John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XVIII - Essays on Politics and Society Part I, ed. Robson, Introduction by Alexander Brady.

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18 of the 33 vol. Collected Works contains a number of Mill’s essays on politics, including his reviews of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and his book On Liberty.

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Table of Contents: • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •. The Collected Edition of the works of John Stuart Mill has been planned and is being directed by an editorial committee appointed from the Faculty of Arts and Science of the University of Toronto, and from the University of Toronto Press. The primary aim of the edition is to present fully collated texts of those works which exist in a number of versions, both printed and manuscript, and to provide accurate texts of works previously unpublished or which have become relatively inaccessible. Editorial Committee j.

Robson, General Editor v. Bladen, alexander brady, j. Hollander, r. Priestley, marsh jeanneret, francess halpenny, jean houston Edition: current; Page: [iii ].

Contents • introduction, by Alexander Brady • textual introduction, by J. ALEXANDER BRADY john stuart mill’s development as a political and social thinker may be divided into at least three periods, with the first two largely determining the course and character of the third. The first embraces his youthful apprenticeship in and passionate proselytizing for the utilitarianism in which from childhood he had been carefully nurtured by his father and Bentham. His career as a young and orthodox utilitarian extended to his mental crisis in 1826 at the age of twenty. The second period began with his recovery from the crisis (1826-30) and terminated with the dissolution of the Philosophic Radicals as a distinct party towards the end of the 1830s.

In this crucial period of his life Mill refashioned his thinking under a variety of intellectual and emotional influences. The final period comprised the remaining thirty-three years of his career (1840-73), when he published his major works, including A System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, and Considerations on Representative Government.

The occupation accustomed me to see and hear the difficulties of every course, and the means of obviating them, stated and discussed deliberately, with a view to execution; it gave me opportunities of perceiving when public measures, and other political facts, did not produce the effects which had been expected of them, and from what causes; above all it was valuable to me by making me, in this portion of my activity, merely one wheel in a machine, the whole of which had to work together.... I became practically conversant with the difficulties of moving bodies of men, the necessities of compromise, the art of sacrificing the non-essential to preserve the essential. I learnt how to obtain the best I could, when I could not obtain everything....

Two years after Mill founded the Utilitarian Society, Bentham and a few friends launched the Westminster Review as an official organ for utilitarian ideas. In its first four years (1824-28) Mill, despite his youth, was a frequent contributor on a wide range of themes, which he treated in the spirit of utilitarian orthodoxy. He criticized the follies of aristocratic rule in Britain Edition: current; Page: [xi ] and Ireland, the illusions of chivalry formerly associated with aristocracy, the vested interests of great landowners in corn and game laws, and the ills of a faulty journalism. He strove to liberate the English press from the trammels of an abused and arbitrary law of libel and the burden of press duties. Mill like his father and other contemporary Radicals saw in the freedom of the press the essential instrument for mobilizing opinion, breaking down resistance to reform, and creating that degree of popular discontent which would compel the aristocratic government to make substantial concessions. He was naturally inspired by his father’s famous essay on “Liberty of the Press,” first published in 1821 as a supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. He accepted his parent’s uncompromising belief that no special laws should exist to hamper the freedom of newspapers to print facts and advance opinions to protect the people against the tyranny of a government.

In 1826 when Mill was twenty he entered the shadows of a mental crisis, which lasted for months, and has been variously assessed and explained by biographers. It is easy to accept the traditional and simple view that it resulted from prolonged and excessive work. Mill had recently undertaken the prodigious task of editing the five volumes of Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence, contributed to newspapers and journals, debated in the societies with which he was associated, tutored his brothers and sisters at home, and dealt with official duties at India House.

Yet there was more involved than heavy work and physical exhaustion. In the Autobiography he blames a faulty education which cultivated his intellect but starved his feelings and aesthetic yearnings. His faith in the efficacy of utilitarian thought was evidently shaken, and it is symptomatic that on this, unlike other occasions, he failed to seek from his father guidance, sympathy, or compassion. He had secretly begun to rebel against certain elements in the philosophy of James Mill and Jeremy Bentham and felt compelled to work out alone an intellectual accommodation with his inheritance. Levi has advanced a Freudian explanation of the mental crisis and its disappearance. Whether we accept this view or not, Mill’s illness marked a milestone in his intellectual development.

