Mill on England, Ireland, Empire: Collected Works vol. VI

Source: Editor's introduction to The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume VI - Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Joseph Hamburger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982).

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Introduction by JOSEPH HAMBURGER

mill the philosopher, the economist, the general essayist and critic appears here in yet another capacity—as a radical journalist and party politician. Most of the articles in this volume were written to define the purpose of, and give direction to, the Radical party in Parliament during the 1830s; and even the articles on Ireland and the early articles on other subjects provide evidence of Mill’s radical inclinations at other times, though, of course, Mill’s discussion of Ireland is also important in the history of English controversy about that island. Most of these essays were written for journals that Mill helped to establish: the Westminster Review, the Parliamentary History and Review, the London Review, and the London and Westminster Review. The only exceptions were the independently published pamphlet England and Ireland, and his contributions to the Monthly Repository, which was edited by his friend, the Radical and Unitarian, William Johnson Fox. His successive contributions to each of these journals is closely related to the history of Benthamite radicalism; and, especially when combined with his correspondence, they show that Mill’s radicalism during the 1820s and 1830s defined a distinct and important episode in his life, and that he participated in events significant in parliamentary history. This introduction, except for the last part on Ireland, describes Mill’s radicalism during this early period, including his rationale for a Radical party, and his activities on behalf of that party during the 1830s. It also, in describing the relation of the mental crisis to his radicalism, shows that his resolution of the crisis allowed him to continue working and writing for the radical cause despite the changes in outlook and political philosophy that accompanied it.

Since most of the articles in this volume deal with party programmes and tactics, they emphatically belong in the realm of practice, and they are markedly different from the theoretical writings on politics that we usually associate with Mill.1 Practically oriented as these articles were, however, they also had a theoretical dimension, for he promoted a political enterprise with arguments that originated in Benthamite political philosophy. Mill’s radicalism, as an extension of the Benthamite position, is readily distinguished from other radical doctrines. Its principled basis allowed him to claim that it was uniquely philosophic, and thus it justified his invention and use of the phrase “Philosophic Radicalism.”

A RADICAL EDUCATION

mill’s career as a radical reformer began with his early education. When he was only six his father thought of him as the one to carry on the work begun by Bentham and himself. James Mill, during a period of illness, told Bentham of his hope that, in the event of his own death, his son would be brought up to be “a successor worthy of both of us.”2 James Mill, however, lived to carry out his educational mission himself, and he accomplished it with great effectiveness. John Stuart Mill later recalls having had “juvenile aspirations to the character of a democratic champion”; and, he continues, “the most transcendant glory I was capable of conceiving, was that of figuring, successful or unsuccessful, as a Girondist in an English Convention.”3

Mill’s wish to be a reformer was given additional impetus in 1821 (at age fifteen) when he read Traités de législation, Dumont’s redaction of Bentham. His education up to this time “had been, in a certain sense, already a course of Benthamism”: but the impact of this book was dramatic—it was “an epoch in my life; one of the turning points in my mental history.” All he had previously learned seemed to fall into place; Mill now felt he had direction and purpose as a reformer. Bentham’s book opened “a clearer and broader conception of what human opinions and institutions ought to be, how they might be made what they ought to be, and how far removed from it they now are.” Consequently Mill “now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion; the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life.” This new understanding was the initiation of Mill into radical politics, for he now had a “vista of improvement” which lit up his life and gave “a definite shape” to his aspirations.4

Mill’s early assimilation of radicalism was evident in “Brodie’s History of the British Empire” (3-58 below),5 an article written at age eighteen. He used Bentham’s ideas to analyze seventeenth-century constitutional conflicts and to criticize Hume’s defence of Charles I. Hume wrote a “romance,” Mill said, which generally “allies itself with the sinister interests of the few” while being indifferent to the “sufferings of the many,” and he failed to consider “the only true end of morality, the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (3-4). Mill savagely criticized Hume as a defender of Stuart despotism, a dissembler, a perjuror (49), who involved himself in a “labyrinth of falsehood” (43). Indulgent to Stuart persecution (17), Hume became “the open and avowed advocate of despotism” (16). When Mill turned his attention to the parliamentary opposition, he tried to cast the Independents as seventeenth-century versions of nineteenth-century Radicals. They were republicans who upheld “the religion of the enlightened, and the enlightened are necessarily enemies to aristocracy” (47).6

Bentham’s views on sinister and universal interests and the need for democratic reforms, and his belief that the most important conflict was between the aristocracy (represented by Whigs and Tories) and the people (represented by Radicals), were passed from Bentham to James Mill and subsequently to John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals. Bentham was critical of all institutions sanctioned by traditional authority, especially the common law and the British constitution. He regarded all law-making and administration of public affairs as disfigured by the aristocratic (and monarchical) monopoly of power. This monopoly created sinister interests which had many undesirable consequences, including unnecessary wars and unjustifiable empire building, but Bentham especially emphasized domestic corruption. The monarch and the aristocracy obtained benefits, such as sinecures and pensions, denied to others. The government, supposedly acting as trustees for the people, instead adopted the principle that “the substance of the people was a fund, out of which . . . fortunes . . . ought to be—made.” Such predatory activity and the improper distribution of “power, money, [and] factitious dignity” were made possible by “separate, and consequently with reference to the public service, . . . sinister interests.”7 This concept of sinister interests was central to Bentham’s radical political analysis.

Bentham’s remedy was “democratic ascendancy.” Under it, office-holders would be restrained from seeking corrupt benefits. Universal suffrage, secret ballot, and annual parliaments would subject office-holders to scrutiny by those who stood to lose from the existence of sinister interests; thus these democratic practices would promote “the universal interest . . . of the whole people.” Democratic ascendancy was recommended as the best means to the desired goal, the greatest happiness of the greatest number.8

Any persons or groups, whatever their social class or economic condition, could, according to Bentham, have sinister interests, but in the circumstances of the early nineteenth century the aristocracy was the most obvious and compelling example of a class that enjoyed such corrupt interests. His analysis pointed to fundamental conflict, under existing constitutional arrangements, between the aristocracy and the remainder of the populace. In this dispute the aristocracy was represented by the Whigs and the Tories, and the populace by Radicals, whom he also called “People’s-men.”9 This conflict superseded the contest of parties familiar to most observers, and although it was invisible to many, to Bentham it was the more significant contest. Whigs and Tories, far from being enemies, were not significantly different. “Both parties . . . acting under the dominion of the same seductive and corruptive influence—will be seen to possess the same separate and sinister interest:—an interest completely and unchangeably opposite to that of the whole uncorrupt portion of the people.”10 Despite their superficial quarrels, the two aristocratic parties shared a class interest: “That which the Tories have in possession . . . the Whigs have before them in prospect and expectancy.”11

Bentham laid the foundation of the Mills’ radicalism, but James Mill generated most of the argument and rhetoric that John Stuart Mill adopted in his early years. Young Mill read his father’s works, usually if not always in manuscript, conversed about them at length with him, and proof-read some as well. Among these works was the History of British India, which, James Mill said, “will make no bad introduction to the study of civil society in general. The subject afforded an opportunity of laying open the principles and laws of the social order. . . .”12 There were also James Mill’s Encyclopaedia Britannica articles, which diagnosed problems and outlined remedies on such matters as government, colonies, education, law, the press, prisons, and poor relief.13 And a few years later there were his articles in the Westminster Review on the main Whig and Tory quarterlies and the parties they represented.14

Parliamentary reform was regarded by Bentham and James Mill as supremely important, for they assumed that all other reforms, those of tariffs, education, and law, for example, would be achieved without difficulty once the popular or universal interest was represented in Parliament. An early statement of James Mill’s arguments for radical reform of Parliament may be found in his essay “Government,” although John Stuart Mill probably was familiar with them from his father’s unpublished dialogue on government composed on the Platonic model.15 Written in an austere style for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Government” in fact was a polemical statement, as both Ricardo and John Stuart Mill recognized.16

The essay, far more extreme than was apparent, was influential in shaping the political thought of Philosophic Radicalism. Frequently it has been suggested that because it was a defence of the middle class, it was not an argument for complete democracy. This interpretation, however, ignores the fact that it was in its main features consistent with Bentham’s Plan of Parliamentary Reform, a fully democratic work. Certainly John Stuart Mill regarded his father as a democrat. James Mill, he said, “thought that when the legislature no longer represented a class interest, it would aim at the general interest,” and therefore “a democratic suffrage [was] the principal article of his political creed.”17 James Mill’s severest and most discerning critic, Thomas Babington Macaulay, also recognized that Mill was “in favour of pure democracy.”18

James Mill’s rationale for a democratic suffrage was an important link between Bentham’s advocacy of universal suffrage and John Stuart Mill’s radicalism during the 1830s. “Government,” which was more widely read than any of his other political writings, had a powerful impact on the young Radicals, becoming “almost a text-book to many of those who may be termed the Philosophic Radicals.”19 James Mill’s influence was greatly reinforced by his conversation with the notable, even if not large, group of disciples that gathered around him during the 1820s and early 1830s, including some that John Stuart Mill brought into the fold: Charles Austin, Edward Strutt, John Romilly, William Ellis, and John Arthur Roebuck. James Mill’s impact was enhanced by the distance between these disciples and the aging Bentham (now in his seventies), who at this time was more interested in law reform and codification than in parliamentary politics. Bentham’s distance from the Radicals close to the Mills was accentuated by his intimacy with John Bowring, who was disliked and distrusted by James Mill. In 1825 some of these tensions surfaced when the Mills and their followers reduced their contributions to the Westminster Review and began publication of the Parliamentary History and Review, a journal in which they proclaimed Bentham’s principles without Bowring’s editorial interference.

Many, in addition to his son, have testified to James Mill’s strengths as a political teacher. George Grote, who began his parliamentary career as a Radical in 1833, recalled James Mill’s “powerful intellectual ascendency over younger minds.”20 Roebuck, despite an early quarrel with James Mill, called him his political and philosophical teacher and said, “To him I owe greater obligations than to any other man. If I know any thing, from him I learned it.”21 Another of John Stuart Mill’s young friends, William Ellis, said of his early encounter with James Mill, “‘he worked a complete change in me. He taught me how to think and what to live for.’” Indeed, Mill supplied him “with all those emotions and impulses which deserve the name of religious.”22 Harriet Grote, the historian’s wife, also observed that under James Mill’s influence “the young disciples, becoming fired with patriotic ardour on the one hand and with bitter antipathies on the other, respectively braced themselves up, prepared to wage battle when the day should come, in behalf of ‘the true faith,’ according to Mill’s ‘programme’ and preaching.”23 Such strong influence allowed John Stuart Mill to say that his father “was quite as much the head and leader of the intellectual radicals in England, as Voltaire was of the philosophes of France.”24

This comparison with the philosophes, made by John Stuart Mill more than once, identifies the spirit in which he and the other Philosophic Radicals approached politics. His father’s opinions, he said,

The Philosophic Radicals’ sectarian spirit was evident in their use of a distinctive jargon irritating to others. John Stuart Mill’s adopting the utilitarian label as a “sectarian appellation,”26 for example, led Macaulay to ridicule “the project of mending a bad world by teaching people to give new names to old things.” The utilitarians, Macaulay added, invented “a new sleight of tongue.”27 Mill also confessed that “to outrer whatever was by anybody considered offensive in the doctrines and maxims of Benthamism, became at one time the badge of a small coterie of youths.”28

Mill and others in his coterie displayed this sectarian spirit in the London Debating Society where they preferred to engage in political debate with ideological opposites whose principles were as clear and explicit as their own. Mill’s group, not the liberal moderates or trimming Whigs (such as Macaulay), provided the opposition to the Tories in the Society, and almost every debate, Mill recalled, “was a bataille rangée between the ‘philosophic radicals’ and the Tory lawyers.” The debates, he said, were unusual for being philosophically extreme, so that the opponents were “thrown often into close and serré confutations of one another.”29 In noting that the Society was the only arena in which such conflict was to be found, Mill was making an allusion to the defects of Parliament itself as well as giving a hint of the worldly ambitions which were linked to his and the other Philosophic Radicals’ political speculations.

Their conduct and opinions did not go uncriticized. Henry Taylor, an official in the Colonial Office and later author of The Statesman, regarded John Stuart Mill’s views in the 1820s as being “at heart something in the nature of political fanaticism,” and in the London Debating Society Taylor spoke against the same facet of radicalism that provoked Macaulay’s famous critique of James Mill.30 William Empson also complained about “the most peremptory and proselytizing seminary of ipse dixitists, (to use one of their own beautiful words,) which has ever existed.” The Benthamite Radicals reminded Empson of “those abstract and dogmatical times when men were principally distinguished by the theory of morals that they might happen to profess.”31 Macaulay, at this time a prolific publicist but not yet in the House of Commons, suggested that the disciples of James Mill (whom he called a “zealot of a sect”)32 were potentially dangerous.

Such criticism was not likely to undermine the confidence of John Stuart Mill and his fellow enthusiasts. The Philosophic Radicals were distinguished, Mill said, for writing with an “air of strong conviction . . . when scarcely any one else seemed to have an equally strong faith in as definite a creed. . . .” Thus the public eye was attracted by “the regular appearance in controversy of what seemed a new school of writers, claiming to be the legislators and theorists of this new [reformist] tendency.”34

RADICALISM INTERRUPTED: THE MENTAL CRISIS

during the middle and late 1820s John Stuart Mill might have felt confidence in his future as a leading member of an influential coterie, but his commitment to radicalism was shaken by his mental crisis and related events, particularly, at the end of the decade, by Macaulay’s critique of James Mill’s “Government,” John Austin’s arguments in his course of lectures on jurisprudence at the University of London in 1829-30, and the early writings of Auguste Comte and the St. Simonians.

The mental crisis, which beset him in the autumn of 1826, made Mill indifferent to reform. Having been converted, as he reported, to a political creed with religious dimensions, and having seen himself as “a reformer of the world,” he now asked himself if the complete reform of the world would bring him happiness and, realizing it would not, he felt that the foundations of his life had collapsed. “I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my voyage, with a well equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; . . . ambition seemed to have dried up within me. . . .”35 Mill for a time lost his political calling.

This crisis was responsible, as Mill acknowledged, for an “important transformation” in his “opinions and character.”36 So far as opinions were concerned, the change came, not directly from the crisis, but from certain subsequent events. These events occurred after the period of his greatest dejection had ended but before his recovery of purpose and confidence. In fact, by undermining his old beliefs, the crisis opened the way for a commitment to new ideas. Part of the process was the undercurrent of negative feelings about James Mill that are evident in his record of the crisis.

The first of these events, the publication in 1829 of Macaulay’s critiques of James Mill’s “Government,” did much to shake John Mill’s beliefs. Macaulay charged James Mill with using a priori reasoning inappropriate to political analysis, and argued that Mill compounded this error by making deductions from inadequate premises. James Mill’s democratic prescription, Macaulay argued, would not necessarily promote policies reflecting the universal interest.37 This attack, John Stuart Mill confessed, “gave me much to think about.” Though, he says,

Mill now thought there was something “fundamentally erroneous” in his father’s “conception of philosophical Method.”39

Also contributing to the change in Mill’s beliefs were John Austin’s lectures (which Mill attended during the session that began in November, 1829) and his exposure to St. Simonianism. Whereas Macaulay’s attack undermined his confidence in the soundness of “Government,” and by extension much else, without providing anything to put in its place, John Austin and the St. Simonians suggested to Mill political principles that were alternatives to his old radicalism and that, at least to their authors, seemed incompatible with Benthamite radicalism. Mill’s adoption of several ideas from Austin and the St. Simonians for a while prevented him from resuming his former role as a champion of the older radicalism. Only after an intellectual struggle was he able to accommodate the new ideas to the old.

