1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Mill, John Stuart

​MILL, JOHN STUART (1806–1873), English philosopher andeconomist, son of James Mill, was born on the 20th of May 1806in his father’s house in Pentonville, London. He was educatedexclusively by his father, who was a strict disciplinarian, andat the age of three was taught the Greek alphabet and long listsof Greek words with their English equivalents. By his eighthyear he had read Aesop’s Fables, Xenophon’s Anabasis, and thewhole of Herodotus, and was acquainted with Lucian, DiogenesLaërtius, Isocrates and six dialogues of Plato (see hisAutobiography). He had also read a great deal of history in English—Robertson’shistories, Hume, Gibbon, Robert Watson’s Philip II.and Philip III., Hooke’s Roman History, part of a translationof Rollin’s Ancient History, Langhorne’s Plutarch, Burnet'sHistory of My Own Times, thirty volumes of the Annual Register,Millar’s Historical View of the English Government, Mosheim’sEcclesiastical History, M‘Crie’s Knox, and two histories of theQuakers. A contemporary record of Mill’s studies from eight tothirteen is published in Bain’s sketch of his life. It shows thatthe Autobiography rather understates the amount of work done.At the age of eight he began Latin, Euclid, and algebra, andwas appointed schoolmaster to the younger children of thefamily. His main reading was still history, but he went throughall the Latin and Greek authors commonly read in the schoolsand universities, besides several that are not commonly read byundergraduates. He was not taught to compose either in Latinor in Greek, and he was never an exact scholar; it was for thesubject matter that he was required to read, and by the age often he could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease. His father'sHistory of India was published in 1818; immediately thereafter,about the age of twelve, John began a thorough study of thescholastic logic, at the same time reading Aristotle’s logicaltreatises in the original. In the following year he was introducedto political economy and studied Adam Smith and Ricardo withhis father.

Not unnaturally the training which the younger Mill receivedhas aroused amazement and criticism; and it is reasonable todoubt whether the material knowledge which he retained inthe result was as valuable to him as his father imagined. It isimportant, however, to note that the really important part ofthe training was the close association which it involved with thestrenuous character and vigorous intellect of his father. Fromhis earliest days he spent much time in his father’s study andhabitually accompanied him on his walks in North London.Much therefore of what he acquired was assimilated withoutdifficulty, and the accuracy of his impressions was tested by hissubsequently drafting a résumé of their conversations. He thuslearned early to grapple with difficulties and to accustom himselfto the necessity of precision in argument and expression. Itwas an inevitable result of such an education that Mill acquiredmany of his father’s speculative opinions, and his father’s wayof defending them. But he did not receive the impress passivelyand mechanically. “One of the grand objects of education,”according to the elder Mill, “should be to generate a constantand anxious concern about evidence.” The duty of collectingand weighing evidence for himself was at every turn impressedupon the boy; he was taught to accept no opinion on authority.He was deliberately educated as an apostle, but it was as anapostle of reasoned truth in human affairs, not as an apostle ofany system of dogmatic tenets. It was to prevent any fallingoff from this high moral standard till it should become part ofhis being that his father kept the boy so closely with himself.Mill expressly says that his childhood was not unhappy. Itseems unhappy only when we compare it with the normal lifeof a boy and decline to imagine its peculiar enjoyments andaspirations. Mill complains that his father often required morethan could be expected of him, but his tasks were not so severeas to prevent him from growing up a healthy and high-spiritedboy, though he was not constitutionally robust, and his pursuitswere so different from those of other boys of the same age.

From May 1820 till July 1821 Mill was in France in the family of Sir Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy Bentham. Away from his father he maintained his laborious habits. Copious extracts from a diary kept by him at this time are given by Bain; they show how methodically he read and wrote, studied chemistry and botany, tackled advanced mathematical problems, made notes on the scenery and the people and customs of the country. He also gained a thorough acquaintance with the French language. On his return in 1821 he added to his work the study of psychology, and that of Roman law, which he read with John Austin, his father having half decided on the bar as the best profession open to him. In 1822, however, when he had just completed his seventeenth year, this intention was abandoned, and he entered as a clerk in the examiner’s office of the India House, “with the understanding that he should be employed from the beginning in preparing drafts of despatches, and be thus trained up as a successor to those who then filled the highest departments of the office.” ​Mill’s work at the India House, which was henceforth hislivelihood, did not come before the public; hence some havescouted his political writings as the work of an abstract philosopher,entirely unacquainted with affairs. From the first hewas more than a clerk, and after a short apprenticeship he waspromoted, in 1828, to the responsible position of assistant-examinerwith a salary of £600 a year. The duty of the so-calledexaminers was to examine the letters of the agents of theCompany in India, and to draft instructions in reply. Thecharacter of the Company’s government was almost entirelydependent upon their abilities as statesmen. For twenty years,from 1836 (when his father died) to 1856, Mill had charge of theCompany’s relations with the native states, and in 1856 hebecame chief of the office with a salary of £2000. In thehundreds of despatches that he wrote in this capacity, much,no doubt, was done in accordance with established routine, butfew statesmen of his generation had a wider experience of theresponsible application of the principles of government. Aboutthis work he said little in the Autobiography, probably becausehis main concern there was to expound the influences thateffected his moral and mental development.

