brightness glancing,
- Glossy ringlets in the free air dancing,
- Cheek from rose to lily ever changing,
- As thro’ feeling’s world thy thought is ranging.
- Thou bringest gifts of Nature’s fairest treasure
- To those who reckon every flower a pleasure
- Dewy darlings! exquisite creations!
- E’en their shadows seem to have sensations.
- Yet should beauty fade, and flowers wither,
- I will bid thee ever welcome hither;
- Though every charm beside were from thee parted,
- Thou hast that best of all—thou’rt honest-hearted.
- Then welcome, Kathleen, whatsoe’er thou bringest,
- Welcome hither when this way thou wingest,
- Not for eye, or cheek, or dewy blossom,
- But the heart thou wear’st within thy bosom.³

201.

FLOWER’S MIGNON’S SONG AND WHEN THOU WERT HERE

EXAMINER, 21 APR., 1833, P. 245

For Mill’s previous notices of Flower, see Nos. 112, 155, and 197. This review is in the “Music” section, where it is headed “1. Mignon’s Song; or, A foreign sky above. By the Author of the Musical Illustrations of the Waverley novels, &c. 2. When thou wert here. Ballad, composed by the same author. Both published by J. Alfred Novello. [London, 1833.]” The words to the second song are by Sarah Flower, Eliza Flower’s sister. It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A short notice of two of Miss Flower’s songs, in the Examiner of 21st April 1833” (MacMinn, p. 26). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Review of two of Miss Flower’s songs” and enclosed in square brackets, with one correction: at 563.18, “related” is altered to “selected”.

two beautiful songs, worthy of the genius and taste of the composer. Like all her other works they strike less at first hearing than they delight on a more familiar knowledge.

The second will perhaps add most to the composer’s musical reputation, being in a style more unlike her other compositions, and perhaps better calculated for general popularity. But the Song of Mignon is by far the most touching. This is not the well-known Kennst du das Land, which Beethoven, not very successfully, set to music, but an expansion and paraphrase of a shorter and still more affecting passage from the same work of Goethe.¹ It begins thus:

A foreign sky above
A foreign earth below me,
To the south I look all day—
For the friends who love and know me
Are far, far away!
[P. 2.]

Words more adapted to musical expression never fell to the lot or were selected by the judgment of a composer. Miss Flower has entered fully into their spirit. The exquisitely pathetic close of the passage “the friends who love and know me are far, far away,” is in the best style of Spohr,² one of whose loveliest passages it resembles, but without anything approaching to plagiarism.

202.

THE BUDGET

EXAMINER, 28 APR., 1833, PP. 258-9

Though far from finished with French politics, Mill here reveals a growing tendency to concentrate on English affairs, as he did for the next five years, especially after the founding of the London Review in 1835. The details Mill mentions were given by Lord Althorp in introducing the budget on 19 Apr. (PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 17, cols. 326-39). This leading article in the “Political Examiner” is headed as title. It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article headed ‘The Budget’ in the Examiner, of 28th April 1833” (MacMinn, p. 26). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as title and enclosed in square brackets (excluding the footnote), with two corrections: at 564.32 “that when” is altered to “that the time when”, and at 565.6 “wisdom as” is altered to “wisdom and”.

the position of a minister who is able to propose taking off taxes, is a most favourable one: it is hardly possible for him to avoid being popular; whatever he proposes is sure to pass, and to pass with extraordinary facility.

Commutation of taxes is quite another thing; often fully as important as abolition, but always excessively difficult to accomplish.

As much harm may be done by raising the necessary amount of revenue in a bad way, as even by raising an extravagant amount. For instance, the taxes on paper, on pamphlets, on foreign books,¹ and on newspapers, impede the diffusion of knowledge;² the tax on soap operates against cleanliness; the taxes on insurance are direct discouragements to prudence; the auction-duty is, in most cases, a tax on distress;³ the malt tax⁴ and the excise, in all its branches, necessitates vexatious regulations, which render production troublesome and expensive, and prevent the introduction of improved processes, thereby taking far more out of the pockets of the people than the amount of the revenue afforded to Government. Many other taxes are objectionable on account of the great expenses of their collection. We speak not at present of those which are unequally assessed; bearing hard upon the poor or the middle classes, and lightly on the rich; such as almost all the stamp duties, and the house and window taxes.

Now, let a tax be bad to any excess, if, in taking it off, it be necessary to impose a new one, the measure is almost sure to be unpopular: there is far greater clamour from the newly-taxed than gratitude from the newly-relieved. The latter personage has usually been proclaiming his grievance to the four corners of the world for years before, and he considers its removal as a tardy act of justice, wrung from the Minister by importunity, obtained only because it could no longer be refused, and for which he makes quite a sufficient return of thankfulness if he cease complaining. The party, on the contrary, upon whom the new tax is imposed, resents it as a wrong of the deepest dye; resents the unexpected addition to his burthens, and resents, above all, that he should be called upon to pay more to the State in order that another may pay less.

What follows? This, surely; that the time when there is a surplus revenue, when taxes are to be absolutely remitted, not merely commuted, is an opportunity which should be eagerly seized for weeding out the worst taxes, and getting rid of them for ever. That is the way to retrench to most advantage. The nation saves the tax, and it saves two or three times the tax in the moral or economical ills which were produced by the particular taxes she is enabled to extirpate. When you can reduce taxation itself, then is the time to get rid of bad modes of taxation; by which, still more than by the mere amount, taxation is injurious.

Have the Ministers thought of this? Not the least; equally deficient in worldly wisdom and in any higher kind, they have positively accomplished the marvel of remitting a million of taxes without gaining one particle of credit from anybody. They might have so managed their remissions that the country would save far more than the revenue would lose; they have so managed them that the country will not save one farthing more, if even so much. Except the trifling duty on tiles,⁵ they have not abolished a single tax. They have pared off a little from one and a little from another; leaving the expenses of collection undiminished, and removing none of the collateral evils even of the taxes which are lowered. Does any one suppose, for instance, that a slight diminution of that most immoral tax—on marine assurances, will be of any avail while the greater part remains? The reduction of the duty on soap is partially an exception to this part of our censure, if, as Lord Althorp affirms, it will put a stop to the illicit manufacture; but this is still a problem. There is probably no one individual in the community who will feel in this reduction of taxes any sensible relief; who will be conscious of having five shillings in his pocket which he would not otherwise have had:—we mistake; we ought to except Mr. Warren, Messrs. Goss and Co.,⁶ and other frequent advertisers, who will grow rich upon even so small a reduction of the advertisement duty, especially if the plan be persevered in of making the reduction greater in proportion to the repetition of the same advertisement.⁷ The landlords, too, of the London shopkeepers may have reason to be thankful to Lord Althorp for an increase of their rents, if, as is by no means improbable, that portion of the house and window taxes which is to be remitted in favour of their tenants, will go into their already well-filled pockets.

A reduction, less called for than that of the extra tax on the importation of raw cotton, scarcely could have been found.⁸ Some nonsense was talked by Mr. Baring and others about the advantage of this remission to our export trade;⁹ but, surely, in cottons, if in any thing, we have little to fear from foreign rivalry; and besides, the duty might be (we believe it already is) drawn back on exportation.

With the amount of remission which the Ministers had decided upon, they might have entirely abolished the stamp duty on newspapers, the taxes on fire and marine insurances, on pamphlets and foreign books, the auction duty, and perhaps the duty on soap. By equalizing the duties on foreign and colonial timber, which with their present large majority^* they could surely accomplish, though a Tory manoeuvre defeated their former attempt to approximate to such an equalization,¹⁰ they might have raised, as has been shown again and again, an additional million on timber without any increase of burthen, and with that they might have dispensed with the tax on paper and the tax on bricks¹¹ or glass. By equalizing the house tax and fairly assessing the houses of the rich, they might have got rid of the window tax entirely. By equalizing the stamp duties they might have raised as large a revenue as at present with less pressure on the middle classes.

203.

CONFISCATION SCHEME OF THE TIMES

EXAMINER, 5 MAY, 1833, P. 275

For Mill’s earlier comments on property taxes, see Nos. 195 and 196. This article, responding to and quoting one in The Times, 2 May, p. 2, in response to the budget (see No. 202), is in the “Political Examiner,” headed as title. It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article headed ‘Confiscation Scheme of the Times’ in the Examiner of 5th May 1833” (MacMinn, p. 26). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as title and enclosed in square brackets (including the note).

the times is at the head of that class of brawlers for a property tax, who mean by it a tax on other people’s property, exempting their own.

The Times has resisted all former projects of confiscation; but it is now identifying itself with perhaps the most audaciously unjust scheme of confiscation yet broached: a “property tax” to be levied on landholders and public and private creditors exclusively, and falling, as may easily be shown, upon the present landholders and the present fundholders, to the exclusion even of future ones.

But we shall allow this scheme of iniquity to speak for itself.

The object which, in common with a large body of the public, we had most at heart on this late occasion, was, that Ministers themselves, in accordance with the spirit manifested throughout the great towns, the capital, and the country, should have seized the tide at flood, and proposed, not resisted, the abrogation of the obnoxious imposts, replacing them by a “property” tax. Now, with respect to this latter expedient of finance, as it has given rise to much controversy, and will be contested, we presume, during, at least, the present Session of Parliament, it seems to us most desirable to employ no terms in the designation of the tax that can be turned to the sinister end of raising artificial difficulties in the shape of causeless terror, or repugnance, or creating ambiguities susceptible of what determination artful partizans may by and by be pleased to give them, and thus unfairly disposing the minds of men to look at this great, equitable, and efficient measure as one fraught with oppression and iniquity. In one sense, and one only, a “property tax” and an “income tax” is the same thing, namely, a tax upon the income derived from every species of fixed and realized property. The question has been put forth in recent publications, as if a Property Tax must mean of necessity a tax upon landed and monied capital, however employed or circumstanced. This is not what we have ever deemed to be a true description of the tax, or an honest one, of such a tax as, in this commercial country, would ever be endured. To tax, generally, the capital engaged in active commerce, would be to fetter industry in all its branches, and to impede the progress of the merchant’s or manufacturer’s profits on their way to investment in some shape or other, under which they might be fairly made available to a tax on property. By a Property Tax, that Property Tax which, with all the casual inequalities inseparable from it, though we believe they have been much exaggerated, that the public may be discouraged from demanding it, with all these we have, nevertheless, more than once recommended, by that tax, our intention is, a per centage tax on revenue drawn from legally ascertained and secured property, whether land, buildings, or money at interest in the funds, on bond, or mortgage, in perpetuity, for a definite term, or for life. This is at once an “Income Tax,” and a “Property Tax.” But it is not a tax on profits, precarious or conjectural. It waits until the profits, whether professional or commercial, shall have been converted by investment into capital, to which they have a general tendency, as all streams have to the ocean. Nine-tenths of the outcry which was raised against the old Income Tax was because of its warfare upon the operations of commercial industry, and for what? For the sake of less than one-sixth of the produce of the tax.

(The Times of Thursday last.)

The “equitable adjustment,”¹ while vindicated on the ground of the pretended change in the value of the currency, was honesty itself compared with this. The shallow attempt at fraud which lies in the words “fixed and realized property” is hardly worth the trouble of exposure. A has twenty thousand pounds with which he sets up a manufactory. B has other twenty thousand pounds which he has lent to A: B is to be taxed and A is to go free. Why, in Heaven’s name? for what useful, for what honest end? Say, if you will, that the amount of A’s property cannot be correctly estimated, or that the attempt to estimate it would be inquisitorial; (we believe that is the phrase;) these may be good reasons against laying the tax upon A; but they can be no reasons for leaving him and fastening upon B. If you will not endure to be taxed yourselves, gentlemen of the Times, that does not entitle you to tax other people who may not be so well able to evade the tax. This pretension of capital engaged in business, to be exempt from taxation because it may be taxed when it is withdrawn from business, is a pretension almost worthy of the pampered selfishness of a hereditary Legislature. A tax is to be laid on the man who has saved, in order not to “impede the progress” of the man who is saving; the man who does not save remaining untaxed. The tax is not to fall on “profits,” it is to wait until the profits are “converted by investment into capital;” capital belonging to a farmer, a manufacturer, a merchant, or a tradesman, not being, it seems, capital at all. By your good leave, gentlemen of the Times, the people of Great Britain will not allow those four denominations of persons to withdraw their necks from the burthen of taxation, throwing their portion of the public expenses upon other people. Depend upon it, whatever may be the case with the poor, the rich, at least, in the times that are coming, will be obliged to share and share alike. By their stupidity and rapacity they may succeed in weakening the security of all property; but let them rely upon this, that they will not be permitted to make scape-goats of any particular class of its possessors.

The proposers of this precious scheme cannot but be aware that being partial taxation, it is confiscation; but they probably are not aware that it would be a robbery of the present landholders and fundholders exclusively. If a tax of ten per cent. were laid upon the income from land and the funds, the price of both would, of course, fall ten per cent. immediately, and future purchasers coming in at the reduced price, would have an equivalent for the extra tax, they would bear no greater burthen than they did before. The measure, therefore, would amount simply to a seizure of one tenth of the land from the present landholders, and a cutting off one tenth of the funds from the present fundholders. It would be one of the most naked acts of spoliation recorded in history.^*

204.