The most important of these new ideas concerned political authority. In 1829 he began to develop the view that it ought to be exercised by those with special knowledge of public matters, and began speaking about the “authority of the instructed.”40 Since this notion circumscribed the political role of ordinary citizens, he also advocated the multitude’s deference to knowledgeable authority. These opinions, markedly alien to Benthamite radicalism and his father’s political principles, had their origin in writings of the St. Simonians and in John Austin’s lectures on jurisprudence (which is not to say that Austin’s political thought and St. Simonianism were the same).41

Austin’s advocacy of vesting authority in those with knowledge was closely tied to his complete confidence that the method of science could be applied to most fields of knowledge. He was so impressed by the achievements of natural science and the progress of political economy that he looked forward to a parallel emergence of political and moral science. By using the principle of utility, these sciences would discover the sources of improvement, and the result would be a science of ethics, including the sciences of law, morality, and political science. Since such scientific knowledge was accessible only to comparatively few, however, authority could be properly exercised only by them, and most persons were expected to accept their conclusions “on authority, testimony, or trust.”42

These ideas made Austin anything but a radical. He had been an orthodox Benthamite until, in 1827, he began a year-and-a-half stay in Germany, but his new attitudes to authority and trust were incompatible with the democratic arrangements proposed by Bentham. Austin unmistakably rejected radicalism in his denying that “the power of the sovereign flows from the people, or [that] the people is the fountain of sovereign power.”43 He also complained about “the stupid and infuriate majority,” and condemned Radical leaders, saying that “the guides of the multitude [were] moved by sinister interests, or by prejudices which are the offspring of such interests.”44 John Mill noted Austin’s move away from radicalism, reporting that in Germany Austin “acquired an indifference, bordering on contempt, for the progress of popular institutions. . . .”45 Austin’s relations with Bentham became somewhat strained at this time, and Sarah Austin (whose views were very close to her husband’s) said she “excite[d] horror among [her] Radical friends for not believing that all salvation comes of certain organic forms of government.”46

Another alternative to Benthamism was St. Simonianism. Mill became acquainted with the sect in 1829 and 1830, and he claimed to have read everything they wrote, though, of course, he did not share all their beliefs.47 Among other things, he found in St. Simonian writings a theory of history that asserted that society progressed through alternating stages, called organic and critical. Organic epochs are characterized by widely shared beliefs and clearly defined, shared goals. In such periods society is arranged hierarchically, with the truly superior having the power to direct moral, scientific, and industrial activity. Although there is gross inequality, there is no discontent and no conflict. For the St. Simonians, organic eras existed when Greek and Roman polytheism were in full vigour (ending, respectively, with Pericles and Augustus), and when Catholicism and feudalism were at their height.48 Critical epochs, in contrast, are characterized by deep scepticism about the values and beliefs of the preceding organic era and finally by rejection of them. All forces join to destroy the values and institutions of the preceding era, and when this destruction is accomplished, one finds irreligion, lack of morality, and egoism, as particular interests prevail over the general interest. In the resultant anarchy, there is conflict between ruler and ruled, and men of ability are ignored. The St. Simonians found examples in the periods between polytheism and Christianity and from Luther to the present.49

St. Simonian ideas, like Austin’s, were far removed from Benthamite radicalism, implying, as they did, that organic were superior to critical periods, and approving cultural and religious unity and hierarchy. All that Benthamite radicalism aimed to achieve assumed the continued existence of a critical epoch, and radicalism’s highest achievement would have involved the most extreme development of the distinguishing characteristics of critical eras. The Radicals’ blindness to the necessary supercession of critical periods by organic ones was, for the St. Simonians, a disqualifying limitation.

These ideas—both Austin’s and the St. Simonians’—had a powerful impact on Mill. He came to believe that those most instructed in moral and political subjects might “carry the multitude with them by their united authority.”50 His assumption that most persons “must and do believe on authority” was an implicit rejection of Benthamite views on the role of a sceptical electorate always alert to the operation of sinister interests.51 The full extent of his commitment to these new ideas was evident in his “The Spirit of the Age,” which appeared in 1831, but even earlier his changed ideas were reflected in changed activities. Unlike his father, Mill for a few years thought there was little point in stimulating public opinion; he dropped out of the London Debating Society in 1829 and wrote little for publication.52 Although he claimed to have “entered warmly”53 into the political discussions of the time when he returned from Paris in September, 1830, his manuscript bibliography records few publications on domestic politics during the reform period, and during the height of the Reform Bill agitation he was “often surprised, how little” he really cared about extra-parliamentary politics. “The time is not yet come,” he wrote, “when a calm and impartial person can intermeddle with advantage in the questions and contests of the day.”54

Mill recovered his sense of calling as a reformer and his radical beliefs, but only after he accommodated his new ideas about the authority of the instructed to Benthamite radicalism. He felt compelled to make the accommodation:

The process of weaving anew, which involved influences coming from Coleridge, Carlyle, and Harriet Taylor, as well as from John Austin and the St. Simonians, continued for much of his life, but it was a major occupation for him during the 1830s.

If Mill’s metaphor of weaving suggests a harmonious intertwining, it is somewhat misleading, for initially his old and new ideas were not so much woven together as simply combined. Rather than choose between them, Mill now regarded both the old ideas, which emphasized popular control, and the new, which emphasized instructed leadership, as equally necessary: “the grand difficulty in politics will for a long time be, how best to conciliate the two great elements on which good government depends; to combine the greatest amount of the advantage derived from the independent judgment of a specially instructed Few, with the greatest degree of the security for rectitude of pupose derived from rendering those Few responsible to the Many.”56 This combination was necessary because each of its main ingredients was by itself insufficient. Benthamite radicalism provided a popular check on authority but made no provision for instructed authority. By attempting to combine these two approaches, Mill was hoping to provide for “the two great elements on which good government depends.”57

This wish to combine two diverse outlooks led Mill to use the language of eclecticism. He described the truth as “many sided,”58 and advocated “a catholic spirit in philosophy.”59 Trying to combine fragments of the truth and to reconcile persons who represented different “half truths,”60 he sought “practical eclecticism,”61 and he tried to keep “as firm hold of one side of the truth as [he] took of the other.”62

At this time Mill thought of his political speculations as taking place on a higher plane than they had occupied earlier. Whereas previously he (like Bentham and his father) had regarded certain model institutions as the end result of speculation, now, without rejecting his old conclusions about model (i.e., democratic) institutions, he went further. In his words, “If I am asked what system of political philosophy I substituted for that which, as a philosophy, I had abandoned, I answer, no system: only a conviction, that the true system was something much more complex and many sided than I had previously had any idea of, and that its office was to supply, not a set of model institutions, but principles from which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be deduced.”63 Of course, viewed from this higher plane, James Mill’s contribution to political philosophy was greatly diminished. Thus John Mill became “aware of many things which [his father’s] doctrine, professing to be a theory of government in general, ought to have made room for, and did not.”64 He no longer accepted “Government” as embodying scientific theory, and thought his father should have answered Macaulay by acknowledging that the essay was not a scientific treatise but only a tract in support of parliamentary reform.65 Although he did not use the phrase in reference to his father, clearly he thought James Mill had grasped only a “half-truth.”

Mill’s search for ways of combining the diverse understandings of Bentham and his father, on the one hand, and of Austin and the St. Simonians, on the other, was revealed most clearly in his articles on Bailey, Tocqueville, Bentham, and Coleridge (and much later, of course, in Considerations on Representative Government). Whereas he castigated as false democracy the simple majoritarianism which he associated with the recommendations of Bentham and James Mill, he saw true or rational democracy as the kind that, in allowing for representation of minorities, including the minority of the educated, facilitated leadership by the instructed few in combination with a democratic suffrage that provided popular control. This line of thinking was also evident in his belief that the main thrust of eighteenth-century political philosophy, represented by the philosophes on the Continent and in England by Bentham (and, by implication, his father), had to be combined with the main theme of nineteenth-century thought as represented by the German romantics and in England by Coleridge. Whereas Bentham taught the need for popular control, Coleridge, with his notion of a clerisy, promoted the idea of enlightened authority that commanded deference from the populace. “Whoever could master the premises and combine the methods of both [Bentham and Coleridge], would possess the entire English philosophy of their age,”66 Mill said, and described his wish to synthesize Bentham and Coleridge as a “scheme of conciliation between the old and the new ‘philosophic radicalism.’”67

In combining the new ideas with the old radicalism, Mill was greatly helped by a theory of history that allowed him to visualize the progressive development of society. He was exposed to such a theory in St. Simonianism, which provided him with a “connected view . . . of the natural order of human progress.”68 This permitted him to assume that the combination of enlightened leadership and democratic control would be viable; that is, true democracy as he understood it could come to exist.

After Mill had persuaded himself that the old radicalism was reconcilable with his new ideas, he could co-operate with the other Radicals in practical politics. While he had some goals that were not theirs, he shared their wish for an extended suffrage, shorter parliaments, and the secret ballot. The “change in the premises of my political philosophy,” he says, “did not alter my practical political creed as to the requirements of my own time and country. I was as much as ever a radical and democrat, for Europe, and especially for England.”69 Democracy, however, would have put into practice only some of Mill’s political principles, whereas for the other Radicals it would have been closer to complete fulfilment of their hopes.

In the absence of complete agreement, relations between Mill and the other Philosophic Radicals were somewhat strained. Since they were willing to apply only some of his political principles, he regarded them as narrow. They saw “clearly what they did see, though it was but little.” As they were narrow, he regarded them as incomplete, “half-men.”70 All the same, he was “able to cooperate with them in their own field of usefulness, though perhaps they would not always join [him] in [his].”71 Mill also subjected his father to two standards of judgment, approving his ideas at one level but not the other. There was oblique criticism of him in an appendix to Edward Lytton Bulwer’s England and the English (London, 1833) and in references to spokesmen for the philosophy of the eighteenth century in the essay on Bentham; also in the Autobiography Mill confessed to feeling quite distant from James Mill’s “tone of thought and feeling,” and said his father probably considered him “a deserter from his standard,” although at the same time “we were almost always in strong agreement on the political questions of the day.”72

Although Mill was willing to co-operate with the other Philosophic Radicals, their feelings about him were affected by suspicions that his new ideas undermined his status as a Radical. Roebuck complained about Mill’s belief “in the advantages to be derived from an Aristocracy of intellect.”73 Mrs. Grote referred to that “wayward intellectual deity John Mill,”74 and after the publication of the article on Bentham, Francis Place expressed the view “that [since] John Mill has made great progress in becoming a German Metaphysical Mystic, excentricity [sic] and absurdity must occasionally be the result.”75

During the 1830s Mill advocated both parts of his political philosophy. On some occasions he explained the need for allowing the “instructed few” a large measure of authority; at other times he emphasized the more restricted vision of Benthamite radicalism, and sought to be the guide and tactician for the parliamentary Radicals. In the latter mood, he looked for fairly quick results, whereas in the former he was trying to prepare the ground for the acceptance of new principles to be realized in the more distant future. Although his explanations of the new ideas mainly appeared in essays published in other volumes of the Collected Works, occasionally these ideas are found in articles in this volume. A notable example is his anticipation of his proposal in Considerations on Representative Government (1861) for a Legislative Commission in an article of 1834 in the Monthly Repository (160).76

THE RATIONALE FOR A RADICAL PARTY

mill became a political journalist to implement his radical creed. He often wished to be in Parliament with other Philosophic Radicals, and only his official position at India House prevented his going to the hustings.77 Consequently he turned to journalism with the belief—or the hope—that “words are deeds, and the cause of deeds.”78 He looked enviously at France where “editors of daily journals may be considered as individually the head, or at lowest the right hand, of a political party.”79 There was the example of Armand Carrel, who “made himself, without a seat in the legislature or any public station beyond the editorship of his journal, the most powerful political leader of his age and country” (380). With ambition to play such a role, Mill, in co-operation with his father and Sir William Molesworth, set up a new quarterly journal in 1835 (initially the London Review and, after a merger in 1836, the London and Westminster). It was to be “a periodical organ of philosophic radicalism, to take the place which the Westminster Review had been intended to fill.” One of its principal purposes “was to stir up the educated Radicals, in and out of Parliament, to exertion, and induce them to make themselves, what I thought by using the proper means they might become—a powerful party capable of taking the government of the country, or at least of dictating the terms on which they should share it with the Whigs.”80 Mill was the real though not the nominal editor, and after Molesworth withdrew in 1837 he became the proprietor as well.

Mill in his journalism frequently discussed Radical party goals, explaining that constitutional change, that is, organic reform, was essential, but that it was only a means to the real end, improvement. Thus he said that Radicals wanted codification of the laws, cheap legal procedures, access to the courts for the poor, abolition of the corn laws and of restrictions on industry, elimination of useless expenditures, improvement of conditions in Ireland, and a rational administration (348, 397). Thinking the Reform Act of 1832 “wholly insufficient” (186), he did not expect much improvement from the post-Reform Bill parliaments, and therefore advocated organic reform, that is, a more democratic constitution. Of course, if improvements could have been achieved without such fundamental changes, Mill would have been satisfied, but he assumed that the aristocratic classes were unwilling to make more than trivial concessions to liberal opinion. Thus, although constitutional changes were only the means to general improvement, Mill said, “necessary means we believe them to be” (348).81 Consequently, the demand for organic reforms became the hallmark of Philosophic Radicalism.

Although Radicals might differ about how far to go in shifting power away from the aristocracy, they agreed about the kind of change required: “it must be by diminishing the power of those who are unjustly favoured, and giving more to those who are unjustly depressed: it must be by adding weight in the scale to the two elements of Numbers and Intelligence, and taking it from that of Privilege” (479). The traditional Radical programme for achieving this change emphasized universal suffrage, secret ballot, and frequent elections. Mill said little about annual parliaments but appears to have wanted shorter, perhaps triennial, ones. He was outspoken in calling for the ballot, not only because it would reduce bribery and intimidation of electors, but because it would help shift the balance of power: once it became a cabinet measure, “reform will have finally triumphed: the aristocratical principle will be completely annihilated, and we shall enter into a new era of government.”82 As to the franchise, he wanted to see it greatly extended at this time, but he did not press for universal suffrage, although he regarded it as ultimately necessary and desirable. By arguing that it could be put off for a time, he was not doubting its importance and value but was recognizing that it was unlikely that a broadly based radical movement could be formed if extremists within it insisted on universal suffrage. He therefore called for its gradual introduction and was evidently pleased when its not being a pressing issue allowed him to avoid an unequivocal statement of his opinion (482, 488-9).83 When he could not avoid stating his view, however, Mill, although hesitantly, showed his hand, as when he said of the parliamentary Radicals:

Of course, this description of the parliamentary Radicals was a description of Mill himself.