About the time of his entering the India House Mill readDumont’s exposition of Bentham’s doctrines in the Traité deLégislation, which made a lasting impression upon him. Whenhe laid down the last volume, he says, he had become a differentbeing. It gave unity to the detached and fragmentary partsof his knowledge and beliefs. The impression was confirmedby the study of the English psychologists, as well as Condillacand Helvetius, and in 1822–1823 he established among a fewfriends the “Utilitarian” Society, taking the word, as he tellsus, from Galt’s Annals of the Parish. Two newspapers wereopen to him—the Traveller, edited by a friend of Bentham’s,and the Morning Chronicle, edited by his father’s friend Black.One of his first efforts was a solid argument for freedom ofdiscussion, in a series of letters to the Chronicle apropos of theprosecution of Richard Carlile. But he watched all publicincidents with a vigilant eye, and seized every passingopportunity of exposing departures from sound principle in parliamentand courts of justice. Another outlet was opened up for him(April 1824) by the starting of the Westminster Review, and stillanother in the following year in the Parliamentary History andReview. This year also he found a congenial occupation inediting Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence. All the time,his mind full of public questions, he discussed eagerly with themany men of distinction who came to his father’s house. Heengaged in set discussions at a reading society formed at Grote’shouse in 1825, and in set debates at a Speculative Society formedin the same year.

From the Autobiography we learn that in 1826 Mill’s enthusiasmwas checked by a misgiving as to the value of the endswhich he had set before him. This expression was the result,no doubt, of his strenuous training and the comparative lackof congenial friendships. His father was reserved, undemonstrativeeven to the pitch of chilling sternness, and among youngMill’s comrades contempt of feeling was almost a watchword.Himself absorbed in abstract questions and projects of generalphilanthropy, he had been careless of personal attachment.On the other hand without experience he could not have beenprepared for the actual slowness of the reformer’s work. In1826 he looked back to four years of eager toil. What werethe results? He had become convinced that his comrades inthe Utilitarian Society, never more than ten, had not the stuffin them for a world-shaking propaganda; the society itself wasdissolved; the Parliamentary Review was a failure; theWestminster did not pay its expenses; Bentham’s Judicial Evidenceproduced little effect on the reviewers. His own reception atthe Speculative Debating Society, where he first measured hisstrength in public conflict, was calculated to produceself-distrust. He found himself looked upon with curiosity as aprecocious phenomenon, a “made man,” an intellectual machineset to grind certain tunes. The outcome of this period ofdepression was a broadening of his outlook on the problemswhich he had set himself to solve. He now saw that regard for thepublic good was too vague an object for the satisfaction of aman’s affections. It is a proof of the dominating force of hisfather’s character that it cost the younger Mill such an effort toshake off his stern creed about poetry and personal emotion.Like Plato, the elder Mill would have put poets under ban asenemies of truth, and he subordinated private to public affections.Landor’s maxims of “few acquaintances, fewer friends, nofamiliarities” had his cordial approval. These doctrines theyounger Mill now felt himself forced in reason to abandon.Too much in awe of his father to make him a confidant, hewrestled in the gloomy solitude of his own mind. He gainedfrom the struggle a more catholic view of human happiness,at delight in the poetry of nature and the affections as wellas the poetry of heroic unselfishness, a disposition to studymore sympathetically the point of view of opponents, a morecourteous style of polemic, a hatred of sectarianism, an ambition,no less noble and disinterested, but moderated to practicalpossibilities.