FRENCH NEWS [78]

EXAMINER, 5 MAY, 1833, PP. 281-2

Referring back to his similar accounts in May 1832 (see Nos. 162 and 172), Mill here summarizes with even more distaste the French legislative session, which had begun on 17 Nov., 1832, and ended on 25 Apr., 1833. The article is headed “London, May 5, 1833.” The entry in his bibliography covers this and No. 205: “The summary of French affairs in the Examiner of 5th and 19th May 1833” (MacMinn, p. 26). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, this article is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets, with seven corrections: at 569.4 “the year’s” is altered to “the last year’s”; at 569. 19 the comma after “colonies” is changed to a semi-colon; at 569.37 “which” becomes “who”; at 570.4 a comma is added after “qualification”; at 570.11 “abide” becomes “abides”; at 570.29 the comma after “budget” is changed to a colon; and at 571.24 “this an” becomes “this once an”.

at the close of the last year’s Session of the French Chambers, we made an inventory of the important measures of legislative improvement which had been submitted to the consideration of those Assemblies during the Session, and contrasting the great quantity of business laid before them, with the little which they had got through, we concluded that the use of a Chamber of Deputies as at present constituted in France, is not to make laws but to prevent them from being made. If we thought this last year, what are we to think now? Compared with the Session which has just closed, that of the preceding year was a prodigy of activity and usefulness. The measures of legislative improvement either real or pretended, which have been passed into laws this Session are exactly three. One of these abolishes the bounties on the re-exportation of French colonial sugar, substituting a drawback equal to the duty on importation, a slight approximation towards the principle of free trade, with which the interests of the public treasury happened in this instance fortunately to coincide.¹ A short Act, in two short sentences, removed the political disabilities of free men of colour in the French colonies; and a third law gave to the slave-masters of those colonies the benefit of local representative assemblies, a privilege from which the slaves, who form the bulk of the population, will doubtless derive as great advantages and of the same kind as ours do in Jamaica.²

Two other Bills of far greater importance underwent a long and laborious discussion in the Chamber of Deputies, but the Session has terminated before either of them had even come on for consideration in the Chamber of Peers. One of these was a Bill for facilitating pecuniary arrangements with the owners of land required for public works, as roads, canals, and the like:³ a subject of great importance in France, where the multitude of small landed proprietors, their exorbitant claims of compensation, and the great delay and expense necessitated by the legal forms which must be gone through for compelling them to submit to a fair valuation, are obstacles to the improvement of the internal resources of France, often equivalent to an entire prohibition. The other Bill to which we allude, was one which public opinion has been demanding for the last fifteen years more urgently than any other single measure, the very question which turned out the Martignac Ministry. Its object was to render the departmental councils, who vote the local taxes and regulate the local affairs of the Departments (and who are now nominated by the Crown) elective bodies, appointed by the suffrages of at least some portion of the people.⁴ This portion, in the Bill as presented by Ministers, was not to exceed 150,000 electors, out of a population of 33,000,000 of souls. The Chamber of Deputies, in this instance more liberal than the King and his Ministers, lowered the qualification, and increased the number of electors to about 300,000.⁵ Even this electoral body was, one might think, rather circumscribed. But so displeasing to the “powers that be” was even this slight symptom of a democratic spirit, that after the Bill, as amended, had passed the Chamber of Deputies, Ministers delayed introducing it into the Chamber of Peers for a whole month, with the premeditated design of not leaving time for it to pass. By the close of the Session the Bill is lost, and the arbitrary nomination of these taxing and legislating bodies abides with Louis Philippe for at least another year.

What then has the Session produced? Produced! It has produced money. Its results are the vote of an enormous budget,⁶ and an endless series of extraordinary votes of credit.⁷ Meantime the French nation is falling deeper and deeper into difficulties. The revenue falls short of the expenditure by a large annual deficit, which is annually supplied partly by new loans, partly by the sale of what still remains of the forests belonging to the State. The national debt has, we believe, doubled since the fall of Napoleon, and augments largely every year. Meantime the mockery of a sinking fund is kept up;⁸ between three and four millions sterling of new debt are annually contracted for the redemption of old; and this process of transfer from the right pocket to the left, dropping a part by the way, is still vaunted by French financiers as the acme of financial knowledge and skill. M. Laffitte, long the main support of this ridiculous and exploded juggle, with the candour which distinguishes him, publicly renounced his error in a speech delivered in the late Session.⁹

Immediately after the prorogation, the Chambers were called together for a fresh Session.¹⁰ The sole object of this second convocation is more money: another year’s budget: and when that is obtained, as it will be (judging from experience) very promptly and easily, the Deputies will be dismissed.¹¹ An alteration in the réglement, or standing orders of the Chamber of Deputies, fortunately enables the business which was commenced in one Session, to be taken up in the next at the point where it left off;¹² and since many of the Bills introduced in the late Session and referred to select Committees, had been returned from these Committees before the prorogation and are ready for immediate discussion, it is to be hoped that the interval which must elapse before the budget of 1834 can have passed through the same preliminary stage, will be employed in passing some of those important Bills. The Chamber has now at length begun to deliberate on the Bill for establishing an elementary school in every parish.¹³ Let it but adopt this, and it will have done more for the substantial interests of France and mankind, than any French Legislature since the Bourbons were restored.

One solitary iota of commendation is due to the conduct of the Chambers during the Session which is just ended: they did not pass the Bill which the Ministers introduced for establishing an Irish Coercion system throughout France.¹⁴ This praise belongs to the Chamber of Peers; who are a conservative body in the genuine sense, determined neither to allow of new good nor new evil. The Chamber of Deputies had not the opportunity offered them of either adopting or throwing out this Bill, but they seem to have been desirous of leaving no doubt which of the two they would have done if the option had been given; so at least we judge from their conduct to the responsible editor of the Tribune newspaper. They summoned him before them to be tried for a libel upon themselves, (he had called them une chambre prostituée,) and having for this once an opportunity of being judges in their own cause, availed themselves of it to wreak upon poor M. Lionne, by the severest sentence consistent with the law, the accumulated vengeance due to the repeated refusals of Paris juries to assist by their verdicts in putting down the liberty of the press.¹⁵

205.

FRENCH NEWS [79]

EXAMINER, 19 MAY, 1833, P. 313

For the context and entry in Mill’s bibliography, see No. 204. The item, headed “London, May 19, 1833,” is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets in the Somerville College set of the Examiner.

the education bill has passed the Chamber of Deputies, and will probably pass into a law this Session.¹ It will establish one or more elementary schools in every commune; (township or village;) a school of a somewhat higher order in every town containing 6000 inhabitants; and a number of normal schools for the education of schoolmasters to teach in those local institutions. The plan is an imitation of some parts of the admirable arrangements of the Prussian Government for the education of its subjects.² Once introduced, it can scarcely be so ill-managed as not to be a most substantial benefit to France.

The Chamber is now winding its way through a long and intricate Bill for more precisely determining the powers and duties of the municipal or communal assemblies,³ which, by virtue of a law passed two years ago,⁴ are chosen by something approaching to popular election. If the Chamber of Deputies and the Departmental assemblies were chosen by as large a body of electors as the councils for managing the local affairs of the commune, France would have little to complain of in regard to the substantial reality of her representative government.

After these two laws come the money bills; and with them the Session of 1833 will close. The Budget now about to be discussed differs from that recently voted in this, that it professes to propose no new loans.⁵ It takes 20,000,000 of francs (800,000l.) from the sinking fund, by cancelling redeemed stock to that amount. It takes two or three millions more (millions of francs) from the same source, for the purpose of public works, by bringing a further portion of redeemed stock again into the market; which, though not called a new loan, is really such, but to no very large amount. It is proposed to raise 20,000,000 (800,000l.) more, by increased taxation on the already overburdened article of wine.⁶ By these means, and by a small reduction of the enormous army, the deficit is to be, as they phrase it, comblé; filled up and made level.

The Duchess of Berri has simultaneously produced a daughter, and a lawful husband in the person of a Neapolitan Count, named Hector de Lucchesi-Palli.⁷ The poor Carlists find it best to deny the whole story. It is all, they pretend, an imposture got up by the Government.

206.

BEOLCHI’S SAGGIO DI POESIE ITALIANE

EXAMINER, 26 MAY, 1833, P. 326

Mill here calls attention to a fellow radical, Carlo Beolchi (1796-1867), who was exiled for his part in the Piedmontese revolutionary movement, and taught Italian in London. The review, in the “Literary Examiner,” is headed “Saggio di Poesie Italiane, scelte da Carlo Beolchi, LL.D. Con notizie interno alla vita ed alle opere degli autori. Rolandi, Berners-street. [1833.]” This is the 2nd ed.; the 1st ed. (London: Rolandi, 1825) was entitled Saggio della poesia italiana. It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A short notice of a selection of Italian Poetry by Signor Beolchi, in the Examiner of 26th May 1833” (MacMinn, p. 26). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Notice of Beolchi’s Saggio di Poesie Italiane” and enclosed in square brackets, with one correction: in the heading “auiori” is corrected to “autori”.

this little selection of Italian poetry deserves to be recommended for this reason—that Mr. Beolchi has not, as such compilers generally do, contented himself with reprinting poems and passages of poems, which every one is familiar with, but has chosen for himself; selecting in preference the less known and less hacknied productions of the various writers. He has also included in his choice, specimens of the best Italian poets of the present age, some of whom are not unworthy of the better times of their country: Manzoni, Monti, Foscolo, Pindemonte, Rossetti, and others.¹

207.

THE MONTHLY REPOSITORY FOR JUNE 1833

EXAMINER, 16 JUNE, 1833, PP. 372-3

The third of Mill’s favourable reviews of Fox’s journal (see Nos. 198 and 200) contains interesting material relating to his theory of poetry. Mill had nothing in this number of the Monthly Repository, but his “Alison’s History” appeared in two parts in the numbers for July and August. The review, which appeared in the “Literary Examiner,” is headed “The Monthly Repository for June [n.s. VII]. (Edited by W.J. Fox.)”; the page references are to this volume. The article is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A notice of the Monthly Repository for June 1833, in the Examiner of 16th June 1833” (MacMinn, p. 32). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Review of the Monthly Repository for June” and enclosed in square brackets, with one correction: at 574.28 “as” is deleted in “occasions; as it”.

an excellent number of an excellent work. Each article deserves a separate commendation, for each has its own merit and its own interest; and there is more than usual variety both in the subjects and in the treatment of them. The article which contains most wisdom, as well as beauty, is ostensibly a description of scenery, under the quaint title of Local Logic;¹ and it indeed proves many things; but chiefly, what perhaps the writer least thought of, that the highest beauty is not that which is received from the object, but that which is given to it by the perceiving mind: that—(as Pope says)—

—the difference is as great between
The optics seeing as the objects seen.²

It is the poetry of description and the philosophy both in one; because the description is only the outward part, the inward is the feelings and the thoughts of a highly sensitive and reflecting mind. These feelings and thoughts are the soul, the scenery described is the body, which gives impressions to the soul but receives them back tenfold. The wisdom is not in sentences and maxims equally fit for all occasions; it admits not of being extracted; it pervades the whole, and shines through from beneath the surface, but no more admits of being detached from its external vesture, than the flesh from the skin.

Among the other articles we would notice particularly a paper on Miss Martineau’s tale of The Parish, in which the writer takes up the cause of that lady against her reviewer in the Edinburgh Review.³ We have seldom read any article more characteristic of Whiggery, of the Edinburgh Review itself, and of the juste-milieu respectability spirit in general, than that same Whig article on Miss Martineau. With some just and some unjust criticism on the details of her various performances, the aim and purport of the article on the whole was to intimate to Miss Martineau, in as many and as various forms of words as the writer could, that she was and should be reputed a very clever, meritorious, indeed extraordinary person, provided always she would submit all her opinions to the previous ordeal of Whig wisdom; that it is a very fine thing in a woman to write, and write with earnestness, on politics and morals, so long as all she writes in politics is strictly Whig, and in morals strictly common-place, but vastly shocking if she writes anything else. Every approach to free, vigorous, far-reaching thought which we recollect to have seen in Miss Martineau’s Illustrations, her Edinburgh reviewer, with scarcely an exception, singles out for special animadversion; and reads a succession of solemn, prosing, good-natured lectures to one who is at least as well-qualified to lecture him; and who in the long run will be by many degrees the more successful lecturer, for the time is no more when the ballast of society was too ponderous for its quantity of sail.

Our friend “Junius Redivivus” has two able papers in this number,⁴ and the Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice is full of mournful truths on education and society as they now are;⁵ and as such writers as the Edinburgh reviewer would for ever keep them, not from evil intention, but from a most plentiful lack of intellectual audacity and comprehension of mind.

208.