Mill’s wish to promote a Radical party with a programme of organic reform rested on the assumption that a fundamental conflict was taking place between the aristocratic and non-aristocratic classes over control of government. This notion was adopted from Bentham and his father, but the language Mill used to describe the conflict was more varied than theirs: the Disqualified vs. the Privileged; Natural Radicals vs. Natural Opponents of Radicalism; Numbers and Intelligence vs. Privilege; the Aggrieved vs. the Satisfied; the Many vs. the Few. Whatever the labels, Mill, like Bentham and his father, had in mind a conflict between Radicals, as spokesmen for the universal or general interest and representing the “People,” and Conservatives, as spokesmen for particular or sinister interests and representing the Aristocracy. Mill’s analysis was evident in much of what he wrote during the 1830s, but it was presented most elaborately in the remarkable essay, “Reorganization of the Reform Party,” where he described the conflict as arising out of social structure. Political views, he explained, were a matter of social position, interest, and class (465-95 passim, esp. 469).84

Mill’s view of the aristocratic classes was not very different from his father’s. They were, generally, the landed and monied classes, especially the former, and they controlled the legislature, the House of Commons as well as the House of Lords (101-2 and 184). They made laws in their own interest, most notably the monopolistic Corn Laws which made bread unnecessarily expensive for the poor (170, 470), and also in defence of their amusements, as Mill explained in his early article on the Game Laws, which had important consequences for a great part of the agricultural population (101-3, 107). They also biassed justice by administering the laws in their own class interest (471, 483). Furthermore, they administered the Poor Laws; and the army, navy, and civil patronage belonged to them exclusively (170). Altogether the government was “a selfish oligarchy, carried on for the personal benefit of the ruling classes” (479). The Church, too, was but a branch of the aristocracy (471).85 In short, the aristocracy had vast unjust power; it was exploitive, selfish, and indifferent to the interests of others. Clearly its members, the bulwark of what Mill called the Privileged, Conservative, Satisfied Classes, exploited their sinister interest at the expense of the people (469-70).

In opposition to the aristocratic classes, Mill portrayed the combination of groups that made up the Numbers and Intelligence and who, in their struggle against Privilege, became “natural Radicals” (468, 470). All who suffered deprivation as a result of aristocratic exclusions—whether through legislation or custom—were the Disqualified, and therefore by definition opposed to the Privileged.

Such was Mill’s attempt to define the comprehensive coalition of the discontented.

Turning to the sources of such discontents, Mill looked to amount of property and to occupational and financial circumstances—in other words, to class. First, there were the middle classes, the majority of whom, including the bulk of the manufacturing and mercantile classes (except those in protected trades), were on the side of change. In addition, there were the ten-pound electors in the towns, who belonged to the “uneasy classes,” for they lived a life of struggle and had no sense of fellow feeling with the aristocracy (476). In part these were Dissenters, who had their own grievances against the Church to supplement those they experienced as members of the middle class. “Between them and the aristocracy, there is a deeper gulph fixed than can be said of any other portion of the middle class; and when men’s consciences, and their interests, draw in the same direction, no wonder that they are irresistible” (476).86

There was another aspect of middle-class discontent about which Mill was perceptive, perhaps because he personally experienced it. It arose less from inequities leading to material deprivation than from resentments about social status, and it was experienced by “the men of active and aspiring talent” who had skilled employments “which require talent and education but confer no rank,—what may be called the non-aristocratic professions. . . . ” Such persons were natural Radicals, for, Mill asked, “what is Radicalism, but the claim of pre-eminence for personal qualities above conventional or accidental advantages” (477)? As examples Mill mentioned stewards and attorneys, but one recalls his claims for “the most virtuous and best-instructed” in “The Spirit of the Age,”87 and his observation that journalists and editors, who were influential but regarded as ungentlemanly, did not enjoy public recognition of their real power (163-4). All such persons together might be called the intelligentsia. Of course, the word was not used in England in Mill’s time, but there can be little doubt that he had in mind the phenomenon to which it refers when he discussed the political outlook of such persons.88

In this statement, which suggests his resentment at exclusion from a deserved political station in society, Mill (despite his position in the East India Company) identified with the class of which he said, “We are felt to be the growing power . . . ” (403). His identification with such persons may explain the bitterness that is evident in some of his observations about the aristocracy (162).

Mill gave equal prominence to the working class as the other main constituent part of the opposition to the aristocracy. This was not only a matter of taking note of Chartism during the late 1830s, for before then Mill complained about the injuries done to “the people of no property, viz. those whose principal property consists in their bodily faculties.” Like the middle class and those with small property, “the most numerous and poorest class has also an interest in reducing the exorbitant power which is conferred by large property” (218, 219). So Mill included in the large, naturally radical body “the whole effective political strength of the working classes: classes deeply and increasingly discontented, and whose discontent now [1839] speaks out in a voice which will not be unheard” (478).

In discussing both middle and working classes as the opposition to the aristocracy, Mill was not unaware of conflicts of interest that divided the working from the middle classes. He took note of disagreements about universal suffrage; of quarrels between supporters of the Church and Dissenters; and above all, of “an opposition of interest, which gives birth, it would seem, to the most deep-rooted distrusts and aversions which exist in society—the opposition between capitalists and labourers” (479). When the Chartists were providing evidence of class conflict between proletariat and bourgeoisie, Mill proposed that such antagonism be subordinated to the other kind of class conflict—between the aristocracy and the non-aristocratic classes—that was required by his political position. He appealed to the middle and working classes to co-operate in taking the next step, which was opposition to the aristocracy by a parliamentary Radical party (480-1). Since many middle-class radicals would not agree to universal suffrage, such co-operation required postponement of that demand, which was what the Chartists most wanted. The wish to postpone universal suffrage was also supported by Mill’s belief that education ought to precede full democracy. Meanwhile it was necessary to redress the practical grievances of the working classes without yet allowing them full participation. “The motto of a Radical politician should be, Government by means of the middle for the working classes” (483).89 Despite this concession to middle-class fear of the working class, Mill went far in asking that there should be “some members returned chiefly by the working classes. We think it of importance that Mr. Lovett and Mr. Vincent [both Chartists] should make themselves heard in St. Stephen’s as well as in Palace yard [i.e., in the House of Commons as well as in public meetings], and that the legislature should not have to learn the sentiments of the working classes at second-hand.” (489.)

Mill’s supportive words for the middle class, like his father’s, were not intended to promote the interest of that class to the exclusion of the working class, nor was he particularly sympathetic to the middle class. He criticized the shopocracy (162) and, in urging that the working classes have some representation, said, “We would give [them] power, but not all power. We wish them to be strong enough to keep the middle classes in that salutary awe, without which, no doubt, those classes would be just like any other oligarchy. . . . ” (489.) It is evident that Mill was far from being comfortable with middle-class rule:

Mill’s view of party politics during the 1830s was shaped by his belief that party conflict ought to reflect the class conflict between the aristocracy and its opponents. A Radical party should represent the anti-aristocratic interest of the diverse groups which Bentham and James Mill called the numerous classes or the People. Their party was to rest “on the whole body of radical opinion, from the whig-radicals at one extreme, to the more reasonable and practical of the working classes, and the Benthamites, on the other.”90 Far from excluding the working classes, Mill said, “A Radical party which does not rest upon the masses, is no better than a nonentity” (396). The labels he used for this party varied—it was the Radical party, popular party, Reform party, liberal party, Movement party—but whatever the label, “the small knot of philosophic radicals,” as he called them, to whom Mill offered guidance throughout the decade, was to be the most advanced part of it, and he hoped it would provide the party with leadership.

On the other side of the great conflict Mill looked for an aristocratic party made up of both Whigs and Tories. The Whigs were included despite their use of a liberal and reformist rhetoric that superficially distinguished them from the Tories. They were attached to the existing distribution of power as much as the Tories and were equally “terrified at the remedies” (297). In response to popular pressure the Whigs occasionally made concessions, and at these times Mill allowed a place for the most liberal of them in a comprehensively defined Radical or Reform party, but his wish and expectation was that they would combine with the Tories in an aristocratic party. This would be the party of “the English oligarchy, Whig and Tory,” and its organ (Mill said in 1834) was Lord Grey (262).

Since Radicals and Conservatives had clearly defined views on the large issue of democracy and aristocracy, they deserved to survive, but the Whigs, because of their half-hearted equivocations, did not. Thus he regarded the Whigs as “a coterie, not a party” (342), and rather optimistically noted that Conservatives and Radicals were gaining strength “at the expense not of each other, but of the Indifferents and the juste milieu,” and, he added, “there will soon be no middle party, as indeed what seemed such had long been rather an appearance than a reality” (341).91 The realignment of parties Mill wanted would remove the equivocating Whigs and make political conflict an accurate representation of the underlying class conflict. He did not use the word “realignment,” but the phenomenon to which it refers was in his mind, as it was in Bentham’s and James Mill’s. Forcing the Whigs (other than the most liberal of them) to acknowledge their shared aristocratic interest with the Tories would create a place for a Radical party that was not a subordinate partner in an uneasy alliance with the Whigs. The proper alignment would come, he said, “when the present equivocal position of parties is ended, and the question is distinctly put between Radicalism and Conservatism” (477).92

Mill’s view on party realignment illuminates his use of the phrase “Philosophic Radical.” His fairly precise notion of the meaning of the term—which he himself coined—sharply contrasts with the loose usage among historians, for whom it has referred to such things as Benthamism, utilitarianism, liberalism, laissez-faire doctrine, and radicalism so loosely defined as to include the mixture of economic and political ideas of Adam Smith, Bentham, the Mills, Nassau Senior, and Cobden.93 Mill invented the phrase to identify a small group among the many radicals who existed during the 1820s and 1830s. This group was deeply influenced by James Mill and most had associated with John Stuart Mill in the London Debating Society and in the production of the Parliamentary History and Review. Among them were George Grote, who later distinguished himself as an historian of Greece and of Greek philosophy; John Roebuck, who had a long and prominent career as a member of Parliament; and Charles Austin, who had a dazzling success at the bar. Older than most of the others, Joseph Parkes, a successful attorney and political agent, played a part in their deliberations; although less an enthusiast than the others, he shared some of their convictions. Francis Place, the legendary Radical tailor, must be included, although his age and his participation in the Radical movement from the 1790s gave him a special position. It also would be difficult to exclude Harriet Grote, whose lively political interests and aggressive temperament made her an active participant. Others became associated with the Philosophic Radicals during the 1830s—Henry Warburton, Charles Buller, and Sir William Molesworth being most noteworthy. What characterized the group was their association with the Mills and a belief—held by some with greater enthusiasm than by others—that by means of party realignment the Radicals could replace the Whigs. This belief was promoted by several of these Philosophic Radicals in their journalism and their parliamentary careers.

Mill used the adjective “philosophic” in describing the Radicals with whom he felt a close affinity because they took a principled—a philosophic—position on politics. Mill’s political philosophy—or perhaps one should say half of it, the part derived from Bentham and James Mill—was mainly occupied with justifying democracy against aristocratic government. He contrasted the Philosophic Radicals with historical Radicals who demanded popular institutions as an inheritance from the distant past; with metaphysical Radicals whose belief in democracy was based on a notion of abstract natural rights; with Radicals marked by irritation with a particular policy of government; and with “radicals of position, who are radicals . . . because they are not lords” (353).94 Mill’s favoured Radicals deserved to be called philosophic because they traced practical evils back to their cause, which was the aristocratic principle. Thus their motto was “enmity to the Aristocratical principle” (353).95

This justification for the adjective “philosophic” makes the label appropriate not only for Radicals, for there was an opposing position which was also philosophic. There was a type of Tory “who gives to Toryism (what can be given to it, though not to Whiggism) something like a philosophic basis; who finds for [his] opinions the soundest, the most ingenious, or the most moral arguments by which they can be supported” (335). This was “speculative Toryism,” such as Coleridge’s:

In the House of Commons, however, Toryism was quite different; it acted on behalf of the aristocratic “selfish oligarchy” (479); it was the Toryism for which Sir John Walsh “gets up and vents . . . shattered and worn-out absurdities,” including a defence of Tory policy in Ireland (335). Even Peel was disdained by Mill (403-4). Yet because Toryism could address the large question of aristocracy and democracy it was capable of having philosophic status. The Whigs, in contrast, although “a portion of the privileged class,” and “hostile to any thorough reform,” pretended to favour reform on behalf of the people, and consequently could be seen to be unprincipled. “Since the questions arising out of the Hanoverian succession had been set at rest, the term Whig had never been the symbol of any principles” (342).

A consequence of Mill’s “philosophic” approach to politics was a preference for conflict between extreme parties, a preference which placed the highest priority on the issue of aristocracy versus democracy. Mill, in describing how the Philosophic Radicals and the Tories gained domination of the London Debating Society, said, “our doctrines were fairly pitted against their opposites,” and with evident pride he reported that these debates “habitually consisted of the strongest arguments and most philosophic principles which either side was able to produce.”97 Later he encouraged such conflict in the House of Commons because it would be a contest “between the representatives of the two great principles,—not between two men whose policies differ from one another only by the shadow of a shade” (495). In such a contest the Whigs would be set aside and “the question [would be] distinctly put between Radicalism and Conservatism” (477).

Mill’s confidence that the Whigs could be set aside, to be replaced by a Radical party led by the Philosophic Radicals, may seem surprising in retrospect. Yet he clearly believed that if the Philosophic Radicals played their cards correctly, that is, aggressively, the Radicals would become an independent party and might ultimately gain office. As unrealistic as this view appeared to many contemporaries,98 it did not seem impossible to Mill (or to his father or to the other Philosophic Radicals).99 That he seriously entertained this possibility is an indication of his doctrinairism and his high political ambition during the 1830s. Sophisticated and careful as Mill was, his words show that he thought the Philosophic Radicals eligible for the highest offices. There were Radicals in and out of Parliament, he said, with the talent and energy which in time would qualify them to play a distinguished part in either a government or an opposition (386).100 He also spoke about the prospective party of moderate radicals as “our party,”101 and discussed what would happen “the moment a Ministry of Moderate Radicals comes into power.” “All things,” he said, “are ripe for it,” and its leader “is sure of everything, to the Premiership inclusive” (494, 495).102 A similar speculation in the Spectator did not exclude Mill; in describing a possible Radical cabinet, in addition to Durham (as Prime Minister), Grote (Exchequer), Hume (Home Secretary), Buller (Colonies), Warburton (Board of Trade), Molesworth (Board of Control), John Romilly (Solicitor General), it mentioned, without suggesting offices, Roebuck, Charles Austin, and Mr. John Mill.103

Since Mill denied the Whigs their usual position as a major party, they regarded his views on parliamentary politics as doctrinaire. His arguments indeed had many doctrinaire features (which were present despite his reaction against his own early Benthamite sectarianism): he looked for large-scale change, and he depreciated reforms that did not contribute to the redistribution of power;104 he was uncomfortable with compromise, and he criticized compromisers and trimmers as unprincipled;105 he assumed that considerable changes could be achieved easily;106 and, as mentioned, he regarded conflict with an ideological opposite as the worthiest kind, and so was critical of moderates who stood for gradual change. This last feature of the Philosophic Radicals’ approach was identified by the Whig publicist Francis Jeffrey as early as 1826, when he responded to James Mill’s castigation of Whigs as insincere reformers and moderates: “The real reason of the animosity with which we [Whigs] are honoured by the more eager of the two extreme parties, is, that we . . . impede the assault they are impatient mutually to make on each other, and take away from them the means of that direct onset, by which the sanguine in both hosts imagine they might at once achieve a decisive victory.”107 Although other moderate critics of the Philosophic Radicals did not match Jeffrey’s incisive rhetoric, they recognized the doctrinairism. Fonblanque, once a Radical himself, late in the 1830s called them (and especially John Mill) Ultras, fanatical Radicals, pseudo-Liberals, Detrimentals, Wrongheads, and, since their tactics would have led to a Tory government, Tory Radicals.108

Mill was aware of the “philosophic” origin of the ambition he entertained for radicalism. And he was also aware of British uneasiness with anything theoretical. “There is no passion in England for forms of government, considered in themselves. Nothing could be more inconsistent with the exclusively practical spirit of the English people.” (339.) Indeed, England was “a nation practical even to ridiculousness; . . . a nation given to distrust and dislike all that there is in principles . . ., and whose first movement would be to fight against, rather than for, any one who has nothing but a principle to hold out” (392-3). In this uncongenial environment, Mill tried—though hardly with success—to conceal the theoretical aspect of his political enterprise. He used the phrase “Philosophic(al) Radical” rather infrequently (165, 191, 212, 353),109 and he tried to divert attention from the “philosophic” side of his radicalism by using equivalent phrases, these too used sparingly. They included “thorough Reformers” (292, 322, 378, 380), “complete reformers” (301, 307), “enlightened” Radicals (378), “decided Radicals” (389), “real reformers” (326), and “more vigorous Reformers” (322). Mill explained that “because this designation [Philosophic Radicals] too often repeated gave a coterie air which it was felt to be objectionable, the phrase was varied.”110 Despite such attempts to evade criticism, the Philosophic Radicals, including Mill as their self-appointed spokesman, attracted increasing attention as the size of the Whig majority in Parliament diminished and Radical votes became more important.