In the course of the next few years he wrote comparativelylittle, but he continued his reading, and also derived muchbenefit from discussions held twice a week at Grote’s house inThreadneedle Street. Gradually also he had the satisfaction ofseeing the debates in the Speculative Society becoming famousenough to attract men with whom it was profitable for him tointerchange opinions, among others Maurice and John Sterling.He ceased to attend the society in 1829, but he carried awayfrom it the strengthening memory of failure overcome bypersevering effort, and the important doctrinal conviction that atrue system of political philosophy was “something much morecomplex and many-sided than he had previously had any ideaof, and that its office was to supply, not a set of model institutionsbut principles from which the institutions suitable to any givencircumstances might be deduced.”

The first sketch of Mill’s political philosophy appeared in aseries of contributions to the Examiner in the autumn of 1830entitled “Prospects in France.” He was in Paris soon afterthe July Revolution, and made the acquaintance of the leadingspirits among the younger men; in his discussion of theirproposals we find the germs of many thoughts afterwards morefully developed in his Representative Government. It is fromthis time that Mill’s letters supply a connected account of hislife (see Hugh Elliott, Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1910).

The letters in the Examiner may be taken as marking the close of his period of meditative search, and his return to hopeful aspiring activity. It was characteristic of his nature that he should be stirred to such delight by the Revolution in France, and should labour so earnestly to make his countrymen understand with what gravity and sobriety it had been effected. Their own Reform Bill came soon after and it is again characteristic of Mill—at once of his enthusiasm and of his steady determination to do work that nobody else seemed able or willing to do—that we find him in the heat of the struggle in 1831 writing to the Examiner a series of letters on “The Spirit of the Age” which drew from Carlyle the singular exclamation “Here is a new mystic!” How little this criticism was justified may be seen from the fact that Mill’s inductive logic was the direct result of his aspirations after political stability as determined by the dominion of the wisest (Examiner letters). “Why is it,” he asked, “that the multitude accept implicitly the decisions of the wisest, of the specially skilled, in physical science?” Because in physical science there is all but complete agreement in opinion. “And why this agreement?” Because all accept the same methods of investigation, the same tests of truth. Is it possible then to obtain unanimity as to the methods of arriving at conclusions in social and political matters, so as to secure similar agreement of opinion among the specially skilled, and similar general respect for their authority? The same thought appears in a review of Herschel’s Natural Philosophy, written about the same time. Mill remarks that the uncertainty hanging over the very elements of moral and social philosophy proves that the means of arriving at the truth in those sciences are not yet ​properly understood. “And whither,” he adds, “can mankindso advantageously turn, in order to learn the proper means, andto form their minds to the proper habits, as to that branch ofknowledge in which by universal acknowledgment the greatestnumber of truths have been ascertained, and the greatest possibledegree of certainty arrived at?”

By 1831 the period of depression had passed; Mill’s enthusiasmfor humanity had been thoroughly reawakened, and had takenthe definite shape of an aspiration to supply an unimpeachablemethod of search for conclusions in moral and social science.No mystic ever worked with warmer zeal than Mill. But hiszeal encountered a check which baffled him for several years,and which left its mark in various inconsistencies andincoherences in his completed system. He had been bred by hisfather in a great veneration for the syllogistic logic as an antidoteagainst confused thinking. He attributed to his early disciplinein this logic an impatience of vague language which in all likelihoodwas really fostered in him by his study of the Platonicdialogues and of Bentham, for he always had in himself more ofPlato’s fertile ingenuity in canvassing the meaning of vagueterms than the schoolman’s rigid consistency in the use of them.Be this as it may, enthusiastic as he was for a new logic thatmight give certainty to moral and social conclusions, Mill wasno less resolute that the new logic should stand in no antagonismto the old. In his Westminster review of Whately’s Logic in 1828(invaluable to all students of the genesis of Mill’s logic) heappears, curiously enough, as an ardent and brilliant championof the syllogistic logic against highfliers such as the Scottishphilosophers who talk of “superseding” it by “a supposedsystem of inductive logic.” His inductive logic must “supplementand not supersede.” But for several years he searchedin vain for the means of concatenation.