THE BANK CHARTER BILL [1]

EXAMINER, 30 JUNE, 1833, P. 409

This is one of three items on the renewal of the Bank of England’s Charter (see also Nos. 209 and 212). The Bank had been established in 1694 (5 & 6 William and Mary, c. 20); its most recent Charter, that of 39 & 40 George III, c. 28 (1800), was due to expire on 1 Aug., 1833. The Bank’s original monopoly had been curtailed by the allowing of joint-stock banks (i.e., banks with more than six partners) of deposit and issue, located farther than sixty-five miles from London, by 7 George IV, c. 46 (1826); the main question now was whether the Bank’s partial monopoly was to be prolonged. Mill here refers to the “Resolutions proposed by Lord Viscount Althorp, in the Committee on the Bank Charter” (31 May, 1833), PP, 1833, XXIII, 299-300, and to Althorp’s outline of the ministry’s further plans. The debate, in which Colonel Torrens moved that consideration of renewal be postponed until the next session, began on 28 June, and continued on 1 and 3 July (PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 18, cols. 1306-53, 1361-1408, and Vol. 19, cols. 82-110). The brief unheaded note is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A paragraph on the Bank Charter Bill, in the Examiner of 30th June 1833” (MacMinn, p. 32). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as “Paragraph on the Bank Question” and enclosed in square brackets.

the scheme of the ministers with respect to the renewal of the Bank Charter is full of crudities, and rests on no rational basis of principle.¹ As there is nothing in the nature of the question which presses for a speedy decision, it would be wise in Ministers to pass a temporary Act for continuing the existing system one year longer, and employ part of that time in a reconsideration of the subject, with the advantage of the discussions which their plan now, when promulgated, cannot fail to engender.—We shall return to this topic next week.

209.

THE MINISTERIAL MEASURE RESPECTING THE BANK

EXAMINER, 7 JULY, 1833, PP. 417-18

Mill here redeems the promise in No. 208 (q.v.), though he seems not to have been proud of his performance, for he wrote to his friend J.P. Nichol on 10 July that “the article was superficial, and could not consistently with its purpose be otherwise” (EL, CW, Vol. XII, p. 167). He is commenting on the “Bill for Giving to the Corporation of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England Certain Privileges, for a Limited Period, under Certain Conditions,” 4 William IV (5 July, 1833), PP, 1833, I, 69-76, eventually enacted as 3 & 4 William IV, c. 98; it had received first reading on 5 July. The leader, which appeared in the “Political Examiner,” headed as title, is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article headed ‘The Ministerial Measure respecting the Bank’ in the Examiner of 7th July 1833” (MacMinn, p. 32). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as title and enclosed in square brackets, with three emendations: at 577.31 “opinions” is altered to “opinion”; at 582.7 “lest” is changed to “last”; and at 582.10 “fact” is changed to “part”. The second of these is clearly an inaccurate correction, and we have given “least” as what the sense requires.

the proposed measure for the renewal of the Bank Charter is a specimen of the sort of legislation to be expected from the sort of men by whom, for want of better, the instrument of Government is likely for some time longer to be wielded. In one respect, the reputation of Ministers ought to benefit by it. Those who have been accustomed to see in the timid, vacillating, and truckling policy of the present Administration, evidence of intentions hostile to the interests of the community, may incline to a more charitable judgment on seeing them exhibit, even on a question like this, where their greatest enemies cannot suspect them of any undue bias in point of interest, exactly the same kind of mental incapacity; no power of grasping any principle; no attempt to ground their proceedings upon any comprehensive, even though false, views; no appearance of understanding the subject, or even of thinking they understand it; nothing contemplated which rises to the dignity of even a half-measure—only quarter and half-quarter measures; a little scratching on the surface of one or two existing evils, but no courage to attempt their excision, because there has been no vigour or skill to probe them to the bottom. It is only in points of comparative detail that even the tendency is towards improvement; the general system of our currency, so far as altered at all, is to be altered for the worse; the exclusive privileges of the Bank of England are to be even extended.

From the tenor of the evidence delivered before the Parliamentary Committee of last Session,¹ joined to the fact that the Committee was not reappointed to hear the other side of the question this year, it was probable that Ministers had made up their minds, (as far as minds like theirs are ever made up,) to maintain the Bank monopoly unimpaired, at least in the leading point of being the sole bank of issue in the metropolis. They appear to have been wholly governed by the authority of the London bankers, who had the natural prejudice of practical men in favour of the system under which they had thriven, and against changes which would raise up powerful rivals to themselves. Even able and honest men are apt to confide too exclusively in the modes of transacting business with which they are familiar, and the securities on which they have been accustomed safely to rely; they do not learn all at once to have equal trust in other though perfectly effectual securities, nor even in the same securities when the circumstances are apparently different. The opinion of the London bankers in favour of the Bank monopoly does not appear to us to be the result of argument. If they had given no reasons whatever it might have been supposed they had excellent ones to give; but since they have given reasons, if those reasons are mere assumptions, it must be supposed that they had a predisposition, (though, we are convinced, in the case of some of them, a perfectly unconscious one,) in favour of the conclusion they have arrived at; and that the merit of their argument, like that of a jest, lies “in the favour of him that receives it.”²

The principal reason assigned, the only one upon which any stress is laid, is the danger of competition. If banking was free, and bankers striving against each other to put forth their notes, there would be over-issue. But why? Tell us why? In all other branches of business competition is the great preventive and corrector of excess: the greater the competition the more accurately is the supply proportioned to the demand. If the markets of London were supplied with provisions by one single dealer, or one single company of dealers, there would be frequent over-supply and frequent deficiency. Every blunder, every miscalculation of a single individual would inflict upon the town one of these evils or the other. If there were two dealers, or three, and no more, they might all chance to miscalculate the same way. But there is so great a number, that their mistakes neutralize one another, and the markets are consequently supplied with a regularity and an equality, which the foresight of the ablest man, or body of men, could not make the most distant approach to; accident seems to have lost its powers over this portion of human affairs; there is no fluctuation, except where there is rational cause for it.

We have never heard any argument to show that the currency of London could not safely be supplied by private bankers, which would not also show that the food of London cannot safely be supplied by private dealers. If London had always hitherto, like a town in expectation of a siege, been victualled by the Government, what a clamour would be raised when the first proposal was made of trusting to private interest for the supply! Every man of routine would prophesy the utter failure of the plan; would predict that the metropolis would one day be left without food, that another day food would be brought to market in such quantities that it would spoil before it could find a purchaser; the subsistence of a million and a half of people would be declared too vast a concern to be managed by private hands, too all-important to be risked upon the faith of theories. These fears, anterior to experience, would not have been altogether so absurd as they seem: but with this experience, trusting with the steadiest confidence to competition for our food, it is strange we should think ourselves unable to trust to it for our circulating medium.

But let us grapple with this question somewhat more closely. It would be the interest of private bankers to put forth a super-abundance of paper and depreciate the currency. What then? Such is also the interest of the Bank of England. In order to make it not the interest of the Bank of England, that body is required to pay its notes in gold, in order that when they become depreciated, they may be brought back to the Bank, and gold demanded in exchange. This security is either sufficient or it is not:—if not, we are liable to depreciation from the Bank of England; if it be sufficient, the same obligation to give gold for their notes will operate with the same efficacy as a restraint upon private bankers.

It is supposed that if competition were allowed, every bank would strive to fill the entire circulation with its own notes: that each would attempt to put forth as much paper as if itself were the sole bank of issue; hoping that while itself derived all the profit, its rivals would bear a share of the subsequent loss, as the run for gold, occasioned by depreciation, would probably affect all the banks, not that alone whose over-issues had occasioned it. We state the argument as strongly as it can be stated; much more strongly than it is commonly put by those whom we are supposing to be influenced by it.

Our answer is, that after the first rush consequent on the removal of the restriction was over, and the supply of the circulation had divided itself among the various banks according to the extent of their connexions, and of the credit reposed in them, they would be very cautious of extending their issues unless to fill up a gap in the circulation produced by the discrediting of a rival bank, or unless the state of the money transactions of the country was such as admitted of an increase of the currency without depreciating it. If one of the banks commenced an imprudent extension of its issues, the other banks would be immediately warned of the fact by the increased number of its notes which would come into their possession in the course of trade; and they would immediately return those notes on the hands of the issuers in exchange for gold. Indeed this would be done, even without any express design on their part, the very first day, by the ordinary operations of the clearing-house. It is well known that the London bankers every afternoon pay over to each other the cheques drawn upon any one of them which have been paid into any other house during the day, and receive or pay the differences. If they were banks of issue they would at the same time, and in the same manner, interchange their notes as well as cheques. Consequently if any one bank had increased its issues while others had not, more of its notes would be returned to it at the clearing-house, than would be balanced by the notes of other banks paid into itself, and it would be called upon to pay the difference in cash that very day. The check would, therefore, operate instantaneously.

This is not only a necessary conclusion from the theory of the subject, but is borne out by specific experience. The Scotch banks, which, as every one knows, are the most stable banking establishments in the world, actually do exchange their notes in this precise manner; and the consequence is that there is nothing like the dreaded struggle of rival banks to supplant one another, but each rests satisfied with the share of the circulation which custom has assigned to it. The system, however, altogether prevents the existence of any bank of doubtful credit. No such bank exists, or has existed, except in one or two instances and for very short periods, in all Scotland for the last hundred years.

The arguments, therefore, of the supporters of the Bank monopoly are equally in contradiction to the reason of the case and to the most obvious and particular experience on the very point.

An exclusive privilege of issuing paper-money, given to such an establishment as the Bank of England, is altogether an anomaly. Either the regulation of the currency may safely be left, under the security of convertibility, to the private interest of the issuers, or, if not, it is part of the business of Government, and should be under the control of a responsible Minister. The common notion seems to be, that if the issuers look only to their own interest they will best consult that by over-issue; and that it is necessary the currency should be every now and then tampered with on some principle of public policy. But if this were true, there could not be a more unfit body to be entrusted with absolute power of regulating the currency, than a private irresponsible company. We must have the security of private interest or the security of responsibility, one or the other; if we cannot trust to the former, we must be fools to let ourselves be jockeyed out of the latter. If issuing paper-money must be a public trust, it should be vested in a public functionary, who ought to be liable to displacement if he prove incompetent, to punishment if he neglect or violate the duties of his office.

Our own opinion is, that the interest of the issuers of notes when obliged to pay them in gold on demand, is identical with the interest of the public, and that by taking their measures prudently for their own interest, they are providing effectually against over-issue and all other dangers. We would, therefore have banking free. It is desirable, certainly, to secure to the public the largest possible share of the profits arising from the substitution of the cheaper for the more costly medium of exchange. This, however, might be accomplished, as it is to a certain extent even at present, by a stamp duty on bank notes.³ This duty we would raise as high as it would bear. We would then remove all restrictions on the establishment of banking partnerships, and would even allow the formation of joint-stock banking companies with limited responsibility, provided a certain large amount of capital was first paid up. With the example of Scotland before us, we can feel no doubt that the formation of safe banks would drive all unsafe ones out of the field, and that the failure of a bank would soon become as unheard of an event on this as it is on the other side of the Tweed: ultimately, therefore, the issue even of one pound notes might, as in Scotland, take place without any danger; but in the mean time we would even, if necessary, prohibit all notes below ten pounds, in order to confine the circulation of paper to those classes who may be trusted to judge for themselves of the solvency of a bank.

With this proviso we should have no apprehension of the effects of allowing the issues of paper money to be as free as that of bills of exchange. We should as soon dream of giving to one establishment a monopoly of the latter kind of security as of the former.^*

The tendency of the Ministerial measure is “clean contrary.” The Bank of England is not only to remain the only bank of issue in London, but the wish of Government is that it should progressively become the issuer of paper for the whole country. With this view it is proposed to permit the formation of joint-stock banking companies, with limited responsibility, on condition that these companies shall not issue paper of their own, but transact all their business with the notes of the Bank of England. As these banks would probably, by the greater confidence of the public in their solvency, drive all or most of the present country bankers out of the field, Bank of England paper would wholly or in great measure supersede all the existing country paper. What advantage Lord Althorp anticipated from this substitution his Lordship omitted to inform us; but it is easy to see one obvious and inevitable disadvantage—a great increase of forgery. A country note never circulates beyond the neighbourhood of the issuers, and forged notes are presented for payment, or come into the bankers’ hands as deposits so very speedily that it is almost impossible to throw many of them into circulation without beng detected. But if Bank of England notes were the common circulating medium of Cumberland or Cornwall, the forger might continue his operations for months before a forged note passed into the hands of any one who could detect the forgery.

Lord Althorp has announced that for the present at least he will not press that part of his plan on which we are now remarking.⁴ He has not changed his opinion, but he candidly confesses that the country bankers are too strong for him, and that he cannot carry it. Along with the evil of this part of the project, we are therefore to be deprived of the good. The principle of permitting the formation of joint-stock companies for banking is for the present abandoned.

For the continuance of the Bank monopoly, so far as respects the issue of notes, there was at least a colour, a semblance of reason; men who had paid attention to the subject had advocated that side of the question. But what excuse, what pretext is there for continuing the exclusive privileges of the Bank of England as a bank of mere deposit? Would it have been credible a few years ago that any Ministry would have had the folly, or the boldness, to propose the renewal of the prohibition on the formation of banks with more than six partners, in London and 65 miles round it? Amidst so much cant about making banks secure, here is a law for the express purpose of making them insecure. Who that remembers Lord Liverpool’s letter to the Bank in 1826,⁵ and the warning he gave them of the little reason they had to expect any further prolongation of their monopoly after the expiration of their present Charter, could have believed it possible that a reforming Ministry, a Ministry the professed enemy of monopolies, would have proposed the renewal of even the least atom of the Bank monopoly, even that part of it for which no human being, instructed or ignorant, has yet ventured to utter one word of defence?