RADICAL PARTY TACTICS

since mill wished to promote Radical leadership of the reform party in Parliament, the tactics he recommended to the other Philosophic Radicals focused on their relations with the Whigs. Much of what he suggested depended on his estimate of Whig policy on reform. Those in the Whig government, like their supporters, varied greatly in their reformist zeal, but they were sufficiently favourable to reform for Lord Grey’s government to cultivate a liberal image by calling itself the Reform Ministry.

This image, when combined with pressures for additional reform from the press and the liberal wing of their own party, created a dilemma for the Whig leadership, according to Mill. In the face of demand for reform, the Whigs had to choose either to make concessions and become more reformist than Whig, or they could refuse concessions and become hardly distinguishable from the Tories. They “must either join with the Tories in resisting, or with the Radicals in carrying, improvements of a more fundamental kind than any but the latter have yet ventured to identify themselves with” (326). Whichever choice they made, the reform cause would be promoted. If they chose concession, considerable improvements would be made: “there is hardly any limit to what may now be carried through the Ministry” (192). On the other hand, if the Whigs resisted and were forced to coalesce with the Tories, much good would result even if the government was then openly opposed to additional reform. For then the Radical party would be invigorated and the country would be “delivered from the anomalous state, in which we have neither the benefits of a liberal government, nor those of a liberal opposition; in which we can carry nothing through the two Houses, but what would be given by a Tory ministry, and yet are not able to make that vigorous appeal to the people out of doors, which under the Tories could be made and would be eagerly responded to” (385). If this situation occurred, of course, the realignment strategy would have been implemented; that is, the Radicals would have ceased to be a mere appendage to the Whigs and the Radical party would have achieved independent existence.111

The Whigs may have faced a dilemma, but Mill was not without one of his own, for he wanted both additional reform and the establishment of an independent Radical party, and Whig policy that promoted one of these goals made the other harder to attain. If the Whigs made concessions to the pressures for additional reform, Radicals, even extreme Radicals, became more generous in the support of the government, and thus the achievement of independence for the Radical party became more difficult. On the other hand, the gaining of such independence would be facilitated by Whig resistance to further reform. For Mill’s former goal to be achieved, the Whig leadership would have had to move to the left; for the latter, they would have had to move to the right. Since Mill wanted both results, he was inevitably dissatisfied, no matter what the Whigs did. His response to the dilemma changed as the decade unfolded. During the first four years or so following the Reform Bill, Mill thought the Whigs could be persuaded to make concessions, and therefore he recommended conditional support of their governments. Increasingly during these years, however, he became disappointed with them, despite the abolition of slavery and the passing of the New Poor Law. A turning-point came later in the decade when the Whigs’ unequivocal refusal to consider reform of the constitution put an end to Mill’s expectations that Radicals and Whigs might co-operate. Thereafter he urged the Philosophic Radicals to adopt a more independent line of conduct, and he experienced exhilaration at the prospect of a separate Radical party. Yet, even in this mood, he complained about the lack of movement towards the implementation of the Radical programme.

Either of Mill’s goals, however, could be promoted by pressure on the Whig government, and therefore throughout the decade he called on the Philosophic Radicals to “attempt much” (395). They were supposed to “put forward, on every fitting occasion, with boldness and perseverance, the best political ideas which the country affords” (191). Despite their small numbers, the strong public support for radicalism would allow a few to accomplish great things: “there is a vitality in the principles, there is that in them both of absolute truth and of adaptation to the particular wants of the time, which will not suffer that in Parliament two or three shall be gathered together in their name, proclaiming the purpose to stand or fall by them, and to go to what lengths soever they may lead, and that those two or three shall not soon wield a force before which ministries and aristocracies shall quail” (397-8).112 Despite what Mill saw as their great opportunity, however, some of the Philosophic Radicals were unaggressive. Grote, from whom so much was expected, deeply disappointed Mill. “Why does not Mr. Grote exert himself” (314n)?113 The Radicals, Mill said, were without policy, a leader, or organization, and therefore they failed to call forth their strength in the country (467). Mill sometimes called them torpid (327) and ciphers (165) and accused them of lacking courage (212), though there were exceptions, notably Roebuck, whom Mill generally praised.114

Putting pressure on the Whig government should have been easy, Mill thought, for he assumed that the great burst of reform agitation that forced aristocratic acceptance of the Reform Act manifested a fundamental change, making public opinion permanently favourable to further reform. Therefore he thought opinion would support either a Whig-led reform party or a genuine Radical party in opposition to both Whigs and Tories. The events of 1831-32 revealed a public angry and outspoken enough to be capable of intimidating the governing classes (430).115 These events changed the understanding of the constitution, “which [since the Reform Bill] enables the people to carry all before them when driven by any violent excitement” (299). Mill thought the governing classes knew it could happen again: “where the public voice is strong and unanimous, the Ministry must now go along with it” (317). Although public opinion became much less agitated after the Reform Bill passed into law, Mill assumed that “there [was] a great deal of passive radicalism in the electoral body,”116 and he confidently announced that “England is moderate Radical” (389).117 He also thought this latent opinion could be reawakened at any time, and therefore that the “progress of reform appears . . . certain” (292).118

The period immediately following the Reform Bill understandably began with high Radical hopes. The aristocracy apparently had suffered a severe defeat, and the Whigs, despite their sponsorship of the Reform Bill and their hopes for party advantage from it, were worried about its long-term consequences. In May 1832 Mill thought there was “nothing definite and determinate in politics except radicalism; and we shall have nothing but radicals and whigs for a long time to come.”119 It is not known what Mill thought when his Radical friends in Parliament sat on the opposition benches,120 but it should have gratified him, for it set them off from the Whigs as the nucleus of a new party. He also must have been pleased by Grote’s motion on the ballot, which was supported by 106 votes and threw Whigs and Tories together to defeat it by a majority of 105.121 After his initial enthusiasm, however, the first session of the Reform Parliament was, on the whole, disappointing to Mill. Although the Whigs adopted the reform label and introduced some measures of reform, he depreciated most of the proposed legislation because it was so far removed from the organic reform sought by genuine Radicals. Slavery was abolished; the Bank Charter was renewed; and free competition in the China tea trade was established as part of the renewed East India Company charter. Mill was not opposed to these things, but they fell far short of what he wanted. When the government defended its record in the first session with its pamphlet The Reform Ministry and the Reformed Parliament, Mill, in his review of it, complained that it “passes over three-fourths of the essentials of the case.” The Whigs must be judged, he wrote, not only by what they had done, but by considering “what they have opposed, and so prevented from being done.”122

In these circumstances—the Whigs were the only agency through which reform could be achieved, yet they proposed only changes that Mill regarded as insufficient—it was difficult to withhold support, and yet it was also difficult to be enthusiastic. So Mill acceded to the Philosophic Radicals’ voting in support of the government, but he called on them to be demanding, and he held out the threat of renewed agitation of public opinion and a return to the nervous days prior to the Reform Bill.

Three events in 1834 reduced Mill’s uneasiness about Philosophic Radical support of the Whig government. First, the resignation of Stanley and Graham in May signalled a reduction of conservatism in the cabinet (252, 285). Next, the government sponsored the Poor Law Amendment Act. Although not an organic reform, it was far-reaching and dear to all whose views on administration and poor relief had been shaped by Bentham and the political economists. This was the one achievement of the session, Mill said; he had not expected such a development, especially as there was no public clamour for it; consequently “we give them [the Whigs] due honour” (285). Finally, Lord Grey retired and was replaced by Melbourne. The retirement of Grey, a man of the 1790s, would allow the Whigs to be more responsive to the needs of a new age (263-5). As this period of Whig-Radical relations ended, Mill thought that the Whigs might regain the popularity they enjoyed in 1832, and that their errors of omission would be forgiven. “From us, and we believe from all the enlightened reformers, they may expect, until they shall have had a fair trial, not only no hostility, but the most friendly encouragement and support. They must now throw themselves upon the people.” (243.)

Such a trial had to be postponed, for in November, 1834, the Whigs were turned out and replaced by a Tory government under Peel. Mill and the Philosophic Radicals were jubilant, for they correctly assumed that this would be a brief interlude, and they were delighted to witness the Whigs in defeat. The Whigs now joined the Philosophic Radicals on the opposition benches, and the Radicals—about seventy of them—co-operated with the Whigs to expel Peel from office.123 When the Whigs under Melbourne returned to the government benches in April, 1835, the Philosophic Radicals’ old problem—of defining their relation to the Whigs—returned in an acute form, for they had to adopt a position that took into account both their recent co-operation with the Whigs in opposition and their long-standing enmity to them.

Mill now offered guidance to the Philosophic Radicals from the pages of the London Review, which began publication just as the change in government took place (297). In a brief comment which was a postscript to his father’s political article, Mill said he did “not call upon the thorough Reformers to declare enmity against [the Whig Ministry], or to seek their downfall, because their measures will be half-measures . . . nor even because they will join with the Tories in crying down all complete reforms . . .” (292). At the same time, Mill suggested that the Philosophic Radicals refuse any offers of office. This he called “qualified and distrustful” support, and in the next issue he warned that such co-operation might not last very long (297).124 In keeping with this advice, the Philosophic Radicals sat on the government side, to indicate their support of the Whig Ministry, but below the gangway, to demonstrate their distance and independence from it.125

A crisis in this arrangement occurred as the Municipal Corporations Bill passed through Parliament, for this legislation and the way it was amended raised fundamental questions for the Radicals. The Bill provided for the elimination of the “little oligarchies,” as the Webbs later called them, that ruled in towns, and replaced them with town councils elected by household suffrage.126 Although not fully democratic, the Bill went rather far in that direction. It pleased the Radicals, even delighted some of them, including Mill, who said “the destructive part . . . is of signal excellence,” and he acknowledged that, despite deficiencies in its constructive part, there was much merit, particularly the extension of the suffrage to householders, for which the Ministers were “entitled to great praise” (303). Overall, Mill said, it was “one of the greatest steps in improvement ever made by peaceable legislation in the internal government of a country” (308). The features of the Bill that elicited such praise were not altered by several amendments made in the House of Lords.

Yet the Philosophic Radicals were so eager to assert their fundamental principles that several of them, including Mill, responded angrily to the Lords’ amendments. It was the Lords’ tampering that caused the difficulty, because the Radicals, recalling the submission by the House of Lords in 1832, interpreted the post-Reform Act constitution as tolerating an upper house only so long as it remained quiescent. The suggestion that the House of Lords had a veto indicated that the Lords, as Roebuck said, “have not yet acquiesced in this arrangement,” as they did not comprehend their “real position.”127 For Mill the Bill was “a challenge of the House of Lords to mortal combat” (302); and to allow the Lords’ amendments to stand would be “to abandon all the ends to which the Reform Bill was intended as a means” (343). Roebuck, Place, Molesworth, and even Grote were extremely angered, even more, it seems, than Mill.128 Their anger was so great that they criticized the House of Lords as a second chamber, and in the end, Mill joined them. “An entire change in its constitution is cried out for from the remotest corner of the three kingdoms; and few would be satisfied with any change short of abolishing the hereditary principle” (313). He proposed an upper house chosen by the lower. The choice was to be made from the existing peerage supplemented with qualified persons not in the Commons who were to be given peerages. This was not the best design he could make, but only the result of his attempt to “remodel” the existing House of Lords. Its purpose was a second chamber “unlikely to set itself in opposition to what is good in the acts and purposes of the First.”129 As well as attacks on the Lords, this episode produced complaints about the “truckling” by the Whig government and its moderate radical supporters (317).

Mill continued, however, to recommend cautious and selective support of the government, despite his disapproval of its yielding to the Lords on the Municipal Corporations Bill. Although he complained about the appearance of a tacit compromise between the government and the thorough reformers, he said, in October, 1835: “We do not wish the Radicals to attack the Ministry; we are anxious that they should co-operate with them. But we think they might co-operate without yoking themselves to the ministerial car, abdicating all independent action, and leaving nothing to distinguish them from the mere Whig coterie. . . .” (316.) In April, 1836, Mill continued to argue that the Whigs deserved support from the thorough reformers, for they introduced or at least promised a marriage bill that removed certain grievances of dissenters; a bill for the registration of births and deaths; a bill to consolidate turnpike trusts; an Irish Corporation reform bill; and a measure of church reform (322-5). A far cry from organic reform, these proposals were yet enough to justify his call for support of the government. Despite his distrust of Whigs, he was reluctant to call for an attempt to turn out the government (344). At the same time, however, he asserted Radical independence and looked forward to the realignment of parties (326-7).

Mill’s mixed view reflected certain difficulties which he and the other Philosophic Radicals faced. Their principles made co-operation with the Whigs disagreeable and directed them to an independent course of action. The political situation in 1836 also might have encouraged them to adopt aggressive tactics, for Melbourne’s majority, including Irish and moderate radicals, was perhaps fifty or sixty, and Mill thought Melbourne dependent on the small group of Philosophic Radicals for support.130 Other circumstances, however, called for restraint, for it became evident that the large number of moderate radicals, whose support was required for the implementation of the Philosophic Radicals’ realignment strategy, might not go along with an attempt to turn out the Whig government. These so-called “200 ballot men,” the “nominal” Whigs, supported Grote’s ballot motion and were more reformist than the Whig leadership, but probably would keep the Whigs in office rather than risk a Tory government.