Meantime, while recurring again and again, as was his custom,to this cardinal difficulty, Mill worked indefatigably in otherdirections where he saw his way clear. The working of thenew order in France, and the personalities of the leading men, hada profound interest for him; he wrote on the subject in theExaminer. He had ceased to write for the Westminster in 1828;but during the years 1832 and 1833 he contributed many essaysto Tait’s Magazine, the Jurist, and the Monthly Repository.In 1835 Sir William Molesworth founded the London Reviewwith Mill as editor; it was amalgamated with the Wesminster(as the London and Westminster Review) in 1836, and Millcontinued editor (latterly proprietor also) till 1840. Much ofwhat he wrote then was subsequently incorporated in hissystematic works: some of his essays were reprinted in his firsttwo volumes of Dissertations and Discussions (1859). Theessays on Bentham and Coleridge constituted the first manifestoof the new spirit which Mill sought to breathe into EnglishRadicalism. But the reprinted papers give no just idea of theimmense range of Mill’s energy at this time. His position in theIndia Office, where alone he did work enough for most men, cuthim off from entering parliament; but he laboured hard thoughineffectually to influence the legislature from without bycombating the disposition to rest and be thankful. In hisAutobiography he admits that the attempt to form a Radical partyin parliament at that time was chimerical.

It was in 1837, on reading Whewell’s Inductive Sciences andre-reading Herschel, that Mill at last saw his way clear both toformulating the methods of scientific investigation and joiningon the new logic as a supplement to the old. The Logic waspublished in 1843. In 1844 appeared his Essays on SomeUnsettled Questions in Political Economy. These essays wereworked out and written many years before, and show Mill inhis first stage as a political economist. Four out of the fiveessays are elaborate and powerful solutions of perplexing technicalproblems—the distribution of the gains of internationalcommerce, the influence of consumption on production, thedefinition of productive and unproductive labour, the preciserelations between profits and wages. Though Mill appears herepurely as the disciple of Ricardo, striving after more precisestatement, and reaching forward to further consequences, wecan well understand in reading these essays how about thetime when he first sketched them he began to be consciousof power as an original and independent thinker.

That originality and independence became more conspicuouswhen he reached his second stage as a political economist,struggling forward towards the standpoint from which hissystematic work was written. It would seem that in his fitsof despondency one of the thoughts that marred his dreams ofhuman improvement was the apparently inexorable characterof economic laws, condemning thousands of labourers to acramped and miserable existence, and thousands more tosemi-starvation. From this oppressive feeling he found relief in thethought set forth in the opening of the second book of hisPolitical Economy—that, while the conditions of productionhave the necessity of physical laws, the distribution of what isproduced among the various classes of producers is a matterof human arrangement, dependent upon alterable customs andinstitutions. There can be little doubt that this thought,whether or not in the clear shape that it afterwards assumed,was the germ of all that is most distinctive in his system ofpolitical economy. This system, which for many yearssubsequently was regarded as authoritative, has been subjected tovigorous criticism by later economists, and it is perhaps not toomuch to say that it now possesses mainly an historical interest.Its chief importance is perhaps the stress which it laid on thevital connexion which must subsist between true economic theoryand the wider facts of social and national development.

While his great systematic works were in progress, Mill wrotevery little on events or books of the day. He turned aside fora few months from his Political Economy during the winter of theIrish famine (1846–1847) to advocate the creation ofpeasant-proprietorships as a remedy for distress and disorder in Ireland.He found time also to write elaborate articles on French historyand Greek history in the Edinburgh Review apropos of Michelet,Guizot and Grote, besides some less elaborate essays.

The Political Economy was published in 1848. Mill could nowfeel that his main work was accomplished; he remained, however,on the alert for opportunities of useful influence, and pressedon with hardly diminished enthusiasm in his search for usefultruth. Among other things, he made a more thorough studyof socialist writers, with the result that, though he was notconverted to any of their schemes as being immediately practicable,he began to look upon some more equal distribution of theproduce of labour as a practicability of the remote future, andto dwell upon the prospect of such changes in human characteras might render a stable society possible without the institutionof private property. This he has called his third stage as apolitical economist, and he says that he was helped towards itby the lady, Mrs Taylor,^[1] who became his wife in 1851. It isgenerally supposed that he writes with a lover’s extravaganceabout this lady’s powers when he compares her with Shelley andCarlyle. But a little reflection will show that he wrote with hisusual accuracy and sobriety when he described her influence onhim. He expressly says that he owed none of his technicaldoctrine to her, that she influenced only his ideals of life for theindividual and for society; the only work perhaps which wasdirectly inspired by her is the essay on the enfranchisement ofwomen (Dissertations, vol. ii.). It is obvious from what he saysthat his inner life became very different after he threw off hisfather’s authority. This new inner life was strengthened and enlarged by Mrs Taylor.