The importance of that part of the Ministerial measure which permits the country-bankers to pay their notes in Bank of England notes instead of specie, appears to us to have been greatly exaggerated both by its supporters and by its opponents. If the monopoly of the Bank is to be continued, we should, perhaps, approve of this provision. Considered as a further extension of the privileges of that body, we view it with decided disapprobation.

But what shall we say of the grandest improvement of all, the publicity of the Bank issues? When convertibility is secured, the greatest additional security which can be given to the currency is to let in the light upon all the accounts, and all the transactions of all banks of issue without any exception or reserve; that the public may know instantaneously when there is any danger of insolvency, or any danger of an excessive circulation, and that the check of convertibility may operate without a moment’s delay. This is the principle improvement which our monetary system, so far as its security is concerned, now admits of. And what do the Ministers propose? Publication once in three months, of the amount of notes in circulation only; and not even of the amount of notes circulating at the particular time, but of the average amount for three months previous. To the Government, indeed, weekly accounts are to be furnished; but the Government is the very party from whose tampering with the Bank, most danger is to be apprehended; the great over-issues of 1824 and 1825 were encouraged by the Government. As for the country bankers, they also were to disclose the amount of their issues to the Government, but the public were not to know even once in three months the amount in circulation of the notes of each bank, but only of all the country banks taken together. Even this has not been persisted in. The affairs of country bankers are to remain in the dark.

Thus every party or class which has interests opposed to the public, contrives to hold its own, and the public only are sacrificed. But that is because parties and classes look after their own interests, and the public neglect theirs.

There is only one other point which we shall notice. Doubtless any relaxation of the mischievous and contemptible Usury Laws,⁶ is a step towards good: but what sort of figure do a Ministry exhibit to any rational person, when they propose to the Legislature to declare that it shall be accounted right to borrow money at more than five per cent. interest for three months, and wrong for four; right, if the money is lent on a bill of exchange, and wrong if it is lent on mortgage? The fact is, that the country gentlemen, in their ineffable stupidity, do not choose to be allowed to borrow money at six per cent.; they prefer, when they cannot do without it, to borrow it by circuitous methods, at nine or ten per cent. contrary to law. The Ministers, instead of shaming the country gentlemen out of their ridiculous prejudices, give way to them, and dare not propose any measure which those sages would not like to pass. They therefore compromise the matter: instead of taking off the tight shoe, they make an incision into it where it pinches hardest.

210.

FRENCH NEWS [80]

EXAMINER, 21 JULY, 1833, P. 457

This item, headed “London, July 21, 1833,” is described in Mill’s bibliography as “The summary of French news in the Examiner of 21st July 1833” (MacMinn, p. 33). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, the article is listed as “Article on France” and enclosed in square brackets.

the french chambers have concluded the second of their two continuous Sessions. The labours of the former of the two we passed in review some time since, and found subject for marvel that two Assemblies could have remained together for so many months and accomplished nothing.¹ The second has not been so totally unproductive. The salutary alteration in the standing orders of the Chamber of Deputies, whereby they were enabled to take up the unfinished business of one Session in the next, at the stage in which it was left,² has enabled the two Houses to pass three of the important laws which were pending before them.

The first in importance of these is the long expected and long suspended Education Bill.³ This is at length carried, and every parish in France will now have an elementary school, every town of 6000 inhabitants a school of a somewhat higher order. In its passage through the Chamber of Peers this Bill has undergone part of the usual deteriorating process. The local Committees who are to look after the management of the schools, are to consist of three members, of whom the curé is, ex-officio, to be one.

A Bill has passed for facilitating the arrangements with the owners of land required for public works.⁴ The great number of small landed proprietors in France, their exorbitant claims for compensation, and the superstitious regard paid by the French law and the tribunals to all proprietary rights, have hitherto opposed barriers almost insuperable to the formation of canals, railways, and other works of public usefulness. These obstructions will now be considerably diminished, and all authorities agree in representing the Bill which has just passed as a measure of substantial improvement.

The last of the three laws to which we allude is one which gives to the people, or rather to an extremely limited class of the people, the election of the departmental councils or administrative bodies for voting and appropriating the taxes imposed for the local purposes of the department.⁵ This law has undergone large mutilations to adapt it to the Oligarchical spirit of the Chamber of Peers. The Deputies, though themselves the representatives of a body of electors not amounting to 200,000, had, in spite of the Ministry, admitted a class not short of 400,000 to a voice in the election of these local bodies. But the Peers, always ready to abet the executive in any opposition to the extension of popular privileges, restricted the suffrage to a narrower body, consisting of the 180,000, or thereabouts, who have votes in the election of the Legislature, together with those who, by the exercise of a liberal profession, are qualified to serve on juries.

Little, therefore, beyond the principle of popular election, has on this occasion been gained; but even that is much.

The Deputies hurried through their second Budget with the most indecent precipitation.⁶ In order to get through their business and leave Paris, they consented to give up retrenchments which they had insisted upon in the budgets of the two preceding years.⁷ The salaries of various public officers, which were reduced two years ago, have been raised to their former standard, at a time when the expenses of every year considerably exceed the revenues!

211.

MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS

EXAMINER, 11 AUG., 1833, PP. 497-8

Writing to Carlyle on 2 Aug., Mill remarks that he has recently not seen much of Fonblanque and has contributed very little to the Examiner, “almost the only paper” being one that will appear “in the next or”—as it did—in “the next but one”. He continues: “I will let you find it out if you can; there is not much in it; it is all political” (EL, CW, Vol. XII, pp. 171-2). This deprecation must be somewhat discounted, for Mill habitually played up Carlyle’s distaste for the merely political; in any case, the reform and health of local institutions were important matters for Mill throughout his career. The first leader in the “Political Examiner,” headed as title, it is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article headed ‘Municipal Institutions’ in the Examiner of 11th August 1833” (MacMinn, p. 33). In the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as title and enclosed in square brackets.

a commission has been appointed, and, judging from some of the names in the list, we anticipate that it will be an honest and efficient one, for inquiring into the state of Municipal Corporations, and, of course, for suggesting all possible amendments in the constitution and functions of those bodies.¹

These commissioners have now a noble opportunity of planting in the public mind the germs of the most important improvements which remain to be made in the machinery of government in this country. But to do this they must take a liberal and expanded view of the subject of their inquiries. They must not consider themselves limited to the paltry office of devising means by which rude institutions, adapted to the exigencies and the conceptions of rude ages, may be patched and cobbled so as to hold together some years longer. The whole of our local institutions must be revised; there is no soundness in them; for many important purposes they do not exist at all; for no good purpose do they make effectual provision, while they are the seats of the most pervading and audacious political profligacy to be found in the kingdom.

It would certainly be an exaggeration to say that the character of the local functionaries, and the conduct of local business, is more important than the constitution and character of the general government; for the latter includes the former: if the general government is bad, the local administration will commonly be bad too; the only security for the working of the subordinate parts of the machinery, is in the construction of the great central wheel or lever which sets the rest in motion. But it is little, if any, over-statement, to affirm, that the excellence of the form of government is chiefly desirable as a means to obtaining good local institutions. The real business of government is, almost all of it, local business. All the visible apparatus of a windmill or a watermill, is for nothing but to bring two millstones together: some of the greatest steam-engines in the world do nothing but send down buckets into a well. The machinery of government is equally humble in its immediate ends. It is neither at the head nor the heart, but at the extremities, that the ruling body touches the ruled. With what magistrate of the state do the bulk of the citizens come in contact? Who, as far as they are concerned, constitutes the Government? The king? the prime minister? the lord chancellor? No; the justice of the peace, the overseer, and the parish constable. Except in order that these last may do their duty, it matters little to any but a very few persons, what happens with regard to the others. Even the Legislature, the power which controuls all, when it makes laws affecting the most vital interests of the humblest citizen, does but issue orders which those local functionaries are to execute. And it might as well issue no orders, as issue them to persons who are incapable of executing them properly. There are numbers of important laws which the legislature cannot enact, because it knows that it has no persons to whom it can trust for carrying them into effect. This is the great obstacle to many of the most necessary amendments in the details of our institutions. One only part of the business of government—the levying of taxes—the central authority shows itself well able to accomplish without help from any one: it takes care to have local officers fit for that, if for no other purpose. But even that function it but divides with the authorities of the county and of the parish. The taxes which are voted by local and irresponsible bodies, probably exceed in amount those levied by Parliament for the general purposes of government. And this is no more than reasonable: for those local bodies really do us more service in return for our money: what they do, they do unspeakably ill; but they do the greater part of what is done. We often wonder what the nominal Government does, or pretends to do, for all that it costs. The question must be a puzzling one to foreigners, and to those who have lived in foreign countries, where Governments do govern, where the public business really is transacted by the persons who are paid for transacting it.

In this country, the practice has always been that the Government shall not govern. That was the practice, all over Europe, in the feudal times. The king, by the custom of those times, only led the people to battle. The king did not govern: so far as there was any government, the barons governed; and the king, as one of those barons, governed his own domain. As the king gradually absorbed the power of the barons into his own, they were superseded in their function of governing: but scarcely any substitutes were provided. The king supplied scarcely any organs of government, except the officers whom he had originally employed to govern his private domain, and those to whom he had been in the habit of referring the petitions which were made to him complaining of the conduct of the barons; in particular, his private secretary, his cancellarius, seal-bearer or chancellor. There were neither local courts of justice, nor local officers of administration. The French talk of centralization; but where is the centralization to be compared with ours, where, from one end of England to the other, there is scarcely to be found a paid Government officer, except a soldier or a tax-gatherer, anywhere but in London? It is true that the public business is not transacted in London, because it cannot be. It therefore is left to transact itself. Whatever could only be done on the spot, or could not bear the delay and expense of a journey to London, and yet could not be left undone, was turned over to amateurs. The corporate towns retained the powers (which had been granted them as an exemption from the jurisdiction of their enemies the barons) of managing their own local affairs, and administering justice by their own officers. The rest of the local business was flung to any person of station who would consent to undertake it. Hence the “commission of the peace,” and the perpetually increasing powers of judicature and administration which were intrusted to “their worships, the justices.” In almost all cases affecting the mass of the people they are the sole tribunal, and without appeal, except to themselves in quarter sessions. Almost every function or duty of a local nature, out of the corporate towns, has been thrown upon them, for want of any one else to undertake it. The administration of the poor laws is under their absolute controul. Gaols must be superintended, therefore the magistracy must do it. Gaolers must be appointed, therefore the magistracy must appoint them. There must be somebody to impose county rates, and to regulate their expenditure: who but the magistracy? Power to make roads and footpaths, and to stop them up, must reside somewhere: where but in the magistracy? Power must exist to preserve order in public places; therefore the magistrates must have arbitrary power of licensing, and arbitrary powers of restricting or of dispersing, assemblages of all kinds.

Let any one tell who knows, how these powers, and others without end which might be enumerated, are actually used. Interrogate any barrister who practises at the quarter sessions, in which, of all places where the magistracy reign, they are most under observation, and consequently most under restraint; you will hear that of all places where public business is done, that is the place where the most flagrant acts of injustice are committed with the least scruple. And what wonder? The men who made corn laws and game laws² are the élite, the “choice and prime”³ of these men; selected expressly as such, and exposed to the gaze of all mankind. If such are the best, what must the worst be! If such is their conduct in the great theatre of London and Parliament, with the press standing over them rod in hand, what must it be in the dark corners, where the light never penetrates, and where the voice of complaint is never loud enough to be heard beyond the walls of the beer-house?

These are the institutions of England which need reform: unless they be reformed it is idle in practice and vain in theory to affect to reform the Legislature. If the possession of a certain number of acres of land, without any other requisite whatever, qualifies a man to administer the laws in his own hall, why not in Westminster-hall? Let the man with the greatest number of acres preside in the highest court: let the Duke of Northumberland be Chief Justice, and the Duke of Sutherland, Chancellor.⁴ If landed property be sufficient title for imposing county taxes, why not for imposing king’s taxes? Why did we complain that the great landholders nominated the House of Commons? We demand that the principle which Earl Grey broadly laid down as the foundation of his Parliamentary Reform, be taken for the foundation of Municipal Reform: we demand “Representation, not Nomination.”⁵

The Local Courts of Justice which must speedily be established, and to which, if so constituted as to work well, more and more of the judicial business of the country will as certainly be confided; these will, in time, gradually and quietly supersede the judicial functions of the unpaid magistracy. Their administrative functions, including that of local taxation, ought to be intrusted to local representative bodies, in the election of which all rate-payers should have a voice. The representative principle, though in a corrupt state, already operates in the election of the authorities of many corporate towns, and by the late Vestry Act⁶ it has been partially introduced into the affairs of parishes. But, for most purposes, parochial management is on too small a scale; the persons interested do not form a sufficiently numerous public, nor is the publicity sufficient to fix the attention of that public with the needful energy and constancy.