He awoke to deficiencies in the eighteenth-century utilitarian thought in which he had been indoctrinated, and to repair them sought guidance from other and varied sources, including Edition: current; Page: [xii ] a constellation of new friends and new mentors. In the fourteen years after 1826 the orthodox utilitarian was transformed into an eclectic liberal who in no sense repudiated all his inheritance but modified and combined it with many fresh ideas and methods of thought demanded in a world gripped by change where truth, as he saw it, must be many-sided. He found for depression an early antidote in Wordsworth’s tranquil and contemplative poetry, which supplied something which had been lacking in his father’s rigorous educational regime—a cultivation of feeling inspired by natural beauty.

Yet the Wordsworthian culture of the feelings was at the time merely one of a medley of influences. Even Macaulay’s caustic criticism in the Edinburgh Review of his father’s Essay on Government persuaded Mill that although Macaulay himself was faulty in philosophy, he scored valid points against the narrowness of his father’s political thought and its neglect of significant springs in the conduct of modern man. The thinkers, very different from his father and Bentham, who gave him intellectual stimulus in the early 1830s were the Saint-Simonians, Comte, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Tocqueville.

He appreciated the fact that these writers emphasized the significance of history and a philosophy of history, and endorsed the idea that each state of society and the human mind tended to produce that which succeeded it, with modifications dictated by circumstances. At the same time, the whirl of change in events and ideas impressed him with the relativity of political institutions; each different stage in human society must have different institutions. Further, as he put it, “government is always either in the hands, or passing into the hands, of whatever is the strongest power in society, and... What this power is, does not depend on institutions, but institutions on it....” Not the least fascinating circumstance in the shaping of Mill’s thought in the early 1830’s was his coming under different streams of influence and endeavouring to reconcile them or to select from each some element or elements of significance.

This process was admirably illustrated in the letter to John Sterling in October 1831. He discussed here contemporary Toryism and Liberalism, and distinguished between the contrary types of speculative and practical Toryism, but oddly failed to recognize the significant reformism of men like Huskisson and Peel. “Practical Toryism,” he said, “simply means, being in, and availing yourself of your comfortable position inside the vehicle without minding the poor devils who are freezing outside.... Such Toryism is essentially incompatible with any large and generous Edition: current; Page: [xiii ] aspirations....” Yet this is the Toryism that appealed to the privileged classes of his day, who had little faith in human improvement, unlike his friends the speculative Tories—Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey.

These wanted an ideal Toryism, an ideal King, Lords, and Commons, the old England as opposed to the new, an England as she might be, not as she is. They represented a reverence for government in the abstract. Sensible that it is good for man to be ruled; to submit both his body & mind to the guidance of a higher intelligence & virtue. It is therefore the direct antithesis of liberalism, which is for making every man his own guide & sovereign master, & letting him think for himself & do exactly as he judges best for himself, giving other men leave to persuade him if they can by evidence, but forbidding him to give way to authority; and still less allowing them to constrain him more than the existence & tolerable security of every man’s person and property renders indispensably necessary.

It is difficult to conceive a more thorough ignorance of man’s nature, & of what is necessary for his happiness or what degree of happiness & virtue he is capable of attaining than this system implies. These sentiments may seem somewhat uncharacteristic of one renowned as spokesman of British nineteenth-century liberalism. They reflect his thinking at a critical period when he was striving to assess the changing winds of current opinion.

At the same time they also reflect an enduring element: his doubts about the average man’s capacity unaided to cope wisely with the complex problems of citizenship. In combining his earlier utilitarian doctrines with those of new intellectual associates, Mill saw politics as an immensely important part of the structure of society, since only through political activity could men maximize their moral and social potentiality. The institutional contrivances of the state, being interwoven with the main facets of economic and social life, were comprehensible only in the context of the whole. Politics reflected the character of economic and social systems and the ethical values men held. Culture and politics were thus inseparable, political progress and social progress interdependent. Some years later, in a letter to John Chapman, Mill expressed in general terms a view that for him had become axiomatic. I understand by Sociology not a particular class of subjects included within Politics, but a vast field including it—the whole field of enquiry & speculation respecting human society & its arrangements, of which the forms of government, & the principles of the conduct of governments are but a part.