During the seven years of his married life Mill published less than in any other period of his career, but four of his most ​closely reasoned and characteristic works, the Liberty, theUtilitarianism, the Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, and theSubjection of Women, besides his posthumously published essayson Nature and on the Utility of Religion, were thought out andpartly written in collaboration with his wife. In 1856 he becamehead of the examiner’s office in the India House, and for twoyears, till the dissolution of the Company in 1858, his officialwork, never a light task, kept him fully occupied. It fell tohim as head of the office to write the defence of the Company’sgovernment of India when the transfer of its powers wasproposed. Mill was earnestly opposed to the transfer, and thedocuments in which he substantiated the proud boast for theCompany that “few governments, even under far more favourablecircumstances, have attempted so much for the good oftheir subjects or carried so many of their attempts to abeneficial issue,” and exposed the defects of the proposed newgovernment, are models of trenchant and dignified pleading.

On the dissolution of the Company Mill was offered a seat inthe new council, but declined, and retired with a pension of£1500. His retirement from official work was followed almostimmediately by his wife’s death at Avignon, whither they hadcome in the course of a tour. So great was the shock that forthe rest of his life he spent most of his time at a villa at St Véran,near Avignon, returning to his Blackheath residence only for ashort period in each year. He sought relief in active literaryoccupation, in politics, sociology and psychology. Hepublished, with a touching dedication to his wife, the treatise onLiberty, which they had wrought out together. He then turnedto politics, and published, in view of the impending Reform Bill,a pamphlet on parliamentary reform. The chief feature in thiswas an idea concerning which he and Mrs Mill often deliberated—thenecessity of providing checks against uneducated democracy.His suggestion of a plurality of votes, proportioned tothe elector’s degree of education, was avowedly put forward onlyas an ideal; he admitted that no authentic test of educationcould for the present be found. An anonymous Conservativecaught at the scheme in another pamphlet, proposing incomeas a test. Soon after Mill supported in Fraser’s, still with thesame object, Hare’s scheme for the representation of minorities.In the autumn of the same year he turned to psychology,reviewing Bain’s works in the Edinburgh Review. In hisRepresentative Government (1860) he systematized opinions alreadyput forward in many casual articles and essays. HisUtilitarianism (published in Fraser’s in 1861) was a closely-reasonedsystematic attempt to answer objections to his ethical theoryand remove misconceptions of it. He was especially anxiousto make it clear that he included in “utility” the pleasures ofthe imagination and the gratification of the higher emotions,and to show how powerfully the good of mankind as a motiveappealed to the imagination. His next treatise, The Subjectionof Women, was not published till 1869.^[2] His Examination ofHamilton’s Philosophy, published in 1865, had engaged a largeshare of his time for three years before.

While mainly occupied in those years with philosophicalstudies, Mill did not remit his interest in current politics. Hesupported the North in the American crisis of 1862, using all hisstrength to explain what has since been universally recognizedas the issue really at stake in the struggle, the abolition of slavery.It was characteristic of the closeness with which he watchedcurrent events, and of his zeal in the cause of “lucidity,” thatwhen the Reader, an organ of science and unpartisan opinion,fell into difficulties in 1865 Mill joined with some distinguishedmen of science and letters in an effort to keep it afloat. Hesupplied part of the money for carrying it on, contributed severalarticles, and assisted the editor, Fraser Rae, with his advice.The effort was vain, though such men as Herbert Spencer,Huxley, Tyndall, Cairnes, Mark Pattison, F. Harrison, SirFrederick Pollock and Lockyer were among the contributors.

In 1865 he agreed to stand as parliamentary candidate forWestminster, on conditions strictly in accordance with hisprinciples. He would not canvass, nor pay agents to canvassfor him, nor would he engage to attend to the local business ofthe constituency. He was with difficulty persuaded even toaddress a meeting of the electors. The story of this remarkableelection has been told by James Beal, one of the most activesupporters of Mill’s candidature. In parliament he adhered tohis life-long principle of doing only work that needed to be done,and that nobody else seemed equally able or willing to do. Itmay have been a consciousness of this fact which prompted aremark, made by the Speaker, that Mill’s presence in parliamentelevated the tone of debate. The impression made by him inparliament is in some danger of being forgotten, because he wasnot instrumental in carrying any great measure that might serveas an abiding memorial. But, although his first speech on thebill for the prevention of cattle diseases excited the oppositionof country members, and a subsequent speech against thesuspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland was veryunfavourably received, Mill thoroughly succeeded in gainingthe ear of the House. The only speech made by him during histhree years in parliament that was listened to with impatiencewas, curiously enough, his speech in favour of counteractingdemocracy by providing for the representation of minorities.His attack on the conduct of Governor Eyre in Jamaica (q.v.)was listened to, but with repugnance by the majority, althoughhis action in this matter in and out of parliament was farfrom being ineffectual. He took an active part in the debateson Disraeli’s Reform Bill (moving an amendment to omit theword “man” and insert “person”), and helped to extort fromthe government several useful modifications of the Bill for thePrevention of Corrupt Practices. The reform of land tenure inIreland, the representation of women, the reduction of thenational debt, the reform of London government, the abrogationof the Declaration of Paris, were among the topics on which hespoke with marked effect. He took occasion more than onceto enforce what he had often advocated in writing, England'sduty to intervene in foreign politics in support of the cause offreedom. As a speaker Mill was somewhat hesitating, pausingoccasionally as if to recover the thread of his argument, but heshowed great readiness in extemporaneous debate. Viewed asa candidate for ministerial office, he might be regarded as a failurein parliament, but there can be no doubt that his career theregreatly extended his influence.