Among the small group of Philosophic Radicals there was disagreement. Aggressive, anti-Whig tactics were advocated by Molesworth and Roebuck, strongly supported by Francis Place and Harriet Grote. Molesworth’s “Terms of Alliance between Radicals and Whigs” (January, 1837) was a clear and forthright statement of their position.131 Others were more cautious, though not without sympathy for the extremists; these included Grote, Buller, Warburton, and Hume. Both Joseph Parkes and Fonblanque were vigorously opposed. The issue was hotly debated (as Harriet Grote put it) “as to the true play of the Rads.”132

Mill, like the Philosophic Radical group as a whole, was of two minds. He took note of “the plan which [Molesworth] and several other of the radical members have formed and are executing. I think them quite right.”133 He also said, “As for me I am with the extreme party; though I would not always go so far as Roebuck, I entirely agree with those who say that the whole conduct of the Whigs tends to amortir l’esprit public, and that it would be a good thing for invigorati[ng] and consolidating the reform party if the Tories were to come in.”134 In this spirit he lamented Fonblanque’s desertion, evident in his effective criticism of the Philosophic Radicals and in his appeal to moderate radicals for support of the Melbourne government. Mill said it was only Fonblanque’s “past reputation for radicalism which prevents him from being mistaken for a ministerialist with radical inclinations” (380). He also complained that since 1835 Fonblanque had “acted as if his first object was to support and glorify the ministers, and the assertion of his own political doctrines only the second” (379).135 Yet in the same letter in which he identified himself with the extreme party, Mill also noted, “the country does not go with us in [the extreme tactics] and therefore it will not do for the radicals to aid in turning out the ministry; by doing so they would create so much hostility in their own party, that there would be no hope of a real united reform party with the country at its back, for many years. So we must linger on. . . .”136 Doctrine called for one line of conduct; circumstances pointed to another: as Mill said, they were in a “false position.”137

In late 1837 Mill suddenly broke loose from the “false position” by declaring open hostility to the Whig government. He was provoked to do so by Lord John Russell’s “Finality” speech, and he was joined in this move by other Philosophic Radicals, who recently had been deeply disappointed by the thinning of their ranks in the elections of August, 1837.138 In response to Radical amendments to the Address urging consideration of an extended suffrage, ballot, and shorter parliaments,139 Russell said the amendments would repeal the Reform Act, whereas he regarded that Act as a final measure and not one he was willing to repeal or reconstruct.140 Not only did Russell declare his opposition to further constitutional reform, but he carried with him a majority of the moderate radicals, who refused to vote for the Radical amendments.141 Most of the Philosophic Radicals, both in and out of Parliament, were depressed by this development, but Mill was angry. He attended a meeting at Molesworth’s house in order to rouse the others. He argued that “the time is come when all temporizing—all delicacy towards the Whigs—all fear of disuniting Reformers or of embarrassing Ministers by pressing forward reforms, must be at an end.”142 Now outspoken in advocating complete separation from the Whigs, he urged the Philosophic Radicals to “assume the precise position towards Lord Melbourne which they occupied in the first Reformed Parliament towards Lord Grey. Let them separate from the Ministry and go into declared opposition.” (412.)

Events arising out of the Canadian rebellion of 1837-38 were to be the occasion for Mill’s last call for the organization of a Radical party in opposition to Whigs and Tories. Initially, Canadian events clouded his hopes for renewed Radical activity, for the Philosophic Radicals’ response contributed to their isolation from the moderate radicals. When in January, 1838, the government proposed the suspension of the Canadian constitution for four years and the creation of a high commissioner, the Philosophic Radicals were opposed, but failed to gain support from liberal reformers and moderate radicals.143 Edward Lytton Bulwer taunted them about their disagreements with other reformers:

The small size of the Philosophic Radical vote (six to thirty-nine at this juncture) demonstrated their isolation.

Mill defended the Philosophic Radicals in the London and Westminster for January, 1838, but Fonblanque in the Examiner, like Bulwer in the House of Commons, criticized the “Grote conclave” for sympathizing with colonial rebellion. “The London Reviewer,” he wrote, “asserts that the alliance between the Ministry and the Radicals is at an end; but how many members out of the Radical minority of little less than 200 have spoken or acted as if the alliance was at an end, or as if they desired it to be at an end. . . ?”145 Fonblanque’s observations must have had a ring of truth, for Mill was acutely aware of the cleavage between the Philosophic Radicals and the other, more moderate radicals in the House of Commons. He had already complained that the Canadian question “suspends all united action among Radicals, . . . sets one portion of the friends of popular institutions at variance with another, and . . . interrupts for the time all movements and all discussions tending to the great objects of domestic policy” (408). He was so dismayed by this development that the next two numbers of the London and Westminster Review appeared without his usual political article (though he did publish the essays on Vigny and Bentham, as well as shorter articles), and the number for October, 1838, did not appear at all.146 Mill could well say that the Canadian question “in an evil hour crossed the path of radicalism.”147

Mill’s outlook changed suddenly in October, 1838, when he learned of Durham’s resignation as Governor General in Canada, consequent on the Whig government’s failure to sanction the ordinances by which he granted amnesty to most of the captured rebels but transported a few of their leaders to Bermuda. In view of Durham’s anger towards the Melbourne Ministry, Mill thought Durham might be prepared to lead the liberal reformers and moderate radicals in a challenge to the Whig government, especially as he had always been much more a reformer than his Whig colleagues—indeed, so much so, that in 1834 he had called for the ballot, triennial parliaments, and household suffrage.148 The opportunity to turn this event to Radical party advantage was greatly facilitated by the presence of Buller and Wakefield on Durham’s staff in Canada. They sent Mill information about Durham’s outlook and tried to direct Durham’s attention to the possibility of turning the Canadian affair to domestic political advantage. Wakefield reported to Molesworth that Durham “is mortally but coolly and immovably offended at everything Whig,”149 and Buller, having read Mill’s recent political articles, wrote, “You will see what attitude the Radicals ought to assume with respect to his returning now at open defiance with Whigs and Tories. . . . Circumstances seem to be approaching, in which it will be perfectly possible for us to force him into power. The cue of all Radicals then is to receive him not as having failed, but as having done great things. . . . But you know best what is to be done.”150 Durham was to be cast as the popular leader who could bring together the coalition of moderate radicals, liberal reformers, and Philosophic Radicals that Mill wished to establish as the party of the “natural Radicals.”

Mill’s depressed mood now quickly evaporated. Durham’s resignation, he said, “has awakened me out of a period of torpor about politics.” With obvious enthusiasm he wrote to Molesworth: “The present turn in Canada affairs brings Lord Durham home, incensed to the utmost (as Buller writes to me) with both Whigs and Tories—Whigs especially, and in the best possible mood for setting up for himself; and if so, the formation of an efficient party of moderate Radicals, of which our Review will be the organ, is certain—the Whigs will be kicked out never more to rise, and Lord D. will be head of the Liberal party, and ultimately Prime Minister.”151 Even in his Autobiography, years later, Mill observed that “any one who had the most elementary notions of party tactics, must have attempted to make something of such an opportunity.”152

Durham sailed for England on November 1st and was due to arrive a month later. Mill thought there was “a great game” to play in the next session of Parliament. He realized Durham’s course of action was uncertain, but he believed the result “will wholly depend upon whether Wakefield, we ourselves, and probably Buller and his own resentment,” on the one hand, “or Bulwer, Fonblanque, Edward Ellice, the herd of professing Liberals, and the indecision and cowardice indigenous to English noblemen,” on the other, “have the greatest influence in his councils.” Mill added, “Give us access to him early and I will be d....d if we do not make a hard fight for it.”153

Mill’s article “Lord Durham’s Return” (December, 1838)—quickly published in an unscheduled issue of the London and Westminster—carefully followed Buller’s advice to show Durham not as having failed, but as having done great things. Although most of the article was a defence of Durham’s conduct and policy in Canada, Mill carefully combined with the Canadian matter an account of the significance of Durham’s resignation for domestic politics. When he told Molesworth that Durham was returning prepared to set up for himself, Mill explained that “for the purpose of acting at once upon him and upon the country in that sens I have written an elaborate defence of him.”154 Durham’s mission to Canada, he wrote, could become “the turning point of English politics for years to come,” because it involved “the prospects of the popular cause in England . . . [and] the possibility of an effective popular party” (447). He held out the hope that this could become a major party and “break the power of the aristocratic faction” (448). Here he saw an opportunity finally to achieve the party realignment to which his Philosophic Radical doctrine was directed.

A meeting was held to co-ordinate the efforts of those working with Mill. Rintoul, editor of the Spectator, agreed to publish extracts of Mill’s article before it could appear in the London and Westminster Review.155 Wakefield, who returned from Canada ahead of Durham, went with Molesworth to Plymouth to meet Durham, apparently in hope of persuading him to act on his resentment and of stage-managing an enthusiastic popular reception.156 On the Whig side, Edward Ellice, a former Whig whip and owner of vast tracts of land in Canada, tried to blunt Radical efforts. To his son, who had accompanied Durham as a private secretary, Ellice wrote that the public “are not prepared for a Durham, Wakefield, and Buller Cabinet, and mark my words, that if they come home with that expectation, they will be laughed at.”157 He warned Durham against the “recommendations of the writer in the Westmr. Review!”158 He also saw danger in Buller, who, though “an intelligent, handy, and most amiable fellow . . . has neither experience, or prudence, and is in the hands of the younger Mill (I wish it were the elder one) a person very much of his own character—with considerable learning, and critical talent—but also a ‘denisen of Utopia.’”159

Mill’s efforts went for nought. Durham refused to play the part for which he was cast by Mill. Although he felt personal animosity towards his former colleagues and remained moderately radical in opinion, he was unwilling to attempt a party rebellion, especially in view of the disagreements among reformers. He also was reported to have called the Radicals “great fools.”160 Mill at last recognized that his goals for a Radical party were impracticable. Durham’s conduct, he said,

He also said, “if the time is come when a radical review should support the Whigs, the time is come when I should withdraw from politics.”161 And this he now proceeded to do.

DEMISE OF THE PHILOSOPHIC RADICAL PARTY

when his article “Reorganization of the Reform Party,” which had been planned for publication in January, 1838, finally appeared in April, 1839, it could serve only as an epitaph to Radical hopes, and Mill regretted its appearance “in a posture of affairs so unsuitable to it.”162 He published two more numbers and then ended his connection with the review, deciding that it was “no part” of his “vocation to be a party leader.”163

Now in 1839, little more than a decade after the dream of establishing a powerful parliamentary party first took shape, John Stuart Mill began to share a sense of failure with the other Philosophic Radicals. The moderate reformers continued to oppose the aggressive tactics designed to force the Whigs to coalesce with their “natural” aristocratic allies, the Tories. The Melbourne government’s existence became increasingly tenuous, and moderate reformers and Whigs alike became more and more critical of those on their left who threatened it. The Edinburgh Review described the extreme Radicals as “a small, conceited, and headstrong party” that should be called “the sect of the Impracticables.”164 The cleavage between the Radicals and the moderate reformers remained, and the expected merger of Whigs and Tories into an aristocratic party did not take place. On the contrary, the Whigs continued to look upon the Tories as their strongest opponents, whereas the Philosophic Radicals were regarded as merely an annoying faction. Both in public opinion and in electoral organization, the Tories throughout the decade increased their strength. In 1839, far from having merged into an aristocratic party, the Whigs and Tories were poised against one another in a fairly even struggle; the aristocratic factions that Mill had been opposing for more than a decade continued to dominate the political scene.

The Philosophic Radicals were too disheartened by 1839 to celebrate their part in provoking the resignation of the Whig government, an event which two years earlier would have brought them to a high pitch of excitement.165 Nor were they much moved by the increase in conversions to the ballot. When the Whig Macaulay defended Grote’s motion in 1839, Mill said the ballot “is passing from a radical doctrine into a Whig one.”166 As Chartism rose to prominence the Philosophic Radicals also lost their sense of leadership in the democratic movement. Although they might have welcomed it—after all, the Philosophic Radicals could agree in principle with the six points of the Charter—they were made uneasy by some of the violent Chartist rhetoric and by the Chartists’ criticism of private property and opposition to repeal of the Corn Laws. They also disapproved of the Chartists’ use of the language of class, which rested on assumptions that challenged Philosophic Radical doctrine about universal and sinister interests.167 The Philosophic Radicals were also depressed by the attrition of reform sentiment after the passing of the Reform Bill; as Mill said, “Their lot was cast in the ten years of inevitable reaction, when the Reform excitement being over . . . the public mind desired rest.”168

Mill and his associates recognized that they had so dwindled as to become insignificant. They could no longer regard themselves as the nucleus from which a great party would soon grow. Macaulay said in 1839 that the Radical party was reduced to Grote and his wife; and Grote himself was depressed by the diminution, saying he “felt indisposed to remain as one of so very small a number as now constituted the Radical cluster.”169 Mill was poignantly aware that hopes for the party, both as it existed and as he had imagined it, had dissolved. “Even I,” he said, “who have been for some years attempting it must be owned with very little success, to induce the Radicals to maintain an independent position, am compelled to acknowledge that there is not room for a fourth political party in this country—reckoning the Conservatives, the Whig-Radicals, and the Chartists as the other three.”170 As Mill put it in his Autobiography, “the instructed Radicals sank into a mere côté gauche of the Whig party.”171

The bitterness turned several of the Philosophic Radicals against active politics. Harriet Grote, for example, confessed feeling “sick and weary of the name of politics”; at times, she said, “I sigh over those ten years of infructuous devotion to the public service; unrequited even by [Grote’s] constituents . . . and only compensated by the esteem and admiration of some dozen high-minded men.”172 Mill’s feelings, as Caroline Fox reported, were similar: “‘No one,’ he said with deep feeling, ‘should attempt anything intended to benefit his age, without at first making a stern resolution to take up his cross and to bear it. If he does not begin by counting the cost, all his schemes must end in disappointment.’”173 He also confessed being “out of heart about public affairs—as much as I ever suffer myself to be,” and soon he had “almost given up thinking on the subject.”174

Of course the Philosophic Radicals did not cease to have political opinions, but now that they acknowledged the disappointment of their ambition for radicalism, their attitude to the Whigs softened considerably. Mill, Buller, and even Roebuck began contributing to the Edinburgh Review, and Mill appears to have been the intermediary between Napier, the editor, and some of the former contributors to the London and Westminster.175 Harriet Grote made peace with the Whigs by accepting an invitation to Holland House, and George Grote, who ten years earlier avoided aristocratic company as a matter of principle, now accompanied her “without any twinges of conscience.”176 Mill’s views had altered sufficiently for him to tell Fonblanque in 1841 that “there is nothing of any importance in practical politics on which we now differ for I am quite as warm a supporter of the present [Whig] government as you are.”177

Since parliamentary politics ceased to be a preoccupation, several of the Philosophic Radicals turned to authorship. Molesworth worked on his edition of Hobbes, and Grote on his History of Greece. Even Place and Roebuck took to writing history. And Mill too began his series of essays on French historians, though his main preoccupation was with his System of Logic, on which he had been working at intervals throughout the previous decade. Now that his plan for a parliamentary party devoted to fundamental constitutional changes had failed, his interest in politics, with its emphasis on institutions, diminished, and he turned to the realm of thought. Having been disappointed as a politician, he downgraded political activity and looked to philosophy for improvement. He consoled himself with the belief that he was entering an era when “the progress of liberal opinions will again, as formerly, depend upon what is said and written, and no longer upon what is done. . . .”178

IRELAND

that mill’s disillusionment, which put an end to his hopes for a Radical party, did not conclude his radicalism, is nowhere so evident as in what he said and wrote about Ireland. In his journalism just after the famine, the Principles of Political Economy (1848), and speeches, mainly in the House of Commons from 1866 to 1868, he poured forth a powerful condemnation of the social system and economy in Ireland and of the way that country was governed by England. His essay on Irish affairs in the Parliamentary History and Review perhaps is partially an exception, for it focusses mainly on Ireland as an issue in British domestic politics. The 1848 speech and the pamphlet England and Ireland (1868), however, demonstrate Mill’s radical rejection of old ways and his search for far-reaching remedies.

The extent of Mill’s radicalism was evident in his sympathetic understanding of Irish rebelliousness. He even suggested a moral basis for outrages against the landlord; the Whiteboys and Rockites, he said, “fought for, not against, the sacredness of what was property in their eyes; for it is not the right of the rent-receiver, but the right of the cultivator, with which the idea of property is connected in the Irish popular mind” (513). Mill also claimed that the more a person emphasizes obstacles to reform, “the further he goes towards excusing, at least as to intention, the Irish revolutionary party” (503). Moreover, there was the example of the French Revolution. Before 1789 the peasantry in France was more destitute and miserable than Irish cottiers, but the revolution led to a great shift in peasant ownership: “the result was the greatest change for the better in their condition, both physical and moral, of which, within a single generation, there is any record.” Who was to say, Mill asked, that Irish anticipations of similar benefits from an Irish revolution were wrong? (503.)