For every town there should be, as in France, a municipal council: for every district equal in extent and population to an average county, there should also be a council. In these councils should reside the exclusive power of imposing local taxes, and of determining their appropriation to local purposes. All local functionaries should make periodical reports to them, and should act under their constant surveillance. They should have the right of addressing the king for the removal of any officer of Government within their district. The multitude of private bills which now occupy the time of Parliament, to the great hinderance of the proper duties of the Legislature, and the success or rejection of which is now invariably determined by private intrigue and jobbery, should (where they cannot be superseded, as in many cases they might be, by general statutes framed once for all) be turned over to these local assemblies. They should have the controul of the local police, and the superintendence of all schools and other establishments supported by public money or private endowments. The purposes for which such bodies might be made available will be found to be innumerable; and are mostly such as cannot be even tolerably performed but by such means.

The necessity of such institutions is borne out by the authority both of constitutional and of absolute Governments. In France, representative bodies exist, chosen by a portion of the people, for the local taxation and administration of every department, every arrondissement, and every commune (township or village). In Prussia, a country which by the excellence of the details of its institutions puts to shame all the constitutional Governments of Europe, there have for some time existed provincial assemblies, and other municipal bodies, on the principle of popular election.⁷

If our country were to be judged by her laws, well might M. Cousin give the palm of highest civilization to France and Prussia, “without excepting England herself, all bristling with prejudices, gothic institutions, and semibarbarous customs, over which there is awkwardly thrown the mantle d’une civilisation toute matérielle.”^* The opinion be it remembered of no Jacobin or Republican, but of a French Whig, a philosophic doctrinaire.

The Commissioners for Municipal Corporations should carry their views, and even their recommendations, to the full length of what we have now proposed. There would, indeed, be no hope that plans of so comprehensive a character would at once be adopted; but the Commissioners need not expect to carry all that they propose, let it be ever so little. Though they pare down their reforms to the most inconsiderable dimensions, there will be abundance of persons who will take care that not more than half of what they ask shall be granted them. A Commission has this advantage over a Ministry, that it is under no necessity of proposing no more than can be carried; it may cast its bread on the waters, certain that the world will find it after many days.⁸ A solemn declaration of opinion from an authoritative quarter, going the full length of a great principle, is worth ten paltry practical measures of nibbling amendment. The good which any mere enactment can do, is trifling compared with the effect of whatever helps to mature the public mind; without which, all attempts to improve institutions must be failures, or at best only palliatives. And besides, even in actual legislation, what is obtained always bears some proportion to what is asked. Men may be frightened by the extent of change proposed, but that very alarm makes changes which would otherwise have seemed almost equally formidable, appear moderate; and we always find that gradual reform proceeds by larger and more rapid steps, when the doctrines of radical reform are most uncompromisingly and intrepidly proclaimed.

212.

THE BANK CHARTER BILL [2]

EXAMINER, 18 AUG., 1833, P. 514

For the background, see Nos. 208 and 209. This leading article in the “Political Examiner” is headed as title. It is described in Mill’s bibliography as “An article headed ‘The Bank Charter Bill’ in the Examiner of 18th August 1833” (MacMinn, p. 33); in the Somerville College set of the Examiner, it is listed as title and enclosed in square brackets.

this piece of weak and ignorant legislation has passed through the Committee, and may have passed the House of Commons before these lines are printed; not entirely without improvement, but without the only sufficient improvement, viz., annihilation.¹ Never was the answer more applicable which some one made to Pope when he exclaimed “God mend me.” “God could more easily make twenty than mend the like of you.”²

The principal change for the better consists in the destruction of not perhaps the worst, but the most undefended and indefensible of all the exclusive privileges which the measure, as it originally stood,³ was intended to prolong. The monopoly of the Bank is to extend no further than to the supply of currency. For deposit and other banking purposes, banks with more than six partners may henceforth be established in any part of the United Kingdom. For this amendment we are indebted to no conviction, to no enlightenment of the understandings of our Whig Ministers, nor yet to the wisdom of the House overruling their folly. We owe it to a singular discovery. Till now it had been believed that by the law as it stood, no banking establishment with more than six partners, except the Bank of England, could exist in London, or a circle of sixty-five miles round it, or could have existed anywhere in the kingdom, previously to the Act of 1826.⁴ Of a sudden it is discovered that this interpretation of the law is wholly erroneous; that there is not, nor has ever been any legal hindrance to the establishment of banks with any number of partners; that the Legislature, every successive Ministry, all parties interested in upholding the monopoly, and all parties interested in breaking through it, have been entirely mistaken in what so nearly concerned their duties, their occupations, and their interests. A curious picture of the law and of legislation; and a curious example too, if the fact really be as stated, of the fallacy of the expectation that what it is peculiarly and strongly men’s individual pecuniary interest to know, they will know; for of all the innumerable adventurers, or those who would gladly have been adventurers, in banking speculations, or who have actually founded numerous associations for banking purposes in other parts of the kingdom since 1826, if there had been one who had inspected the Act and given a fee to Sir William Horne or Sir John Campbell for telling him its real meaning, he must have learnt the very fact which those functionaries, as the law authorities of the Crown, have just promulgated to a wondering public.⁵

However, this being announced, put it in the power of Lord Althorp to escape from the awkward position in which he had placed himself before Parliament and the public by his hasty and silly measure, at no greater expense than that of an evasion—the favourite resource of juste-milieu politicians, as of all other waverers whether in public or private life. Had Lord Althorp made confession to the Bank of a change of opinion; had he said, “I was ignorant of the subject—I am now better instructed;” or even, “This measure is unacceptable to Parliament and to the country, and must, therefore, be modified in conformity to public opinion,” he would have done that which, next to proposing at first a well considered and well digested plan, would have been the noblest and wisest part a Minister could have performed. A mere private arrangement between Ministers and an interested party cannot, in common sense, bind a servant of the nation to betray his trust by pressing a measure when he has ceased to think it expedient, or to resign his office when the sworn enemies of the people’s dearest principles and wishes must be his successors. Lord Althorp’s engagement with the Bank was fulfilled when he had proposed the measure. That engagement could not have been forfeited by altering, or even by withdrawing the Bill, on the occurrence of any real change in his opinion either of the measure itself, or of the consequences to the public of persisting in it. The use of the private correspondence was merely to ascertain what price the Bank were willing to pay for what privileges, and if the privileges were refused the Bank were released from paying the price; that was all.⁶

But this view of the matter was not adapted either to the optics or to the nerves of a Lord Althorp. Observe his mode of dealing with the pretended pledge. He owns it; but as it would be inconvenient to keep it, he keeps it only “to the ear.” His bargain was that the Bank should retain their existing exclusive privileges.⁷ It is true that when this promise was made, Lord Althorp believed, and the Bank believed, and the world believed that the Bank did possess the privilege now in question; and, as long as this was the case, it is obvious that they enjoyed all the advantages which the real possession of the privilege could have given them. However, as the Attorney and Solicitor-General affirm that the Bank had not what all the world thought they had, it is not an existing privilege; and to refuse it to them hereafter, though as complete a change in their position as if they had really had it, happens not to be an infringement of the actual letter of the engagement. This is enough for Lord Althorp; and to this trick we are indebted for a riddance, which the most potent arguments, urged and re-urged from the beginning to the end of a Session, never would have procured for us.

The only other alteration for the better which this Bill has undergone, is the permission given to country banks of issue, whatever be the number of partners, to have agents in London and to make their notes payable there. By means of this clause a door will, we trust, be opened for the ultimate defeat even of those provisions of the Act which are intended to secure to the Bank the exclusive supply of paper-currency to the metropolis.

All attempts have failed to procure a shortening of the period of time during which this Act, for which the best that can be hoped is that it supplies the means for its own nullification, is to remain binding on the country. The monopoly is granted for twenty years; once during that period, namely, ten years from this time, it is to be subject to revision. But, with the consent of the Bank it may be revised or repealed at any moment; and before ten years have passed over us, times may come at which, as in 1826, the voice of the public out of doors will “act upon the prudence” of the Bank.

[1 ]Henry Warburton (1784?-1858), radical reformer and free trader, one of the founders (with James Mill and Bentham) of London University, had sat for Bridport since 1826; John Romilly (1802-74), a liberal, known to Mill personally through the London Debating Society, was elected for Bridport.

[2 ]Edward Romilly (1804-70), also a liberal reformer, was elected for Ludlow. The Clive family had lived in Shropshire since the reign of Henry II. The “boroughmonger” was Edward Clive (1754-1839), the Earl of Powis; his nominee was his son, Robert Henry Clive (1789-1854), an anti-reformer, who, defeated in this constituency, was elected for South Shropshire.

[3 ]Buller (1806-48), another friend of Mill’s, had been elected to West Looe in 1830 under the auspices of his uncle, John Buller of Morval (1771-1849), who had sat for West Looe in 1826-27; John Buller’s younger brother, Charles (1774-1848; father of Mill’s friend), had also represented West Looe, 1812-16 and 1826-30. Charles Buller the younger was, as Mill predicted, elected for Liskeard, replacing the representative of the St. Germans family, Edward Granville Eliot (1798-1877), Lord Eliot (later 3rd Earl of St. Germans).

[4 ]On 22 Feb., 1831, at the conclusion of the Debate on Supply—Army Estimates, Buller and Hume (with O’Gorman Mahon, Daniel O’Connell, Henry Warburton, and John Wood) voted against increasing the army by 6878 men (PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 2, col. 826).

[5 ]Charles Buller, On the Necessity of a Radical Reform (London: Ridgway, 1831).

[6 ]John Horatio Lloyd (1798-1884), barrister and radical reformer, an active member of Mill’s circle in the London Debating Society, another successful candidate.

[7 ]William Hutt (1801-82) also was elected.

[8 ]See PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 3, cols. 1617-30 (19 Apr., 1831), and Vol. 7, cols. 193-214 (19 Sept., 1831), for the reform speeches of John Heywood Hawkins (1802-77), barrister, supporter of the ballot, who had sat for St. Michael’s Mount (Cornwall) in 1830 and Tavistock in 1831-32; he was elected for Newport in 1832, as was William Henry Ord (1803-38), a liberal, son of William Ord (1781-1855), Whig reformer, who had represented Morpeth from 1802 to 1832.

[1 ]Enfantin, Chevalier, and Duveyrier (for their arrest, see No. 140, n7). The other two then arrested, Barrault and Rodrigues, were given trifling fines. Enfantin’s speech in his own defence is in Moniteur, 30 Aug., 1832, p. 1647.

[2 ]Leading article, The Times, 31 Aug., 1832, p. 2.

[3 ]As Mill said in a letter of 17 Sept. to Carlyle: “There was much in the conduct of them all, which really one cannot help suspecting of quackery. . . . The St. Simonians all wear beards, and a peculiar costume, and marched to the place of trial in a body, singing if I recollect right, a succession of hymns, written and set to music by themselves.” (EL, CW, Vol. XII, p. 120.)

[4 ]The editor was Paulin; the article was Carrel’s “Qu’il faut craindre de rendre les modérés violens en se moquant de la modération,” Le National, 31 May, 1832, p. 1.

[5 ]The report by Claude Pierre, comte Pajol (1772-1844), is ibid., 30 Aug., 1832, p. 2.

[6 ]Those referred to are Charles Comte and Adrien Théodore Benoît-Champy (1805-72), counsel; Jean Charles Persil, public prosecutor; and Maître Naudin (b. 1784), the presiding judge. The law of evidence is Art. 378 of the Code pénal, Bull. 277 bis, Nos. 1-7 (20 Feb., 1810).

[7 ]For details, see Nos. 172, n37, and 176. For the ruling of the Court of Cassation, see Moniteur, 1832, p. 1411.

[8 ]For an account, see “Paris, 30 août,” Gazette des Tribunaux, 31 Aug., 1832, p. 1075.

[9 ]Letter to the Editor from all three, Constitutionnel, 30 Aug., 1832, p. 1.

[10 ]The rumour was mistaken; see No. 181.

[1 ]The “doctrinaire” Ministry, nominally headed by Marshal Soult, included de Broglie, Thiers, and Guizot; it came to power in May 1832 after Périer’s death, and lasted until 1836.

[2 ]Essais sur l’histoire de France (1823), 2nd ed. (Paris: Brière; Leipzig: Bossange, 1824). His other works include those later praised in reviews by Mill: Cours d’histoire moderne: Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe (Paris: Pichon and Didier, 1828), and Cours d’histoire moderne: Histoire de la civilisation en France, 5 vols. (Paris: Pichon and Didier, 1829-32).

[3 ]Histoire de la révolution d’Angleterre depuis l’avènement de Charles 1er jusqu’à la restauration de Charles II (Paris: Leroux and Chantpie, et al., 1826-27).

[4 ]Leading article on the French ministry, The Times, 17 Oct., 1832, p. 2.

[5 ]Histoire de la révolution française, 10 vols. (Paris: Lecointe and Durey, 1823-27).

[6 ]Speech on primogeniture (4 Apr.), Moniteur, 1826, pp. 443-4.

[7 ]See, e.g., “De la juridiction administrative,” Revue Française, VI (Nov. 1828), 58-132.

[8 ]For earlier comment, see No. 172, n28.

[9 ]Ordonnances du roi, Bull. 187, Nos. 4419-78 (12 Oct., 1832).

