Econlib

The Library

Other Sites

 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 419.: THE CASE OF WILLIAM SMITH UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE DAILY NEWS [LATE 1869 TO EARLY 1870] - The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV

Return to Title Page for The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV

Search this Title:

Also in the Library:

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

419.: THE CASE OF WILLIAM SMITH UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE DAILY NEWS [LATE 1869 TO EARLY 1870] - John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV [1847]

Edition used:

The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986).

Part of: Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, in 33 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


419.

THE CASE OF WILLIAM SMITH

UNPUBLISHED LETTER TO THE DAILY NEWS [LATE 1869 TO EARLY 1870]

William Smith, police constable, had been tried and punished for striking an Irish labourer and felt-maker, Patrick Macgovern, in the course of stopping Macgovern’s assault on his wife Eliza. The case was reported in “The Police Courts. Thames,” Daily News, 25 Dec., 1869, p. 2, from which Mill quotes. For Mill’s efforts to interest the Attorney-General, Sir Robert Porrett Collier, and the editor of the Daily News, Frank Harrison Hill, in Smith’s reinstatement, see LL, CW, Vol. XVII, pp. 1677-9, and 1705-6. A long leader appeared in the Daily News, 18 Jan., 1870, pp. 4-5; one may assume that a fair copy of this unsigned draft (MS, Yale) was sent to the Daily News (which did not print it) as part of Mill’s unsuccessful campaign. The letter, being unpublished, is not in Mill’s bibliography.

sir,—

I beg you to receive the inclosed £5 as the commencement of a subscription for the benefit of the police constable William Smith, No. 151 K, who as I learn from your paper of Dec. 25 has been sentenced by Mr. Benson, the Thames Police magistrate,1 to a month’s imprisonment and hard labour for striking with his staff a man who had only knocked down his own wife in the street.

“The assault,” said Mr. Benson, meaning not the man’s assault upon his wife but the constable’s assault upon the man, “was unprovoked, brutal, and unjustifiable” and it has gone forth from the seat of justice to the whole brutal part of the population, that for a man to knock down a woman, provided that woman is his wife, is no “provocation” and that a month’s penal servitude is a proper penalty, not for the ruffian himself but for the appointed guardian of the public peace who interferes with his authorized brutality.

For my own part, it seems to me that the policeman who thinks that men’s wives are within the pale of legal protection and who, astonishing as the idea was to the man himself and to the magistrate, thinks it his duty not to look on passively and see them maltreated, deserves a signal mark of public approbation, which cannot in this instance take a better shape than that of a subscription to compensate him for the suffering and degradation as well as the pecuniary loss inflicted on him by this iniquitous sentence.

[1 ]Ralph Augustus Benson (1828-86), barrister.