Mill’s sympathetic understanding was not directed only to material circumstances in Ireland, for he was also sensitive to the stirrings of Irish nationalism. He knew that conditions had improved since the famine, especially because of emigration, and that many old grievances had been removed. Yet to be complacent—for gentlemen “to soothe themselves with statistics”179 —was to bask in a fool’s paradise and to misunderstand Fenianism, which was “a rebellion for an idea—the idea of nationality” (510).180 The rulers of Ireland “have allowed what once was indignation against particular wrongs, to harden into a passionate determination to be no longer ruled on any terms by those to whom they ascribe all their evils. Rebellions are never really unconquerable,” Mill added, “until they have become rebellions for an idea.” (510.)

Disaffection was so great that only a remedy of revolutionary proportions would have a chance of relieving it. Thus in 1868 Mill asserted that “revolutionary measures are the thing now required,” and he added, “In the completeness of the revolution will lie its safety” (518-19). He also said, “Great and obstinate evils require great remedies.”181

Mill’s analysis in this case emphasized economic considerations, both in the identification of abuses and in the prescription of remedies, but since he focussed on the conflict of interest between landlord and tenant, it is reminiscent of his Philosophic Radical assumption that the class conflict between aristocracy and the people took precedence over all other issues. His analysis in 1868, which is similar to what he wrote about Ireland in his Principles of Political Economy, recognized a variety of causes for Irish rebelliousness, but the land question, he said, outweighed all others.182 Irish wretchedness was the result of “a radically wrong state of the most important social relation which exists in the country, that between the cultivators of the soil and the owners of it” (502). Against the background of overpopulation and underemployment (84-5), the specific problem was vulnerability to arbitrary eviction and arbitrary increases of rent of tenants who worked the land (516-17). Consequently, the bulk of the population “cannot look forward with confidence to a single year’s occupation of [the land]: while the sole outlet for the dispossessed cultivators, or for those whose competition raises the rents against the cultivators, is expatriation” (515). As a result, improvements were not made, and poverty was added to insecurity: “these farm-labourers are entirely without a permanent interest in the soil” (514).183

Mill’s remedy was to alter the system of land tenure by changing the relationship between landlord and tenant. He proposed making “every farm not farmed by the proprietor . . . the permanent holding of the existing tenant” (527). The rent would be fixed by an official tribunal; the state would guarantee that the landlord received the rent and that rents were not arbitrarily increased.184 In this way Mill proposed to eliminate exploitation by landlords and, by making tenants secure, give them incentives to make improvements.

The genuinely radical character of this proposal arose from its implications for the doctrine of private property. Mill argued, as he had already done in the Principles of Political Economy, that land has characteristics that distinguish it from property created by labour and skill.185 In contrast, land is “a thing which no man made, which exists in limited quantity, which was the original inheritance of all mankind, and which whoever appropriates, keeps others out of its possession. Such appropriation,” he goes on, “when there is not enough left for all, is at the first aspect, an usurpation on the rights of other people.” (512.) Using ideas and language from Locke’s famous chapter on property, Mill changed Locke’s argument as it applied to land,186 asserting that the idea of “absolute property in land,” especially when the land is “engrossed by a comparatively small number of families,” is an obstacle to justice and tranquillity (512). Vicious conditions in Ireland were “protected and perpetuated by a wrong and superstitious English notion of property in land” (502). Indeed, there was a contradiction between English law and Irish moral feelings (512-13).187

The pamphlet England and Ireland, in which, as Mill said, he spoke his “whole mind,”188 was written late in 1867 against the background of intense Fenian activity in England as well as in Ireland, marked by the killing of a policeman during the rescue of captured Fenians in Manchester and the trial and execution of the rescuers.189 Mill’s pamphlet, which was “probably the most influential single contribution to the extended debate on Irish land problems which was carried on in England between 1865 and 1870,”190 caused a great furore, largely because it aggravated fears about the security of property in England where landlords were apprehensive that radical Liberals and spokesmen for the working classes would use Mill’s observations about property in Ireland as authority for an attack on the landed classes generally.191 There were many who were surprised that Mill cast doubts on the doctrine of private property, among them former Philosophic Radicals such as Joseph Hume and John Arthur Roebuck.192 Mill explained that he put forth extreme views to startle his readers and prepare them at least to accept other measures. He subsequently said his proposals “had the effect of making other proposals, up to that time considered extreme, be considered comparatively moderate and practicable.”193

Radical as Mill’s views were on land tenure and landed property in Ireland, he rejected the most radical political solution, that of separation. He understood that the Fenians wanted independence and that, regardless of concessions, it might be impossible to divert them from this nationalist goal.194 Yet he had recently written in Representative Government that the Irish and Anglo-Saxon races were “perhaps the most fitted of any two in the world to be the completing counterpart of one another.”195 When in 1868 he considered the relation between the two countries, he concluded that Irish independence would be bad for Ireland and dishonourable to England (520-1, 523-4, 526).196 Therefore he ended the pamphlet with a statement of hope that reconciliation was still possible (531-2).197

In his discussions of Ireland Mill revealed an intense moral concern as an aspect of his radicalism that was much less evident in what he wrote as a Philosophic Radical, where he generally argued on grounds of consequences and utility. That Ireland engaged his moral feelings is evident in his eloquent statements of sympathy for the Irish—they were the “poorest and the most oppressed people in Europe” (66)—and in his outrage with the causes of this condition: “The social condition of Ireland . . . cannot be tolerated; it is an abomination in the sight of mankind” (503). Mill made it clear that within the rationalist and utilitarian there was indignation, sympathy, and moral passion.

[1 ]See Essays on Politics and Society, Collected Works [CW], XVIII-XIX (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).

[2 ]Letter from James Mill to Jeremy Bentham, 28 July, 1812, in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring, 11 vols. (Edinburgh: Tait; London: Simpkin, Marshall; Dublin: Cumming, 1843), X, 473.

[3 ]John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, CW, I, ed. J. M. Robson and Jack Stillinger (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 65-7.

[4 ]Ibid., 67-71.

[5 ]Page references to material printed in this volume are given in the text.

[6 ]Mill had to acknowledge, however, that among the Independents there was a willingness to persecute (47) and that they participated in the regicide, which was an “act of a nest of despots, [who were] removing a rival despot out of their way” (53).

[7 ]Plan of Parliamentary Reform, in the Form of a Catechism, with Reasons for Each Article: With an Introduction, Showing the Necessity of Radical, and the Inadequacy of Moderate, Reform (London: Hunter, 1817), xi-xii, ccxxiii.

[8 ]Ibid., xxxvi-xxxvii, cclxix-cclxx, cccvi.

[9 ]Ibid., cccvi.

[10 ]Ibid., cccvi-cccvii.

[11 ]Ibid., cccvii.

[12 ]Letter to David Ricardo, 19 Oct., 1817, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), VII, 195-6.

[13 ]Reprinted in Essays (London: printed Innes, n.d. [1825]).

[14 ]“Periodical Literature: Edinburgh Review,” Westminster Review, I (Jan., 1824), 206-49; “Periodical Literature: Quarterly Review,” Westminster Review, II (Oct., 1824), 463-503.

[15 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 67. See John M. Robson, The Improvement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 17, n42, for the suggestion that “Government” may have been based on this dialogue. “Government” was written for the Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh: Constable, 1824), IV, 491-505. Parts (in half-volumes) were issued separately between 1815 and 1824; the part containing this article appeared in September, 1820.

[16 ]Ricardo thought Mill was right to avoid discussion of the secret ballot, as “it would have given the article too much the appearance of an essay on Reform of Parliament which it was perhaps desirable to avoid” (letter to James Mill, 27 July, 1820, Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, VIII, 211); John Stuart Mill thought his father should have acknowledged that he was “writing an argument for parliamentary reform” (Autobiography, CW, I, 165).

[17 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 109. James Mill’s belief in democracy was deliberately obscured in “Government” as a matter of prudence and rhetoric. His well-known eulogy of the middle class, far from indicating a wish to restrict the suffrage to the middle class, served to show that the suffrage could be safely entrusted to the classes with lesser rank because they would be guided by the exemplary middle class. For a fuller discussion of Mill’s essay as a defence of universal suffrage and of the middle-class theme, see Joseph Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 36-8, 49-52; and Joseph Hamburger, “James Mill on Universal Suffrage and the Middle Class,” Journal of Politics, XXIV (1962), 172-83. Although Mill pointed to an electorate without pecuniary or property qualifications, he suggested the exclusion of men under forty and of women. Women’s interests, he argued, were involved in their father’s and husband’s; and men under forty were protected by virtue of older men’s not distinguishing between their sons’ interests and their own (“Government,” Utilitarian Logic and Politics: James Mill’s “Essay on Government,” Macaulay’s Critique and the Ensuing Debate, ed. Jack Lively and John Rees [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978], 79-80). Unlike class and property qualifications, age and gender were not regarded as relevant to definitions of democracy.

[18 ]Speech of 10 July, 1833, Speeches by Lord Macaulay, ed. George Malcolm Young (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 126.

[19 ]John Stuart Mill, “Mr. Mill,” CW, I, 594.

[20 ]The Minor Works of George Grote (London: Murray, 1873), 284.

[21 ]Letter to Henry Brougham, 29 June, 1836, Brougham Papers, University College, London.

[22 ]Florence Fenwick Miller, “William Ellis and His Work as an Educationist,” Fraser’s Magazine, n.s., XXV (Feb., 1882), 236. John Black, editor of the Morning Chronicle, remembered “the force of [James Mill’s] personal character. . . . Young men were particularly fond of his society; and it was always to him a source of great delight to have an opportunity of contributing to form their minds and exalt their character.” (“Death of Mr. James Mill,” Morning Chronicle, 25 June, 1836, 3.)

[23 ]Harriet Grote, The Personal Life of George Grote (London: Murray, 1873), 23. Joseph Parkes said of Henry Warburton that James Mill had been “his chief political instructor” (Obituary, The Times, 21 Sept., 1858, 7; evidence of Parkes’s authorship: letter from Parkes to Brougham, 23 Sept., 1858, Brougham Papers, University College, London).

[24 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 213. For their activities, see the Introduction to CW, I, xii-xiii.

[25 ]Ibid., 111.

[26 ]Ibid., 83.

[27 ]Macaulay, “Bentham’s Defence of Mill: Utilitarian System of Philosophy,” Edinburgh Review, XLIX (June, 1829), 296.

[28 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 81. Whereas his father avoided using terms like democracy and universal suffrage, John Stuart Mill showed no such restraint (for example, “Speech on the British Constitution,” 19 May, 1826, in James McCrimmon, “Studies toward a Biography of John Stuart Mill,” Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University, 1937, 358).

[29 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 133. On economic issues the opposition came from the Owenites.

[30 ]Autobiography of Henry Taylor (London: Longmans, 1885), I, 78-9, 90-5; Macaulay, “Mill’s Essay on Government: Utilitarian Logic and Politics,” Edinburgh Review, XLIX (Mar., 1829), 159-89. See also Robson, Improvement of Mankind, 24, n6.

[31 ]“Bentham’s Rationale of Evidence,” Edinburgh Review, XLVIII (Dec., 1828), 463. The phrase ipse dixitism derives from Bentham. See, e.g., Rationale of Judicial Evidence, ed. J. S. Mill, 5 vols. (London: Hunt and Clarke, 1827), I, 127. For Mill’s use of the term, see ibid., 126n, and “Speech on the British Constitution,” in McCrimmon, “Studies,” 346.

[32 ]“Utilitarian Theory of Government, and the ‘Greatest Happiness Principle,’” Edinburgh Review, L (Oct., 1829), 124.

[33 ]“The Present Administration,” Edinburgh Review, XLVI (June, 1827), 260-1. Whereas Macaulay’s analysis in 1827 indicates that the Philosophic Radicals are dangerous, in the better known 1829-30 articles he leans more to the view that they are ridiculous.

[34 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 103.

[35 ]Ibid., 137, 139, 143.

[36 ]Ibid., 137.

[37 ]“Mill’s Essay on Government,” 161-2, 168-9, 176-7, 181-2. For discussion of the Mill-Macaulay controversy, see the introduction by Lively and Rees to Utilitarian Logic and Politics, 1-51; and Joseph Hamburger, Macaulay and the Whig Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 49-62.

[38 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 165.

[39 ]Ibid., 167.

[40 ]Letter to Gustave d’Eichthal, 7 Nov., 1829, Earlier Letters [EL], ed. Francis E. Mineka, CW, XII-XIII (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), XII, 40.

[41 ]For a different estimate of the connection between Mill’s views in 1831 and his father’s, see William Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals: Nine Studies in Theory and Practice, 1817-1841 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 176. See Richard B. Friedman, “An Introduction to Mill’s Theory of Authority,” in Mill: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Jerome B. Schneewind (New York: Anchor, 1968), 379-425, for the illuminating suggestion that Austin’s views on authority influenced Mill. The questions as to whether Mill was exposed earlier to Austinian or St. Simonian ideas on this subject and as to which had the greater influence remain unanswered.

[42 ]The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (London: Murray, 1832), 61-4.

[43 ]Ibid., 323. For evidence of Austin’s orthodox Benthamite radicalism before 1827, see his “Disposition of Property by Will—Primogeniture,” Westminster Review, II (Oct., 1824), 503-53.

[44 ]Province of Jurisprudence, 59, 86.

[45 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 185.

[46 ]Letter to Jane Welsh Carlyle, 25 Dec., [1832], National Library of Scotland.

[47 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 171, 173-5.

[48 ]The Doctrine of Saint-Simon: An Exposition, ed. and trans. Georg G. Iggers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 52-3, 93, 198, 206-7.

[49 ]Ibid., 52, 54-5, 206-7.

[50 ]“Rejected Leaves of the Early Draft of the Autobiography,” CW, I, 616.

[51 ]Letter to d’Eichthal, 9 Feb., 1830, EL, CW, XII, 48.

[52 ]Mill thought it was “utterly hopeless and chimerical to suppose that the regeneration of mankind can ever be wrought by means of working on their opinions” (ibid., 47; Autobiography, CW, I, 137, 163). This opinion influenced the argument in On Liberty, CW, XVIII, 257. Henry Cole said the London Debating Society was “in a bad way, doubtless owing to the secession of Mill and his friends” (entry of 19 Feb., 1830); after Goldsmid introduced the question, “that the utilitarian system of philosophy is pernicious and absurd,” Cole said there was no debate, but only “a satyrical [sic] reply from C. Buller he being the only disciple of that system present” (entry of 8 Jan., 1830; Cole’s Diary, 1827-1834, Victoria and Albert Museum).

[53 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 179.

[54 ]Letter to John Sterling, 20 to 22 Oct., 1831, EL, CW, XII, 78. This letter was written less than two weeks after the riots at Derby and Nottingham. Mill was not completely indifferent, however; he wrote an article recommending several friends as parliamentary candidates (Examiner, 2 Sept., 1832, 569); he contributed £1 to the National Political Union (British Library, Place Collection of Newscuttings, Set 63, Vol. 1, f. 276); and he attended the meeting to organize the Parliamentary Candidates Society on 14 Mar., 1831 and contributed £1 (letter from Francis Place to Bentham, 18 Mar., 1831, Bentham Papers, University College, London).

[55 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 163-5. “The decade 1830 to 1840 was that in which he put together the strands of the past with the filaments of the present, and it ended with the assertion of his independent position” (Robson, Improvement of Mankind, 32).

[56 ]“Rationale of Representation” (July, 1835), CW, XVIII, 24.