[10 ]Pierre Alexandre Joseph Allent (1772-1837), whose successful career in the army included his being Under-Secretary at the Department of War in 1817, became a deputy in 1828, but became ineligible on the sale of his property after the July Revolution. Jean Baptiste Maximilien, baron Villot de Fréville (1773-1847), active in the Revolution, was a member of the Tribunate under Napoleon. Louis Jacques Thenard (1777-1857), a brilliant chemist, was a deputy, 1827-31. Victor Cousin (1792-1867), philosopher, who, after his course at the Sorbonne was suspended in 1821, spent six months in prison. In 1828 he was allowed to return to the Sorbonne; he supported the July Revolution. Abel François Villemain (1790-1870), professor of modern history and then of éloquence française at the Sorbonne, whose course also was suspended by Villèle, was a deputy, 1830-31, supporting the July Revolution and working on the revision of the Charter.

[11 ]Louis François Bertin de Vaux (1771-1842) shared with his brother the political direction of the Journal des Débats. He had been a deputy since 1820.

[1 ]Pierre Antoine Berryer (1790-1868) was a lawyer who, although a royalist, had made himself unpopular with the regime during the Restoration by his defence of persons prosecuted by the State. He was sent by the legitimists to dissuade the duchesse de Berry from her enterprise but failed and was, ironically, arrested. His trial at Blois, from 15 to 17 Oct., is reported in Moniteur, 1832, pp. 1839, 1845-6, 1849-50, 1851-3.

[2 ]Following the testimony of François Tournier (ibid., pp. 1852-3), the avocat-général, Vilnot, abandoned the charge (ibid., p. 1853).

[3 ]Joseph Georges Demangeat (1787-1866) admitted, in writing, that he had submitted a false confession (ibid., p. 1852). Chateaubriand (the author of a letter Berryer was carrying to the duchesse), Fitzjames, and Hyde de Neuville had subsequently been arrested.

[4 ]Aristide Locquet de Grandville (1791-1853), friend of Berryer.

[5 ]“Il est appelé à Paris pour les [des explications] donner” (Moniteur, 21 Oct., 1832, p. 1855).

[6 ]For the reference to the ruling, see No. 180, n7.

[7 ]Pierre François Audry de Puyravault (1773-1852), industrialist and politician, deputy since 1822, actively opposed the Bourbons, distributed guns and ammunition to the people during the July Revolution, proclaimed Lafayette head of the National Guard, and was a member of the provisional commission.

[8 ]Bull. 160, No. 1570 (23 Nov., 1797).

[9 ]For Duval’s conduct at Grenoble, and Périer’s reaction, see No. 154. The troubles in the nearby Vendée over the duchesse de Berry had caused great dissension in the region. The government appointed Duval to Nantes to take a firm stand in the negotiations that led to her arrest in November.

[10 ]Louis Marie Rousseau de Saint-Aignan (1767-1837), appointed by Louis Philippe in August 1830.

[11 ]See Constitutionnel, 19 Oct., p. 2, and 20 Oct., pp. 1-2; and La Tribune, 20 Oct., p. 3.

[12 ]Speech on the public disorders (19 Feb., 1831), Moniteur, 1831, pp. 349-50.

[13 ]See, e.g., leading article, La Tribune, 24 Oct., 1832, pp. 1-2; “Opinion de la presse départementale sur le nouveau ministère,” Constitutionnel, 14 Oct., p. 2, and 15 Oct., pp. 1-2; and “Tactique du nouveau ministère,” Courrier Français, 16 Oct., 1832, p. 2.

[1 ]Bull. 194, No. 4523 (26 Oct., 1832), given in Moniteur, 1832, p. 1881, with the Rapport au roi by Guizot.

[2 ]Rapport sur l’instruction publique, fait au nom du comité de constitution, par M. Talleyrand-Périgord (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, [1791]).

[3 ]In his Rapport et projet de décret sur l’organisation générale de l’instruction publique (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1792), presented to the National Assembly on 20 and 21 Apr., 1792, Condorcet outlined at length his proposal for “une société nationale des sciences et des arts,” with four divisions, of which the second was made up of the moral and political sciences (pp. 35-55, esp. 37).

[4 ]See No. 134, n9, for the reference to Daunou’s speech of 19 Oct., 1795, and the founding of the Institute.

[5 ]Napoleon abolished the Department of Moral and Political Science by Bull. 243, No. 2257 (3 pluviôse an XI; 23 Jan., 1803).

[6 ]Louis IX (1214-70).

[7 ]Those not identified earlier are Emmanuel Joseph, comte Sieyès (1748-1836), an abbé very active during the early years of the Revolution who then helped Napoleon to power; he had been appointed to the Institut in 1795, and in 1804 to the Académie Française. Dominique Joseph, comte Garat (1749-1833), originally a professor of history, was in turn a member of the Estates General, editor of the Journal des Débats, Minister of Justice, and professor of ideology at l’Ecole Normale. Philippe Antoine, comte Merlin de Douai (1754-1838), jurist, statesman, and legal reformer, was reappointed a member of the Institut in 1830. Pierre Louis, comte Roederer (1754-1835), economist and writer, active in the early days of the Revolution, editor of the Journal de Paris, had served Napoleon, then retired into private life in 1815, and had been dismissed from the Institut in 1816. Marquis Claude Emmanuel Joseph Pierre de Pastoret (1756-1839) had refused to take the oath to Louis Philippe in 1830 and remained in the service of Charles X. Jean Gérard, comte Lacuée de Cessac (1752-1841), military adviser throughout the Revolution (except for the Terror) and under Napoleon, had been appointed to the Institut in 1795; on its reorganization in 1803 he had transferred to the Académie Française. Charles Frédéric, comte Reinhart (1761-1837), a diplomat, had won many honours, including membership in the Académies des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres and des Sciences Morales et Politiques and a peerage in 1832. Joseph Bon, baron Dacier (1742-1833), historian, first became a member of Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 1772 and was its Permanent Secretary from 1782 until it was closed in 1793; he fled the Terror but returned in 1795 to take part in the new Institut and the Bibliothèque Nationale; two years later Napoleon charged him with the task of reorganizing the Institut into four Académies, and he then became Permanent Secretary of Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, and in 1823 of the Académie Française.

[8 ]Antoine Louis Claude, comte Destutt de Tracy (1754-1836), philosopher, had been a member of the Académie Française since 1808. Joseph Marie, baron de Gérando (1772-1842), philosopher and administrator, had been a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres.

[9 ]Those not previously identified are Alexandre Louis Joseph, comte de Laborde (1773-1842), archeologist and politician, a member of the Institut in 1813, a liberal deputy in 1820, briefly prefect of the Seine at the end of the July days, then aide-de-camp to Louis Philippe; and Joseph Naudet (1786-1878), classicist, who became a member of Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 1817.

[10 ]Théodore Simon Jouffroy (1796-1842), philosopher, deputy from 1829; and Pierre Paul Royer-Collard (1763-1845), political philosopher, member of the Council of 500 in 1797, a deputy and, in 1828, President of the Chamber of Deputies.

[11 ]Barthélemy Charles Pierre Joseph Dunoyer (1786-1862), economist and administrator, friend of Charles Comte; after the July Revolution he became prefect of Allier. He was elected in December 1832 to the Académie des Sciences Morales.

[12 ]Cormenin was known for his Du conseil d’état envisagé comme conseil et comme juridiction sous notre monarchie constitutionnelle (Paris: Pillet, 1818), De la responsabilité des agents du gouvernement (Paris: Baudouin, 1818), and, his chief work, Questions de droit administratif, 2 vols. (Paris: Ridler, 1822).

[1 ]The Parliamentary History and Review, a radical annual based on Bentham’s Book of Fallacies, ceased publication in 1828 after only three issues. Mill wrote four long essays (for the complex bibliographic details and Mill’s comments, see CW, Vol. I, pp. 121-3, 132, and 706), but none on the Corn Laws. In the Review volume for the session of 1825 (London: Longman, et al., 1826), an article on the Corn Laws (pp. 690-705) is identified in George Grote’s copy (University of London Library) as by Charles Austin (1799-1874), younger brother of John Austin and a close friend to Mill. Another article, of which the authorship is unknown, also entitled “Corn Laws,” is in the Review volume for 1826 (London: Longman, et al., 1826), pp. 662-710.

[2 ]9 George IV, c. 60 (1828).

[1 ]Jean Paul Marat (1743-93), Jacobin leader, advocate of a strong dictatorship, was murdered in his bath by Marie Anne Charlotte de Corday (1768-93), an ardent republican, who was guillotined for the murder. The Girondists, more moderate than Marat and Robespierre, lost the struggle for control in the Assembly and consequently twenty-one of them were guillotined on 31 Oct., 1793. Mill was greatly attracted by them; see, e.g., CW, Vol. I, pp. 65-7, and Vol. XX, pp. 98-109.

[2 ]The speech of 19 Nov. is in Moniteur, 1832, p. 1977. Louis Philippe’s Dutch counterpart was William I (1772-1844), who assumed the title in 1814, and ruled until 1840.

[3 ]For Mill’s earlier reaction, see the latter half of No. 172.

[4 ]See The Twoo Bookes of Francis Bacon of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Humane (1605), in Works, Vol. III, p. 406 (cf. Of the Dignity and Advancement of Learning, ibid., Vol. IV, pp. 452-3).

[5 ]The Décade Philosophique was founded in April 1794 as a moderate republican paper, with articles on philosophy, science, literature, and politics. Called Revue Philosophique after October 1804, it ran until September 1807. The founders, with Say, were Sébastien Roch Nicolas Chamfort (1741-94), Academician and ironist who, threatened with arrest, shot himself, and Pierre Louis Ginguené (1748-1816), a brilliant scholar and literary historian, imprisoned during the Terror, who made his reputation with his L’histoire littéraire de l’Italie (1811).

[1 ]Gibbons Merle (ca. 1796-1855) was Paris correspondent of the Globe and Traveller from 1829 to his death. See his attacks in the Globe and Traveller, 23 Oct., 1832, p. 3, and 29 Oct., p. 2, for example, and the accompanying leading articles on French affairs of those dates, both on p. 2.

[2 ]Carrel, “Irlande.—Rappel de l’union.—Lois sur la presse,” Le National, 23 Oct., 1832, p. 2.

[3 ]Richard Lalor Sheil (1791-1851) started life as a dramatist. He supported O’Connell in the 1820s and became an M.P. in 1830, supporting repeal.

[4 ]Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley (1799-1869), later 14th Earl of Derby and Prime Minister, was elected as a Whig M.P. in 1822. At this time he was a moderate supporter of reform in Grey’s cabinet.

[5 ]Galignani’s Messenger, 24 Oct., 1832, p. 4.

[6 ]“By the way, . . . [Le National] informs its readers that ‘it may now be considered as almost certain that the repeal of the Union between England and Ireland will be effected.’ Can you tell why, gentle reader?—because Mr. Shiel, who had hitherto remained silent on the subject, has declared himself, at Clonmel, to be in favour of it!!! What a tit-bit for the Gallic gobe-mouches!” (Globe and Traveller, 25 Oct., 1832, p. 2.)

[7 ]Dom Pedro (1798-1834), Emperor of Brazil since 1822, succeeded to the Portuguese throne as Pedro IV in 1826, but abdicated in favour of his daughter Maria da Gloria, aged seven. His younger brother, the absolutist Dom Miguel (1802-66), however, declared himself king in 1828. In 1831 Pedro came from Brazil to fight for his daughter’s rights. The liberals in England supported Pedro, who landed with troops, including 500 French and 300 British, at Oporto in July 1832. The siege was lifted, and Pedro became Regent for his daughter, who had become Maria II.

[8 ]See Letter from Paris (16 Oct.), The Times, 20 Oct., 1832, pp. 2-3.

[9 ]Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, II, ii, 121; in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 561.

[10 ]Walter Coulson (1794-1860), lawyer, associate of Bentham and James Mill, who had edited the Globe and Traveller from the time when John Mill wrote his early pieces for it.

[11 ]Voltaire, Candide, ou L’optimisme (1767), in Oeuvres complètes, Vol. XXXIX, pp. 296-302 (Chap. xxv).

[12 ]The Courier, founded as an opposition journal in 1792, after 1807 was considered a mouthpiece for the Tory ministers, but when the Whigs came to power in 1830 it quickly changed sides, often expressing Brougham’s views.

[13 ]From 1828 to 1832, the short-reigned editors of the Courier were Thomas George Street (who had edited it also from 1811 to 1817), Eugenius Roche, a Mr. McEntaggart, John Galt, and Gibbons Merle. The proprietorship seems to have been a group of shareholders having control from 1827; in 1830 the principal proprietor was William Stewart, who had as partners the brothers George and John Rennie.

[14 ]For the Journal des Débats, see No. 50, n4. The Constitutionnel, a bourgeois and liberal newspaper, was founded during the early days of the Restoration. After the July Revolution, it loudly supported the new regime and declined markedly in quality and circulation.

[1 ]For the background, see No. 185. Dupin received 234 votes out of a possible 376; his only rival, Laffitte, received 136 (Moniteur, 22 Nov., 1832, p. 1989).