Mill’s subscription to the election expenses of Bradlaugh, and his attitude towards Governor Eyre, are generally regarded as the main causes of his defeat in the general election of 1868. But, as he suggests himself, his studied advocacy of unfamiliar projects of reform had made him unpopular with “moderate Liberals.” He retired with a sense of relief to his cottage and his literary life at Avignon. His parliamentary duties and the quantity of correspondence brought upon him by increased publicity had absorbed nearly the whole of his time. The scanty leisure of his first recess had been devoted to writing his St Andrews rectorial address on higher education and to answering attacks on his criticism of Hamilton; of the second, to annotating in conjunction with Bain and Findlater, his father’s Analysis of the Mind. Now he looked forward to a literary life, and his letters show how much he enjoyed the change. His little cottage was filled with books and newspapers; the beautiful country round it furnished him with a variety of walks; he read, wrote, discussed, walked, botanized. He was extremely fond of music, and was himself a fair pianist. His step-daughter, Miss Taylor (d. January 1907), was his constant companion after his wife’s death. “Helen,” he wrote to W. T. Thornton, an old colleague in the India House, “has carried out her long-cherished scheme (about which she tells me she consulted you) of a ‘vibratory’ for me, and has made a pleasant covered walk, some 30 ft. long, where I can vibrate in cold or rainy weather. The terrace, you must know, as it goes round two sides of the house, has got itself ​dubbed the ‘semi-circumgyratory.’ In addition to this, Helenhas built me a herbarium, a little room fitted up with closetsfor my plants, shelves for my botanical books, and a greattable whereon to manipulate them all. Thus, you see, with myherbarium, my vibratory, and my semi-circumgyratory, I amin clover; and you may imagine with what scorn I think of theHouse of Commons, which, comfortable club as it is said to be,could offer me none of these comforts, or, more perfectly speaking,these necessaries of life.” Mill was an enthusiastic botanistall his life long, and a frequent contributor of notes and shortpapers to the Phytologist. One of the things that he lookedforward to during his last journey to Avignon was seeing thespring flowers and completing a flora of the locality. Hisdelight in scenery frequently appears in letters written to hisfriends during his summer and autumn tours.

Yet he did not relax his laborious habits nor his ardentoutlook on human affairs. The essays in the fourth volume of hisDissertations—on endowments, on land, on labour, onmetaphysical and psychological questions—were written for theFortnightly Review at intervals after his short parliamentarycareer. One of his first tasks was to send his treatise on theSubjection of Women (written 1861, published 1869, manyeditions) through the press. The essay on Theism was writtensoon after. The last public work in which he engaged was thestarting of the Land Tenure Reform Association. Theinterception by the state of the unearned increment, and the promotionof co-operative agriculture, were the most striking featuresin his programme. He wrote in the Examiner and made a publicspeech in favour of the association a few months before hisdeath. The secret of the ardour with which he took up thisquestion probably was his conviction that a great struggle wasimpending in Europe between labour and capital. He regardedhis project as a timely compromise.

Mill died at Avignon on the 8th of May 1873. He was a manof extreme simplicity in his method of life. Though occasionallyirritable in speech, in his written polemics he was remarkablefor courtesy to opponents and a capacity to understand theirpoint of view. His references to his friends were always generous,and he was always ready to assist those whose work needed help.For example, he desired to guarantee the cost of the first booksof Bain and Herbert Spencer. A statue in bronze was placedon the Thames Embankment, and there is a good portrait byWatts (a copy of which, by Watts himself, was hung in theNational Gallery).