[57 ]Mill also said, “what was good in the influences of aristocracy, is compatible, if we really wish to find it so, with a well-regulated democracy” (“De Tocqueville on Democracy in America [I],” [1835], CW, XVIII, 54). Mill’s wish to combine the two outlooks was also evident in his consideration of the “three great questions in government.” Bentham provided an answer to only one of them, “By what means are the abuses of . . . authority to be checked?” Bentham’s proposal of democratic checks was accepted by Mill, but he was worried that these checks might restrict public functionaries too much. To the other questions, however, Bentham gave no answer whatsoever: “To what authority is it for the good of the people that they should be subject?” and “How are they to be induced to obey that authority?” (“Bentham,” Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, CW, X, ed. J. M. Robson [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969], 106.) Consideration of these questions and possible answers to them arose from the work of Austin, the St. Simonians, and Coleridge.

[58 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 169-71.

[59 ]Letter to Sterling, 4 Nov., 1839, EL, CW, XIII, 411.

[60 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 171.

[61 ]Letter to d’Eichthal, 7 Nov., 1829, EL, CW, XII, 42.

[62 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 169.

[63 ]Ibid.

[64 ]Ibid., 165.

[65 ]Ibid., 165, 177.

[66 ]“Coleridge,” CW, X, 121.

[67 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 209. Also the London Review “ought to represent not radicalism but neoradicalism” (letter to Edward Lytton Bulwer, 23 Nov., 1836, EL, CW, XII, 312).

[68 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 171.

[69 ]Ibid., 177.

[70 ]Letter to Thomas Carlyle, 22 Oct., 1832, EL, CW, XII, 126-8.

[71 ]Letter to Carlyle, 17 Sept., 1832, ibid., 117.

[72 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 189.

[73 ]Pamphlets for the People (London: Ely, 1835) (no. 20, 22 Oct., 1835), 3. All the same, Roebuck in his Pamphlets for the People reprinted extracts from the London Review and approved Mill’s Review for its “general tendency . . . [and] most of the leading doctrines”; all contributors (and Roebuck was one of them) shared “a common purpose, and agree[d] in the general principles of their moral and their political system” (“Democracy in America”; “The London Review and the Irish Church Question,” ibid., 1-4, 7). Political co-operation continued, despite their personal quarrel, so that Mill said his differences with Roebuck “became so strongly pronounced that we ceased to be allies either in opinion or in action except as to the immediate objects of radicalism” (“Early Draft,” CW, I, 154).

[74 ]Letter to Place, 16 Aug., 1837, British Library, Add. MSS 35150, f. 279.

[75 ]Letter to Thomas Falconer, 2 Sept., 1838, British Library, Add. MSS 35151, f. 86.

[76 ]Among other examples, see 164 for an allusion to Coleridge’s conversation about clergy and clerisy; and 227-8 for a theoretical defence of state responsibility for religious instruction on the ground that religion is closely connected with conscience and duty (the editor, W. J. Fox, in a footnote—227n—took exception to this suggestion that the state might legislate in matters of religion).

[77 ]“I often wish I were among them [the Radical party in the House of Commons]; now would be the time for knitting together a powerful party, and nobody holds the scattered threads of it in his hands except me. But that cannot be while I am in the India House. I should not at all mind leaving it if I had £300 a year free fromanxiety and literary labour, but I have at most £100.” (Letter to John Pringle Nichol, 29 Jan., 1837, EL, CW, XII, 324.) “For the first time these ten years I have no wish to be in Parliament” (letter to John Robertson, 6 Aug., 1837, ibid., 345).

[78 ]“Armand Carrel,” London and Westminster Review [L&WR], XXVIII (Oct., 1837), 69.

[79 ]“Letter from an Englishman to a Frenchman, on a Recent Apology in the ‘Journal des Débats,’ for the Faults of the English National Character,” Monthly Repository, VIII (June, 1834), 393-4.

[80 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 207, 221. “The principal radicals in parliament and many of those out of it have a scheme for starting a new quarterly review. . . . The first promoters of it were Roebuck, Buller, and I. . . . ” (Letter to Carlyle, 22 Dec., 1833, EL, CW, XII, 201.)

[81 ]See also 401; and compare 61.

[82 ]Letter to Alexis de Tocqueville, 7 Jan., 1837, EL, CW, XII, 317. For an account of Mill’s view on the secret ballot at this time in relation to his later opposition to it, see Bruce Kinzer, “J.S. Mill and the Secret Ballot,” Historical Reflections / Réflections Historiques, V (Summer, 1978), 19-39.

[83 ]In 1839 he favoured household suffrage (467). “Happily there is no necessity for a speedy decision of the question” (“Rationale of Representation” [July, 1835], CW, XVIII, 32).

[84 ]The argument in this article was anticipated in “Parties and the Ministry” (395-6, 401-3).

[85 ]See also 287, 262-3, 270-1.

[86 ]The Scots and Irish were also included (472-3, 477-8).

[87 ]“The Spirit of the Age. No. 5,” Examiner, 29 May, 1831, 340. “Society may be said to be in its natural state, when worldly power, and moral influence, are habitually and undisputedly exercised by the fittest persons whom the existing state of society affords. . . . Society may be said to be in its transitional state, when it contains other persons fitter for worldly power and moral influence than those who have hitherto enjoyed them.” (“The Spirit of the Age. No. 3,” ibid., 6 Feb., 1831, 82.)

[88 ]For scepticism about the use of the term “intellectuals,” see Thomas, Philosophic Radicals, 449-50.

[89 ]Also, “the Radicals may claim to themselves, as their peculiar office, a function in politics which stands more in need of them than any other: this is, the protection of the poor” (396).

[90 ]Letter to Bulwer, 3 Mar., 1838, EL, CW, XIII, 380. In another formulation Mill described “a phalanx, stretching from the Whig-Radicals at one extremity (if we may so term those among the persons calling themselves Whigs who are real Liberals) to the Ultra-Radicals and the Working Classes on the other” (467).

[91 ]Also, “it deserves notice as one of the signs of the times, that the Whig coterie is not renewed. There are no young Whigs.” (344-5.)

[92 ]For an account that attempts to explain Mill’s politics without reference to the quest for realignment, see Thomas, Philosophic Radicals, passim.

[93 ]Mill said in 1851, “ ‘Philosophic Reformers’ is a worn-out and gone by expression; it had a meaning twenty years ago” (letter to John Chapman, 9 June, 1851, in Later Letters [LL], ed. Francis E. Mineka and Dwight N. Lindley, CW, XIV-XVII [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972], XIV, 68).

[94 ]Mill also classified Radicals, other than Philosophic Radicals, as “demagogic radicals, such as Wakley, and . . . the historical radicals of the Cartwright school, and . . . the division of property radicals if there be any” (letter to Albany Fonblanque, 30 Jan., 1838, EL, CW, XIII, 370).

[95 ]Mill also used the adjective “educated,” but the adjective “philosophic” was not merely a synonym for “educated.”

[96 ]Speculative Toryism, it may be noted, although opposed to Philosophic Radicalism in the realm of practical politics, somewhat resembled the position associated with Austin and the St. Simonians and Coleridge, which, according to Mill, complemented Benthamite radicalism in the realm of philosophy. See also 402 on men of speculative ability who were “theoretically Tories.”

[97 ]“Early Draft,” CW, I, 132. Extreme Tories sometimes had a reciprocal perception. Disraeli said, “A Tory and a Radical, I understand; a Whig—a democratic aristocrat, I cannot comprehend” (Whigs and Whiggism: Political Writings, ed. William Hutcheon [London: Murray, 1913], 19). Also, the Radical or Utilitarian party was called “a more shrewd, intelligent, and philosophical class of men than the Whigs, accustomed to a closer method of reasoning” (James B. Bernard, Theory of the Constitution [London: Ridgway, 1834], 5). For an illuminating account of the sources of Mill’s beliefs about conflict, see Robson, Improvement of Mankind, 191-9.

[98 ]Palmerston, in asking whether Molesworth thought of coming into office with his own followers, advised “if he meant to be a leader of a party, to improve his knowledge of Parliamentary strategy” (Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates [PD], 3rd ser., Vol. 41, cols. 489, 521-3 [6 Mar., 1838]). Lord John Russell taunted the Radicals with the problems they and the country would have if Grote were Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House, and he asked whether Molesworth’s administration could command a majority (Letters to the Electors of Stroud, on the Principles of the Reform Act, 6th ed. [London: Ridgway, 1839], 32, 35).

[99 ]Roebuck looked forward to the time when “we . . . shall take up our position at the head of the opposition” and when “we shall govern” (letter to Brougham, 7 Sept., 1836, Brougham Papers, University College, London). James Mill foresaw the time when the “powers of government will be put in [the Philosophic Radicals’] hands” (“State of the Nation,” London Review, I [Apr., 1835], 18).

[100 ]Also, “If Radicalism had its Sir Robert Peel, he would be at the head of an administration within two years . . .” (404). Here Mill alludes to Peel’s skills in parliamentary management; for his estimate of Peel’s politics, see 403-4.

[101 ]Letter to Robertson, 30 Jan. or early Feb., 1838, EL, CW, XIII, 371.

[102 ]Mill later recognized that he “had expected too much” and that he had had “an exaggerated sense of the possibilities” (Autobiography, CW, I, 203, 205).

[103 ]Spectator, 9 Dec., 1837, 1164, 1166; see also ibid., 16 Dec., 1837, 1192.

[104 ]For example, in 1826 Mill did not think Catholic Emancipation very significant, as it would not improve conditions in Ireland; it was hotly debated by both aristocratic parties because it would not remove the “great abuses” which benefited the class represented by both those parties (66-7). For Mill’s view on the abolition of slavery, see 180 below. In “these days of Movement, the place which any session, any single event, will occupy in history, depends not upon the intrinsic importance of the event, or value of the Acts of Parliament which have passed during the session; but upon the far greater consideration, how much it has helped forward the Movement, or contributed to hold it back” (284).

[105 ]Mill referred to the “middle course which so often unites the evils of both extremes with the advantages of neither” (216).

[106 ]For example, “The approaching session will be next to that of 1830/1831, the most important since 1688—and parties will stand quite differently at the commencement and at the close of it” (letter to Tocqueville, 7 Jan., 1837, EL, CW, XII, 317). Mill also spoke of “the practicability of Utopianism” (“Rationale of Representation” [1835], CW, XVIII, 42).

[107 ]“Moore’s Life of Sheridan,” Edinburgh Review, XLV (Dec., 1826), 35.

[108 ]Examiner, 6 Aug., 1837, 497; 27 Aug., 1837, 545; 3, 10, and 17 Sept., 1837, 563, 581, 595; 28 Jan., 1838, 49; 4 Feb., 1838, 65-6; letter to Lord Durham, 2 Jan., 1837, Lambton Papers, in the Lambton Estate Office, Chester-le-Street, County Durham. Fonblanque regarded the reasoning of Mill and his associates as bizarre but purposeful; he characterized it in the following way: “With a Whig Ministry we play second or third parts, but with a Tory Ministry we should fill the first ranks in opposition. Therefore, as what is best for the exhibition of ourselves is best for the public, it is best for the public that there should be a Tory Ministry.” (Examiner, 4 Feb., 1838, 66.)

[109 ]See also “Mr. Mill,” in CW, I, 594; letter to Fonblanque, 30 Jan., 1838, EL, CW, XIII, 370. For use of the phrase by others, see Spectator, IX, 1051 (Nov., 1836); 1251 (31 Dec., 1836); XII, 34 (12 Jan., 1839); Examiner, 23 Jan., 1838, 808; Morning Chronicle, 29 Jan., 1838, 3; William James, in PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 40, col. 1169 (15 Feb., 1838).

[110 ]Letter to Fonblanque, 30 Jan., 1838, EL, CW, XIII, 370. This letter arose out of disagreements about Mill’s attribution of Philosophic Radical opinions to Fonblanque and criticism of Philosophic Radicals by Fonblanque.

[111 ]Mill referred to the Radicals as needing “to shake off the character of a tail” (letter to Bulwer, 3 Mar., 1838, EL, CW, XIII, 380); and he asked, “why have they sunk into a mere section of the supporters of the Whig Ministry” (344-5)?

[112 ]Also, “what a power they [the complete reformers] might wield, if they . . . were not, unhappily, (with some meritorious exceptions,) the least enterprising and energetic” (301).

[113 ]“Nobody disappointed my father and me more than Grote. . . . We had long known him to be fainthearted. . . .If his courage and energy had been equal to the circumstances, or to his knowledge and abilities, the history of those ten years of relapse into Toryism might have been very different.” (“Early Draft,” CW, I, 155.) This passage was left out of the Autobiography, where Mill wrote, “I can perceive that the men were less in fault than we supposed, and that we had expected too much from them” (CW, I, 117).

[114 ]On Roebuck, see 191, 200-1, 202, 307n, 385-6, 389, 452n-3n. On Buller, see 324. On Hume, see 326.

[115 ]He says, “we now know that they [the Ministers] will yield to gentle violence” (285); “did any political body . . . ever reform itself, until it trembled for its existence” (491)?

[116 ]Letter to Fonblanque, 3 Feb., 1838, EL, CW, XIII, 374.

[117 ]“To the people . . . let them hold themselves in readiness. No one knows what times may be coming. . . . Let England and Scotland be prepared at the first summons to start into Political Unions. Let the House of Commons be inundated with petitions. . . . ” (Ibid., 26.) It hardly need be said that Mill’s estimates were exaggerated and even unrealistic. This was a feature of the doctrinairism mentioned above, xxxii-xxxiii. Another example: “If any ministry would now bring forward the ballot, they would excite greater enthusiasm than even that which was excited for the Reform Bill” (letter to Tocqueville, 7 Jan., 1837, EL, CW, XII, 317).

[118 ]“Radicalism is a thing which must prevail” (407).

[119 ]Letter to Carlyle, 29 May, 1832, EL, CW, XII, 107.

[120 ]For evidence that the Radicals sat on the opposition benches, see Hamburger, Intellectuals in Politics, 122-3.

[121 ]PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 17, col. 667 (26 Apr., 1833).

[122 ]“The Ministerial Manifesto,” Examiner, 22 Sept., 1833, 593.

[123 ]Estimates of the size of the Radical group varied: Parkes said there were seventy or eighty; Richard Potter said there were more than fifty; Thomas Young put the number at seventy-eight (letter from Parkes to Durham, 26 Jan., 1835, Lambton Papers; letter from Young to Edward Ellice, 3 Mar., 1835, Ellice Papers, National Library of Scotland; Potter’s Parliamentary Diaries, Vol. 8, f. 2 [entry of 18 Feb., 1835], London School of Economics and Political Science).

[124 ]See also a letter from Mill to Aristide Guilbert, 8 May, 1835, EL, CW, XII, 261. James Mill made similar recommendations (“State of the Nation,” London Review, I [Apr., 1835], 16-18).

[125 ]Henry Reeve, “Personal Memoir of Mr. Grote,” Edinburgh Review (July, 1873), 138, 232.

[126 ]Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government (1908), 11 vols. (Hamden: Archon, 1963), III, 748-9.

[127 ]Roebuck, “The Crisis: What Ought the Ministers to Do?”, Pamphlets for the People (no. 12, 27 Aug., 1835), 8; “The Conduct of Ministers Respecting the Amendments of the House of Lords,” ibid. (no. 14, 10 Sept., 1835), 1.

[128 ]PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 30, cols. 1162-8, 1435-6. Mill criticized the Philosophic Radicals for not forcing more divisions, “not to carry their propositions, but to force public attention to the subject” (308n; evidently written and published in September at the earliest).

[129 ]“The House of Lords,” Globe and Traveller, 16 Oct., 1835, 2.

[130 ]“Without the systematic support of the Radicals, [the Ministry] could not exist for a day” (345).