[2 ]Alphonse Marie Marcellus Thomas Bérenger (1785-1866), a magistrate, chairman of the commission that investigated the administration of Charles X, was an influential member of the constitutional opposition; and Charles Guillaume Etienne (1777-1845), playwright and politician, like Bérenger an Academician, had been Censor-General of Newspapers under Napoleon.

[3 ]Félix Réal (1792-1864), was Deputy for Isère, and avocat-général at Grenoble.

[4 ]See No. 172.

[5 ]The Commission was appointed on 23 Nov. (Moniteur, 1832, p. 1998).

[6 ]The promises of the Speech from the Throne (19 Nov.; see No. 185) resulted in Projet de loi relatif à l’instruction primaire (31 Dec., 1832), ibid., 3 Jan., 1833, pp. 15-16 (enacted as Bull. 105, No. 236 [28 June, 1833], the “loi Guizot”); Proposition de loi sur la responsabilité des ministres et des agents du pouvoir (12 Dec.), ibid., 1832, pp. 2139-40 (not enacted); Projet de loi sur l’organisation municipale (8 Dec.), ibid., pp. 2113-14; Projet de loi sur les attributions communales (8 Dec.), ibid., pp. 2114-16 (the latter leading eventually to Bull. 521, No. 6946 [18 July, 1837]); Projet de loi sur le conseil-général et les conseils d’arrondissement du département de la Seine, et sur la municipalité de la ville de Paris (8 Dec.), ibid., pp. 2116-17; and Projet de loi relatif à l’état de siège (10 Dec.), which was not enacted (see No. 204).

[7 ]Jean Baptiste Teste (1780-1852) was proscribed as a deputy during the Hundred Days, but returned in 1830; he became a minister only in 1834.

[8 ]For earlier comment, see No. 185. “Nouveaux détails sur l’attentat du 20 novembre,” Constitutionnel, 21 Nov., p. 2, identifies Adèle Boury (aged nineteen) as the daughter of the postmaster of Bergues (Nord); her “young man” was named Masse.

[1 ]On 4 Dec. (Moniteur, 1832, p. 2073); Bignon’s amendment was made on 3 Dec. (ibid., pp. 2068-9).

[2 ]For earlier comments, see Nos. 185 and 187.

[1 ]In 1831 Villiers became Secretary to the Board of Control, and had been working on the important revision of the charter of the East India Company that removed its trading monopoly in 1833.

[1 ]Projet de loi sur les douanes, introduced 3 Dec., debated 4-5 Dec. (Moniteur, 1832, pp. 2075-7 with the text on pp. 2084-5) would alter the provisions of the Corn Law, Bull. 462, No. 10886 (4 July, 1821), and the Customs Law, Bull. 91, No. 3076 (17 May, 1826).

[2 ]For the list, see No. 187.

[1 ]9 George IV, c. 60 (1828).

[2 ]Robert Henley Eden (1789-1841), 2nd Baron Henley, barrister, M.P. 1826-30 and Master in Chancery 1826-40, made the proposal for a corporation (not a Parliamentary Commission) to be called “The Commissioners for the Management of Ecclesiastical Property,” in A Plan of Church Reform (London: Roake and Varty, 1832), pp. 32ff.

[3 ]The reports were just coming in to the Poor Law Commission, and it seems very likely that Mill got the information from Edwin Chadwick, Secretary to the Commission and a close friend. The evidence was that of the Reverend Thomas Whately at Cookham, eventually published in the report of C.H. Cameron and John Wrottesley (24 Apr., 1833), in “Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws,” PP, 1834, XXVIII, 151-64.

[4 ]Imposed by 55 George III, c. 184 (1815).

[5 ]A term evidently introduced by Robert South (1634-1716), in A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, Nov. 9, 1662 (Oxford: Robinson, 1663).

[* ]Since this was written, Lord Althorp, in an election speech, has declared it to be his opinion that the Corn Laws ought not to be reconsidered in the approaching Session.

We have much confidence in the goodness of Lord Althorp’s intentions; but if this be a sample of the judgment, and power of appreciating his position, with which those good intentions are to be carried into effect, all our fears are more than verified. [The Times, 17 Dec., 1832, p. 3, reported in brief Lord Althorp’s reply to a question about the Corn Laws after he was declared elected (unopposed) for Northamptonshire on 15 Dec.]

[1 ]See No. 190. The Minister of Commerce and Public Works was the baron d’Argout.

[2 ]By, e.g., 9 George IV, c. 48 (1828), and 1 & 2 William IV, c. 16 (1831), which relaxed duties on glass, coals, slates, cotton wool, barillo, and wax; and 2 & 3 William IV, c. 84 (1832), which provided much lower duties on some items, removed some from the table, and provided for reciprocity.

[3 ]Duties were removed or lowered on a wide variety of imports by 22nd Congress, Sess. 1, c. 227 (14 July, 1832).

[1 ]He died on 28 Dec.

[2 ]Antoine Pierre Joseph Marie Barnave (1761-93) played a prominent role in the Constituent Assembly, of which he became President in October 1790. When the Assembly dissolved in September 1791, he returned to Grenoble where he was arrested, brought back to Paris, and guillotined on 30 Nov., 1793.

[3 ]The greatest orator was Mirabeau.

[4 ]Georges Jacques Danton (1759-94) belonged to the Committee of Public Safety, sharing responsibility for the September massacres; he lost the power struggle with Robespierre, and was guillotined on 5 Apr., 1794. The mot, said to have originated with Vergniaud, was perhaps taken by Mill from Joachim Vilate, Causes secrètes de la journée du 9 au 10 thermidor, in Le vieux cordelier, par Camille Desmoulins; Causes secrètes . . . , par Vilate . . . (Paris and Brussells: Baudoin, 1825), p. 192: “La révolution, comme Saturne, eut bientôt dévoré ses plus tendres enfans.” Vilate, however, does not attribute the phrase, but applies it to Desmoulins and Danton.

[5 ]In a speech on 10 Mar., Lameth had nominated Barnave for inclusion in the projected Panthéon (Moniteur, 1832, p. 712).

[6 ]Bertrand de Barère de Vieuzac (1755-1841), one of the most extreme members of the National Convention and a member of the Committee of Public Safety, first supported Robespierre and then drafted the report denouncing him. He served Bonaparte, and went into exile under the Restoration, returning in 1830.

[* ]Unless, of which we are not certain, Prieur de la Marne still survives. We forget whether the ex-director and eminent lawyer, Merlin de Douai, was a member of the Constituent Assembly. [Pierre Louis Prieur de la Marne (1756-1827), a lawyer, member of the Committee of Public Safety and President of the Convention, known for his bitter attacks on the ancien régime, was banished as a regicide in 1816 and had died in Brussels in 1827. Merlin de Douai, who was still alive, had been a member of the Constituent Assembly.]

[7 ]Charles Carroll (1737-1832), owner of Carrollton Manor in Maryland, was a delegate to the Maryland Convention of 1776, which declared for separation from England, a delegate to the Continental Congress, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He always signed his name Carroll of Carrollton.

[1 ]“An Ordonnance to Nullify Certain Acts of Congress of the United States, Purporting to Be Laws, Laying Duties and Imposts on the Importation of Foreign Commodities,” No. 2557 (24 Nov., 1832), in Statutes at Large of South Carolina, 1814-1838 (Columbia, S.C.: State Legislature, 1839), Vol. VI, p. 456.

[2 ]On 11 Dec. Jackson added to what he had said in his Address by issuing a proclamation denouncing the ordinance passed by the State of South Carolina on 24 Nov., 1832.

[3 ]Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862), a constant proponent of colonization schemes based on the sale rather than the gift of land to settlers, had published by 1833 Sketch of a Proposal for Colonizing Australasia, &c. &c. &c. (London: printed Dove, [1830]); A Statement of the Principles and Objects of a Proposed National Society, for the Cure and Prevention of Pauperism, by Means of Systematic Colonization (London: Ridgway, 1830); Plan of a Company to Be Established for the Purpose of Founding a Colony in Southern Australia, Purchasing Land Therein, and Preparing the Land so Purchased for the Reception of Immigrants (London: Ridgway, 1831); and Proposal to His Majesty’s Government for Founding a Colony on the Southern Coast of Australia (London: Nicol, 1831).

[1 ]10 Anne, c. 19 (1711), soap (and paper); 22 George III, c. 48 (1782), and 35 George III, c. 63 (1795), amended by 9 George IV, c. 49 (1828), insurance.

[2 ]For details on the stamp duties, see No. 177, n2.

[3 ]9 George IV, c. 44 (1828).

[4 ]48 George III, c. 55 (1808).

[5 ]Ibid.

[6 ]55 George III, c. 184 (1815).

[7 ]23 George III, c. 49 (1783).

[8 ]Also by 55 George III, c. 184 (1815).

[9 ]1 & 2 William IV, c. 16 (1831), replacing 7 & 8 George IV, c. 56 (1827).

[10 ]See 2 & 3 William IV, c. 84 (1832).

[11 ]For the debate on the timber duties (18 Mar., 1831), see PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 3, cols. 540-76. The measure was lost by 236 to 190. For earlier discussion, see No. 86.

[12 ]For earlier discussion, see No. 86.

[13 ]No. 196 did not appear until two weeks later.

[1 ]For details, see No. 86, n3.

[2 ]William Bertram Evans (ca. 1801-50), M.P. for Leominster 1831-32; his speech on 16 Aug., 1832, is not reported in PD, which gives no debate on that day, but is reported in The Times, 17 Aug., p. 2.

[* ]We assume this proportion only for facility of exemplification. What the real proportion should be, is matter of nice and careful consideration.

[1 ]The one sheet is a folio, yielding four numbered pages.

[1 ]The Unitarian Chronicle and Companion to the Monthly Repository, a sixteen-page sheet selling for 3d., lasted only until 1834, when the need for it was thought to have dissipated. It was directed for most of its two-year life by the Reverend Edwin Chapman.

[2 ]Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor, Vol. III, p. 111 (Chap. vii).

[3 ]William Johnson Fox, “A Victim,” pp. 164-77. Mehetabel Wesley (1697-1751), a poet of considerable talent, married William Wright, a London plumber, a coarse and brutal man. All her children died in infancy.

[4 ]Mehetabel’s mother was Susannah Wesley (1670-1742), who about 1690 married Samuel Wesley (1662-1735), Rector of South Ormsby and later of Epworth. They had nineteen children, ten of whom survived infancy.

[5 ]Luke, 10:42.

[6 ]The references are to characters (Caliban and Miranda) in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and to Judges, 11:30-1, where Jephtha’s vow results in his daughter’s sacrifice.

[7 ]The reference is to Milton’s advocacy of divorce; see The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), in Prose Works, Vol. I, pp. 342-76.

[8 ]Deuteronomy, 22:20-4.

[1 ]When Laffitte, early in 1833, put his property up for sale, a fund was established to forestall the sale of his Paris hôtel; in eight months more than 400,000 francs was raised.

[2 ]Alexandre Marie Aguado, marquis de Las Marismas (1784-1842), served as aide-de-camp to Soult in Spain, became a financier, getting his title from Ferdinand VII whose agent he was; he owned the Courrier Français at the opening of Louis Philippe’s reign.

[3 ]For details, see No. 169, n5.

[4 ]A second session began on 26 Apr., the day after the first session ended, with the successful aim of passing the budget for 1834 (Bull. 106, No. 239 [expenditures] and No. 240 [receipts], both 28 June, 1833).

[5 ]See No. 204.

[1 ]The article, by Fox, is praised in No. 198.

[2 ]James Martineau, “On the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Priestley,” pp. 231-41; the two previous articles had appeared in the January and February numbers, on pp. 19-30 and 84-8. For Mill’s other laudatory comments on this paper, which influenced his associationist psychology, see CW, Vol. I, p. 591n, Vol. VII, p. 481, Vol. XII, pp. 236, 247, 258, and Vol. XVII, p. 1961. Martineau (1805-1900), a Unitarian divine, brother of Harriet Martineau, was writing on Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the radical Unitarian clergyman and chemist.

[3 ]Anon., p. 251.

[1 ]Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) published his setting of Goethe’s “Kennst du das Land” (Mignon’s song) in 1810, as part of Opus 75, six songs for soprano and pianoforte. Goethe’s “Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt” (from which the translated passage comes) and “Kennst du das Land” are in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96), Vols. XVIII-XX in Werke, 55 vols. in 36 (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1828-33), Vol. XIX, p. 67 (Bk. IV, Chap. xi), and Vol. XVIII, p. 233 (Bk. III, Chap. i), respectively.

[2 ]Louis Spohr (1784-1859), violinist and composer.

[1 ]The most recent tax on foreign books was included in 6 George IV, c. 111 (1825).

[2 ]For details, see No. 177, n2.

[3 ]19 George III, c. 56 (1779), Sect. 5.

[4 ]See No. 301 for Mill’s discussion of the malt tax, most recently regulated by 11 George IV and 1 William IV, c. 17 (1830).

[5 ]Repealed by 3 William IV, c. 11 (1833).

[6 ]Robert Warren, 30 Strand, maker of shoe blacking, and Goss and Co., 11 Bouverie St., purveyors of mail order cures for syphilis and debility of the nervous system; both advertised frequently in the newspapers. See, e.g., Examiner, 13 Jan., 1833, p. 32 (Warren), and ibid.,20 Jan., 1833, p. 48 (Goss).