[131 ]L&WR, XXVI, 279-318. Mill, who corrected and altered this article, called it “a coup de parti, a manifesto as we say of the radicals (or rather for the radicals) on the subject of the Whigs” (letter to Tocqueville, 7 Jan., 1837, EL, CW, XII, 316). Harriet Grote called Molesworth “the Mirabeau of the day. . . . His [article] has given him a high reputation among our Philosophical Radicals.” (Letter to Frances Eliza von Koch, 7 Feb., 1837, The Lewin Letters: A Selection from the Correspondence and Diaries of an English Family, 1756-1884, ed. Thomas Herbert Lewin [London: Constable, 1909], I, 353.)

[132 ]Letter to Place, 28 Jan. [1837], British Library, Add. MSS 35150, f. 235.

[133 ]Letter to Tocqueville, 7 Jan., 1837, EL, CW, XII, 316-17.

[134 ]Letter to Guilbert, 19 June, 1837, ibid., 338.

[135 ]Fonblanque had financial difficulties in maintaining the Examiner, and money for the paper was raised by Ellice and Durham. “The rescue completed the conversion of the Examiner from radicalism to moderate Whiggism. . . . The Examiner had by 1838 become an organ of the ministry,” according to Thomas, who argues that “It would be over-simple to conclude that Fonblanque had been bought. . . . But he had compromised his independence, and if his critics like Roebuck and Mill had known of the scheme to pay his debts, they would have been more indignant than they were.” (Philosophic Radicals, 328-9.)

[136 ]Letter to Guilbert, 19 June, 1837, EL, CW, XII, 338.

[137 ]Letter to Tocqueville, 7 Jan., 1837, ibid., 317. Greville said the Radicals found their “hands tied,” and therefore they “lingered on,” but they were “very irate and sulky.” Yet, “as they still think that there is a better chance of their views being promoted by the Whigs remaining in, they continue to vote with them in cases of need” (The Greville Memoirs, 1814-1860, 8 vols. [London: Macmillan, 1838], III, 401; entry of 25 June, 1837).

[138 ]Roebuck, Hume, Ewart, and Thompson were defeated, and Grote ranked last among the four successful candidates in the City of London; he won by a margin of six votes (he had led the poll in 1832). Hume was soon returned for Kilkenny. Fonblanque said the election marked “the wide chasm that now separates the main body of the Radicals from the extreme section” (Examiner, 4 Mar., 1838, 130). Unlike his fellow-Radicals, Mill managed to find comfort in the election results: “The Radicals seem to have lost most only because they have lost some of their most leading men, but those will come in again for some other place very soon; and a great number of the new members are very decided Radicals . . .” (letter to Robertson, 6 Aug., 1837, EL, CW, XII, 345). See also 388-9.

[139 ]Amendments were moved by Wakley, seconded by Molesworth, and supported in speeches by Hume and Grote. Grote said, “Conservative principle was really predominant in Parliament, and when he said Conservative he meant the negation of all substantial reform” (PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 39, cols. 37-48, 58-60 [20 Nov., 1837]). Molesworth said the Whig Ministry “adopts Tory principles in order to retain office” (ibid., Vol. 41, cols 488-9, 577 [6, 7 Mar., 1838]). Hume said, “Little now remains either in principle or in act between the Tories and the Whigs” (letter to Place, 1 Jan., 1838, British Library, Add. MSS 35151, f. 48). And Grote added, it was “not at all worth while to undergo the fatigue of a nightly attendance in Parliament for the simple purpose of sustaining Whig conservatism against Tory conservatism” (letter to John Austin, Feb., 1838, in Harriet Grote, Life of George Grote, 127).

[140 ]PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 39, cols. 46, 69-70 (20 Nov., 1837).

[141 ]Wakley’s first amendment, for an extension of the suffrage, received twenty votes; among the twenty were Grote, Hume, and Leader (Wakley and Molesworth were tellers) (ibid., col. 81 [20 Nov., 1837]). In view of this result, Wakley did not bother to divide the House on his two other amendments.

[142 ]“To the Electors of Leeds,” Morning Chronicle, 4 Dec., 1837, 1 (advertisements), and Spectator, 2 Dec., 1837, 1149. Although the article was nominally by Molesworth, Mill wrote all but a few words at the beginning and the end (Bibliography of the Published Writings of John Stuart Mill, ed. Ney MacMinn, J. R. Hainds, and James McNab McCrimmon [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1945], 49-50). For Mill’s account of the meeting at Molesworth’s house, see EL, CW, XII, 365.

[143 ]PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 37, cols. 37, 137-44; Vol. 38, cols. 211, 216-48. Roebuck lost his seat in 1837, but he spoke at the bar of the House as agent for the Canadian legislature.

[144 ]Ibid., Vol. 40, cols. 398-9 (23 Jan., 1838).

[145 ]Examiner, 4 Feb., 1838, 66, 65. Fonblanque referred to the “***** conclave,” but he left no doubt that the asterisks stood for Grote.

[146 ]Mill did include a brief article in the second edition of the July number, which was published in August: “Lord Durham and His Assailants” (437-43 below). The second edition was probably made necessary by demand for Mill’s article “Bentham.”

[147 ]Letter to Bulwer, 5 Mar., 1838, EL, CW, XIII, 382.

[148 ]Mill said that generally, though rich landowners would support one of the aristocratic parties, there were exceptions. “In all privileged classes there are individuals whom some circumstance of a personal nature has alienated from their class, while there are others sufficiently generous and enlightened to see the interest of their class in the promotion of the general interest. . . . Lord Durham is such a man.” (473.) For an account of Durham’s opinions and his reputation among Radicals, see Thomas, Philosophic Radicals, 338-71.

[149 ]Letter of 29 Sept., 1838, in Millicent Fawcett, Life of the Right Hon. Sir William Molesworth (London: Macmillan, 1901), 201.

[150 ]Letter to Mill, 13 Oct., 1838, Report of the Public Archives for the Year 1928, ed. Arthur G. Doughty (Ottawa, 1929), 74-6.

[151 ]Letter of 19 Oct., 1838, EL, CW, XIII, 390.

[152 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 223.

[153 ]Letter to Robertson, [Nov., 1838,] EL, CW, XIII, 391-2.

[154 ]Letter of 14 Nov., 1838, ibid., 391. Mill closely followed Buller’s agenda for such an article and he even used some of Buller’s language.

[155 ]Spectator, 24 Nov., 1838, 1108-9. This was probably how Durham became acquainted with Mill’s defence of his conduct.

[156 ]Some of the Philosophic Radicals did not approve of Mill’s defence of Durham’s ordinance; indeed Roebuck said it justified “an act of undisguised tyranny” (letter to Brougham, 31 Aug., 1838, Brougham Papers, University College, London). Roebuck’s views were probably dictated by his personal sentiments (he was born in Canada) and his service as agent of the Canadian legislature which put him in close touch with Papineau, the leader of the rebellion. Mill defended Durham’s ordinance against the criticism of it in Parliament by John Temple Leader, who cooperated with Roebuck, especially after Roebuck’s loss of his seat (440-3).

[157 ]Letter of 23 Oct., 1838, Ellice Papers, National Library of Scotland.

[158 ]Letter to Durham, 29 Nov., 1838, in Chester New, Lord Durham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), 479.

[159 ]Letter from Ellice, sr., to Durham, n.d. [c. Dec., 1838], Lambton Papers.

[160 ]Letter from E. J. Stanley to Parkes, 20 Jan., 1837, typescript, University College, London. Durham’s observation was made before the controversies about Canada.

[161 ]Letter to Robertson, 6 Apr., 1839, EL, CW, XIII, 396-7.

[162 ]Ibid., 397.

[163 ]Letter to Sterling, 28 Sept., 1839, ibid., 406.

[164 ]Thomas Spring-Rice, “Present State and Conduct of Parties,” Edinburgh Review, LXXI (Apr., 1840), 282-3.

[165 ]The Government resigned in May, 1839, after it carried a bill for the suspension of the Jamaican constitution by only five votes. Ten Radicals (including Grote, Hume, Leader, and Molesworth) voted with the Tories, and ten others stayed away. The Whigs continued in office, however. For Mill’s reaction, see EL, CW, XIII, 400.

[166 ]Letter to John Mitchell Kemble, 14 Oct., 1839, ibid., 410.

[167 ]Even Mill referred to “brutish ignorance” and to “the barbarians” who would gain influence through universal suffrage; he did not condemn all Chartists, however, for whereas the “Oastlers and Stephenses represent only the worst portion of the Operative Radicals,” the intelligent leaders of the Working Men’s Association in London, who framed the Charter, “represent the best and most enlightened aspect of working-class Radicalism” (485).

[168 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 203-5.

[169 ]Harriet Grote, The Philosophical Radicals of 1832: Comprising the Life of Sir William Molesworth, and Some Incidents Connected with the Reform Movement from 1832 to 1842 (London: Savill and Edwards, 1866), 63; Greville Memoirs, IV, 176.

[170 ]Letter to Macvey Napier, 22 Apr., 1840, EL, CW, XIII, 430.

[171 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 205.

[172 ]Letter to Leon Faucher, 27 Aug., 1839, in Lady Eastlake, Mrs. Grote (London: Murray, 1880), 75; letter to Raikes Currie, Nov., 1842, in George Grote, Posthumous Papers: Comprising Selections from Familiar Correspondence during Half a Century, ed. Harriet Grote (London: Clowes, 1874), 70-1.

[173 ]Caroline Fox, Memories of Old Friends, ed. Horace N. Pym, 3rd ed. (London: Smith, Elder, 1882), I, 138 (entry of 20 Mar., 1840). She added, “This was evidently a process through which he (Mill) had passed, as is sufficiently attested by his careworn and anxious, though most beautiful and refined, countenance.” She also described a walk with Mill and Sterling: “They talked on politics. I asked if they would really wish for a Radical Government. . . . John Mill sighed out, ‘I have long done what I could to prepare them for it, but in vain; so I have given them up, and in fact they have given me up.’” (Ibid., 151, entry of 27 Mar., 1840.) And in 1833 he had written, “every honest and considerate man, before he engages in the career of a political reformer, will inquire whether the moral state and intellectual culture of the people are such as to render any great improvement in the management of public affairs possible. But he will inquire too, whether the people are likely ever to be made better, morally or intellectually, without a previous change in the government. If not, it may still be his duty to strive for such a change at whatever risks.” (“Alison’s History of the French Revolution,” Monthly Repository, 2nd ser., VII [Aug., 1833], 514-15.)

[174 ]Letter to d’Eichthal, 25 Dec., 1840; and letter to Robert Barclay Fox, 9 Sept., 1842, in EL, CW, XIII, 456, 543.

[175 ]Letters to Napier, 27 Apr., 1840, 21 Sept., 1840, ibid., 431, 444.

[176 ]Harriet Grote, Life of George Grote, 132.

[177 ]Letter of 17 June, 1841, EL, CW, XIII, 478.

[178 ]Letter to George Henry Lewes, [30 July, 1841,] ibid., 483.

[179 ]Speech of 12 Mar., 1868, PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 190, col. 1518.

[180 ]Also, “So deadly is the hatred, that it will run all risks merely to do us harm, with little or no prospect of any consequent good to itself” (509).

[181 ]Speech of 12 Mar., 1868, cols. 1517-18.

[182 ]Ibid., col. 1516. See also Principles of Political Economy, CW, II-III, ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), II, 316-19, 324-8.

[183 ]Scepticism about the argument that the land tenure system was the main cause of Ireland’s economic difficulties can be found in Barbara Lewis Solow, The Land Question and the Irish Economy, 1870-1903 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 12-13, 195. “From the premise that the land law contained investment disincentives, we can draw no conclusions about actual historical development without an examination of the concrete economic situation. Such an examination for post-Famine Ireland will reveal a pattern of tenure customs in which eviction was rare, rents were moderate, and tenant investment incentives were established.” (13.)

[184 ]See also speech of 12 Mar., 1868, cols. 1523-4, 1527-8, 1532; Autobiography, CW, I, 280.

[185 ]See Principles of Political Economy, CW, II, 208, 228-32, 326. A hint of this doctrine appeared as early as 1826; see 108. Steele has argued that Mill’s extreme and emotional position in the 1868 pamphlet sharply contrasted with cautious, moderate judgments on the same issues in his Principles of Political Economy, even as revised in 1865. He acknowledges that Mill in the Principles challenged belief in absolute private property in land at an abstract level; and that there was plenty in the Principles to inspire hostility to landlordism. But he also holds that Mill was reluctant to alter laws of property; that “he substantially withdrew the harsh criticism of Irish landlords and retracted the endorsement of fixity of tenure.” Steele concludes that the 1868 pamphlet “unsaid—though it did not refer to—virtually everything about Irish land in the latest editions of the Principles.” (E. D. Steele, Irish Land and British Politics: Tenant-Right and Nationality, 1865-1870 [London: Cambridge University Press, 1974], 49-50, 53, 55; E. D. Steele, “J. S. Mill and the Irish Question: The Principles of Political Economy, 1848-1865,” Historical Journal, XIII [1970], 216, 226-8, 232-3, 236.)

[186 ]Another modification of Locke’s argument occurs in the speech of 12 May, 1866, PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 183, col. 1095; Mill alludes to Locke’s argument (in The Second Treatise of Government [1690], Chap. v) that private property in land had its origin in improvements and says that “unless we recognise on the same ground a kindred claim in the temporary occupier [i.e., the tenant], we give up the moral basis on which landed property rests. . . . ”

[187 ]This argument was akin to Mill’s characterization of political economy as a science that requires flexible application in light of particular circumstances (speech of 12 Mar., 1868, cols. 1525-6). See also his spirited defence of political economy at 91-2.

[188 ]Autobiography, CW, I, 280.

[189 ]E. D. Steele, “J.S. Mill and the Irish Question: Reform, and the Integrity of the Empire, 1865-1870,” Historical Journal, XIII (1970), 419, 425.

[190 ]R. D. Collison Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question, 1817-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 53. See also 60-2 on the parliamentary debate concerning Ireland, in which Mill’s pamphlet was discussed by, among others, Mill himself (on 12 Mar., 1868). See also 34, 51, 53-7, 70 on Mill’s views on Irish land tenure in relation to classical economic theory and contemporary pamphlet literature.

[191 ]Steele, “Mill . . . Principles of Political Economy,” 216; Steele, “Mill . . . Integrity of the Empire,” 420, 437. For an account of the press reaction to Mill’s pamphlet, see the latter, 438-42.

[192 ]Steele, “Mill . . . Integrity of the Empire,” 438. On Hume and Roebuck, see Steele, “Mill . . . Principles of Political Economy,” 218, 220. In 1837 Mill said the people of property ought to consider “that even their interests, so far as conformable and not contrary to the ends for which society and government exist, are safer in the keeping of the Radicals than anywhere else” (398). Thus “the Radicals are the only true Conservatives” (399).

[193 ]Letter to Philip Henry Rathbone, 9 Jan., 1869, LL, CW, XVII, 1545. See also letter to John Elliot Cairnes, 10 Mar., 1868, ibid., XVI, 1373; Autobiography, CW, I, 280.

[194 ]Speech of 12 Mar., 1868, col. 1518.

[195 ]Considerations on Representative Government, CW, XIX, 551.

[196 ]See also 214-18; LL, CW, XVI, 1328. Steele suggests that Mill was moved by concern for the security of England against invasion as well as a combination of complacency about English institutions, patriotism, and imperialist sentiments which prevented him from seriously considering independence (“Mill . . . Integrity of the Empire,” 430, 432-3, 435, 450).

[197 ]Thus he said, “I maintain that there is no country under heaven which it is not possible to govern, and to govern in such a way that it shall be contented” (speech of 12 Mar., 1868, col. 1523).