[7 ]3 & 4 William IV, c. 23 (1833); there was no reduction for bulk advertising.

[8 ]Reduced by 3 William IV, c. 10 (1833).

[9 ]Alexander Baring, Speech on Supply (19 Apr.), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 17, cols. 351-9; and Robert Peel, Speech on Supply (19 Apr.), ibid., cols. 342-6.

[* ]In print before the division of Friday night. [In divisions on 26 Apr., the government lost by twenty-eight and ten votes (PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 17, cols. 689 and 716).]

[10 ]On 18 Mar., 1831; for earlier discussion, see Nos. 86 and 195.

[11 ]Imposed by 34 George III, c. 15 (1794).

[1 ]The phrase seems to have originated with William Cobbett; see the fifth measure proposed in “The Petition of the Nobility, Gentry, and Others of the County of Norfolk,” Cobbett’s Weekly Register, XLV (11 Jan., 1823), 80.

[* ]So far as the tax affected private creditors, it would fall not upon them, but upon their debtors; for the rate of interest would probably rise in proportion to the tax. If it did not, the mortgagees and all other creditors would instantly call in their debts, and either buy land or stock at the reduced prices, or become sleeping partners in some commercial or manufacturing establishment, by which process they would escape from this notable species of taxation.

[1 ]Bull. 95, No. 219 (26 Apr., 1833).

[2 ]Bull. 94, Nos. 215 and 216 (24 Apr., 1833).

[3 ]The bill was introduced on 12 Dec. (Moniteur, 1832, pp. 2137-8); it was reintroduced on 29 Apr. (ibid., 1833, p. 1200), and was enacted as Bull. 107, No. 241 (7 July, 1833).

[4 ]The bill, which had first been introduced on 15 Sept., 1831, was lost in the session suspended because of the cholera epidemic. Resubmitted in revised form on 8 Dec., 1832, it was reported back on 5 Jan. (Moniteur, 1833, pp. 42-4). Its progress continued in the next session and it was enacted as Bull. 104, No. 235 (22 June, 1833).

[5 ]A new Art. 9 resulted from an amendment on 16 Jan. (Moniteur, 1833, p. 126).

[6 ]For the measures, see No. 150, n2.

[7 ]See, e.g., Bull. 81, No. 188 (15 Dec., 1832), and Bull. 85, No. 195 (20 Mar., 1833).

[8 ]For its origin, see No. 140, n3.

[9 ]On 27 Feb. (Moniteur, 1833, pp. 549-50).

[10 ]It began the very day after the prorogation of the first session, on 26 Apr., and continued until 26 June.

[11 ]Mill’s prediction was fulfilled; when the budget (Bull. 106, Nos. 239 and 240) was approved, the session was prorogued.

[12 ]Salverte’s proposal (see No. 132) had finally been adopted by the Chamber of Deputies on 31 Dec., 1832, as Règlement relatif à la reprise des travaux législatifs interrompus par la clôture des sessions (Moniteur, 1833, p. 6).

[13 ]For earlier discussion, see Nos. 126 and 187, n6. The bill, after being promised in the Throne speech on 19 Nov., 1832, had been introduced on 31 Dec. (Moniteur, 1833, pp. 15-16); the repeated delays account for Mill’s frustrated tone.

[14 ]The Projet de loi relatif à l’état de siège of 10 Dec. (ibid., 1832, pp. 2118-19) was sent back to the commission (i.e., rejected) on 18 Feb. (ibid., 1833, pp. 425-30).

[15 ]The issue of La Tribune for 14 Mar. had been seized “comme excitant à la haine et au mépris du Gouvernement” (Moniteur, 1833, p. 703); in La Tribune of 2 Apr., p. 1, Lionne had written: “O le bon billet de La Châtre que nous donne là cette Chambre prostituée!” He was sentenced to three years in prison and 10,000 francs fine (Moniteur, 17 Apr., 1833, p. 1080).

[1 ]For details, see No. 204, n13.

[2 ]See No. 126, n10. The full text of Victor Cousin’s Rapport sur l’état de l’instruction publique dans quelques pays de l’Allemagne, et particulièrement en Prusse had appeared early in March 1833.

[3 ]For its introduction, see No. 187.

[4 ]For earlier comment, see No. 76.

[5 ]Projet de loi relatif à la fixation du budget des dépenses de l’exercice 1834, introduced on 29 Apr. (Moniteur, 1833, p. 1204). For the earlier budget, see Nos. 150, n2, and 204, n11.

[6 ]For the proposal, see Moniteur, 1833, p. 1204.

[7 ]The Duchess had finally been arrested. While she was in prison, the revelation that she was pregnant had caused a scandal, fanned by the Government. A daughter, Anne Marie Rosalie Lucchesi-Palli, was born on 10 May (she lived only until 8 Nov.). In June, the Duchess was released to return to Italy and to Hector (Ettore) de Lucchesi-Palli (1806-64), a Sicilian nobleman, who had served in the Neapolitan diplomatic service, to whom she had claimed to have been secretly married.

[1 ]Alessandro Manzoni (1784-1873), author of the romance, I promessi sposi, and two tragedies, Il conte di Carmagnola e l’Adelchi and Degl’inni sacri; Vincenzo Monti (1754-1828), translator of Homer’s Iliad and author of Proposta per la riforma del dizionario della Crusca; Ugo Foscolo (1778-1827), author of the novel, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis; Ippolito Pindemonte (1753-1828), author of Poesie Campestri and translator of Homer’s Odyssey; Gabrieli Rossetti (1783-1854), Carbonaro, refugee in London, Professor of Italian at King’s College, London, author of La potenza di dio.

[1 ]W.J. Fox, “Local Logic,” pp. 413-26.

[2 ]Alexander Pope (1688-1744), “Epistle 1,” ll. 31-2, of Moral Essays, in Works, ed. Joseph Warton, et al., 10 vols. (London: Priestley and Hearne, 1822, 1825), Vol. III, p. 178.

[3 ]In “Poor Laws and Paupers,” pp. 361-81, W.J. Fox defends Harriet Martineau’s The Parish: A Tale (No. 1 of Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated [London: Fox, 1833]), against the attack in William Empson’s “Illustrations of Political Economy: Mrs. Marcet—Miss Martineau,” Edinburgh Review, LVII (Apr. 1833), 1-39. Empson (1791-1852), a major contributor to the Edinburgh, was a professor at the East India College at Haileybury.

[4 ]“Proposal for a National College of Language” (pp. 381-92) and “On the Conduct of the Police at the Late Meeting” (pp. 426-37), by William Bridges Adams (“Junius Redivivus”) (1797-1872), an engineer and ingenious inventor as well as political writer, who married Eliza Flower’s sister, Sarah, in 1834. (For Mill’s reviews of his writings, see CW, Vol. I, pp. 367-90.)

[5 ]Charles Reece Pemberton, “Autobiography of Pel. Verjuice,” pp. 392-403. This was Chap. ii; Chap. i had appeared in May, pp. 323-39; and other chapters followed, pp. 475-88, 529-45, 623-44, 691-705, 816-29, and n.s. VIII (Jan. 1834), 21-39 (see Nos. 214, 225, and 229).

[1 ]The scheme’s main provisions, apart from the geographical limitation on joint-stock banks, were to allow new joint-stock banks only by charter, to make Bank of England notes legal tender and induce country banks to use them, to require the Bank to publicize quarterly the amount of bullion and number of notes in circulation, and to exempt the Bank from the 5% interest limit, in respect of bills of less than three months.

[1 ]Report from the Committee of Secrecy on the Bank of England Charter, PP, 1831-32, VI, 1-699; see, e.g., pp. 234-5.

[2 ]Cf. Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, V, ii, 861-2; in The Riverside Shakespeare, p. 211.

[3 ]Imposed by 31 George III, c. 25 (1791).

[* ]It is characteristic of the little attention paid to these subjects by all except those who are privately interested in them, that all the periodical publications of any importance, with one exception, have either taken part with the monopoly or been silent. The exception to which we allude is Tait’s Magazine, which has furnished the only refutation we have yet seen in print of the arguments for the exclusive privilege of the Bank. That work, which ranks high in so many other respects for ability and right principles, stands quite alone among the periodical works of the day in the general soundness and depth of its Political Economy. [“Ministers and the Bank Charter,” by William Tait (1793-1864), the proprietor and editor, appeared in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, II (Mar. 1833), 753-4. Mill’s own contributions to Tait’s included “The Currency Juggle,” II (Jan. 1833), 461-7 (CW, Vol. IV, pp. 181-92), which concludes with an editorial reference to “free trade in banking” as exposited in the series by Henry Brooke Parnell (see No. 217, n12), “The Bank Charter,” Tait’s, I (June 1832), 291-314; (July), 386-8; (Aug.), 559-620; and (Sept.), 664-5.]

[4 ]In his speech on the Bank Charter (3 July, 1833), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 19, cols. 82-3, Althorp withdrew all that part of his proposals relating to country banks.

[5 ]“Copies of Communications between the First Lord of the Treasury and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Governor and Deputy Governor of the Bank of England,” PP, 1826, XIX, 471-9; the warning is on pp. 474-5. Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770-1828), 2nd Earl Liverpool, M.P. from 1790, was Prime Minister, 1812-27.

[6 ]12 Anne, Second Session, c. 16 (1713), the application of which was reduced by the Bank Act of 1833.

[1 ]See No. 204.

[2 ]See ibid., n12.

[3 ]Bull. 105, No. 236 (28 June, 1833); for earlier bills, see Nos. 68 and 126.

[4 ]Bull. 107, No. 241 (7 July, 1833); see No. 204, n3.

[5 ]Bull. 104, No. 235 (22 June, 1833); see No. 204, n4.

[6 ]The last section of the Budget for 1834 (Bull. 106, Nos. 239 and 240 [28 June, 1833]) was adopted on 18 June (Moniteur, 1833, p. 1723).

[7 ]For 1832, Bull. 76, Nos. 168 and 169 (21 Apr., 1832), see No. 135; for 1833, Bull. 93, No. 213 (23 Apr., 1833), and Bull. 94, No. 214 (24 Apr., 1833), see No. 204.

[1 ]See “Report from the Select Committee on Municipal Corporations; with the Minutes of Evidence Taken before Them,” PP, 1833, XIII, 1-399, for the names, which included Althorp, Abercrombie, Peel, Poulett Thomson, O’Connell, and Charles Buller.

[2 ]The latest corn law was 9 George IV, c. 60 (1828); the latest game law was 1 & 2 William IV, c. 32 (1831).

[3 ]Milton, Paradise Lost, II, 423; in Poetical Works, p. 40.

[4 ]George Granville Leveson-Gower (1758-1833), 1st Duke of Sutherland.

[5 ]Cf. Charles Grey, Speech on Parliamentary Reform (3 Oct., 1831), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 7, col. 936.

[6 ]1 & 2 William IV, c. 60 (1831).

[7 ]Gesetze Nos. 810-13, in Gesetz-Sammlung für die Königlichen Preussischen Staaten 1823, pp. 129-52.

[* ]We quote from Mr. Roebuck’s excellent speech on National Education. [Roebuck (PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 20, cols. 147-8 [30 July, 1833]), was quoting Victor Cousin’s Rapport, p. 133.]

[8 ]Cf. Ecclesiastes, 11:1.

[1 ]The Bill passed through Committee on 10 Aug. and the House of Commons on 19 Aug. (PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 20, col. 782); it was enacted as 3 & 4 William IV, c. 98 (29 Aug., 1833).

[2 ]For the anecdote, see Richard Owen Cambridge, “To Mr. Fitz-Adam,” The World, No. 50 (13 Dec., 1753), p. 303.

[3 ]In the Ministry’s resolutions presented by Althorp on 31 May; see No. 208.

[4 ]7 George IV, c. 46 (1826)

[5 ]William Horne (1774-1860), who had been appointed Solicitor-General in 1830, was made Attorney-General in 1832, being replaced as Solicitor-General by John Campbell (1779-1861). Their judgment is reported in “The Bank of England,” The Times, 14 Aug., pp. 5-6.

[6 ]See “A Copy of All Correspondence and Minutes of Any Conferences between the Government and the Directors of the Bank of England, on the Subject of the Renewal of the Bank Charter,” PP, 1833, XXIII, 279-96.

[7 ]See Spencer, “Letter to the Governor and Deputy Governor of the Bank of England” (6 Aug., 1833), ibid., p. 293; and his interjection in the debate on the removal of the Bank’s Charter (31 May, 1833), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 18, col. 188.

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September 1832 to August 1833 - 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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September 1832 to August 1833

179.

RECOMMENDATIONS OF CANDIDATES TO PARLIAMENT EXAMINER, 2 SEPT., 1832, P. 569

180.

FRENCH NEWS [68] EXAMINER, 9 SEPT., 1832, P. 585

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FRENCH NEWS [69] EXAMINER, 21 OCT., 1832, PP. 680-1

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FRENCH NEWS [70] EXAMINER, 28 OCT., 1832, P. 696

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FRENCH NEWS [71] EXAMINER, 4 NOV., 1832, PP. 710-11

184.

THE CORN LAWS EXAMINER, 18 NOV., 1832, P. 739