And it seems to me impossible that even the politics of the day can be discussed on principle, or with a view to anything but the exigencies of the moment, unless by setting out from definite opinions respecting social questions more fundamental than what is commonly called politics. Edition: current; Page: [xiv ]. IDEAS AND ACTIVITY, 1830-40 the varied intellectual stimuli that Mill experienced after his mental crisis helped to shape the mould of his political thought in that turbulent and confused era of the 1830s. However much he strayed from the strict path of his father’s thought, he remained in agreement with the main legal and political reforms sought by James Mill and the Philosophic Radicals. In his journalism he still advocated extensive changes in the laws, the parliamentary system, and the whole system of government to reduce what, in his opinion, was the baneful influence of the aristocracy on the major aspects of British society.

He endeavoured to arouse the Radicals in and out of parliament to form a powerful party that either alone or allied with progressive Whigs could shape public policies on reformist lines. In a letter to Edward Lytton Bulwer in March 1838 he summarized his political ambitions in the preceding years. I have never had any other notion of practical policy, since the radicals were numerous enough to form a party, than that of resting on the whole body of radical opinion, from the whig-radicals at one extreme, to the more reasonable & practical of the working classes, & the Benthamites, on the other. I have been trying ever since the reform bill to stimulate, so far as I had an opportunity, all sections of the parliamentary radicals to organize such a union & such a system of policy....

Yet despite his genuine zeal, Mill found the task of trying to achieve unity among the Radicals frustrating. They were splintered into stubborn factions, and no parliamentary leader with the requisite qualities emerged to unite them. They constituted a party of many lieutenants without a general.

For a short interval Mill pinned his hopes on Lord Durham, who left the Whig ministry, undertook the Canadian mission, surrounded himself with Radical advisers like Charles Buller and Gibbon Wakefield, and produced a report that was a Radical rather than a Whig or Tory document. But Mill’s hopes and designs for Durham’s leadership or indeed for the future of the party were soon shattered by adverse events, including the serious illness and death of Durham and Mill’s own inability to sustain much longer the heavy financial and other burdens of the London and Westminster Review, the organ for radical causes. By 1840 he had virtually ceased to be a leading counsellor to Radical politicians, although his interest in utilitarian reform continued unabated.

Significantly, in the 1830s Mill was not absorbed exclusively in British political ideas and activities. In contrast with his father, who disliked France Edition: current; Page: [xv ] and the French, he was early influenced by French thinkers and fascinated by the dialectic of French politics. In 1829 he told a Parisian friend that he admired his countrymen because they were open to ideas and more ready than the English to act on them. Never perhaps was his Francophile enthusiasm more pronounced than in 1830. On the collapse of the Bourbon monarchy he hurried to Paris, mixed freely with young revolutionaries and Saint-Simonian leaders, shared the excitement and joy of his French friends in what they assumed was the triumph of revolution over aristocratic politics and ultramontane theology, and returned to England with a renewed zest for reforms. Mill’s political hopes for France resembled those for Britain: a political regime on utilitarian lines, a widely representative assembly, a liberal franchise, a free press, free associations, popular education, and an enlightened public.

However, the revolution of 1830 became a dismal disappointment. The monarchy of Louis Philippe, wedded to narrow commercial and financial groups, was unwilling to jeopardize for the sake of reform its powers and privileges, and at every step opposed major changes. From London Mill closely and anxiously followed events, and between 1830 and 1834 in successive articles in the Examiner poured out his bitterness. Mill’s severe disenchantment left an imprint on his political thinking throughout the 1830s and even later. Although he did not lose liberal convictions or a belief in representative government, he now doubted that large electorates could make sound decisions without the positive leadership of enlightened minorities.

An extended suffrage, however important in itself, alone could not prevent the continuance of self-interested oligarchies whether of the aristocracy or middle class. His doubts and fears at the time about representative institutions and democracy were evident in numerous articles. Seven of these are included in the present volume, beginning with the review articles on The Use and Abuse of Some Political Terms by George Cornewall Lewis and Rationale of Political Representation by Samuel Bailey.

LEWIS AND BAILEY Lewis was a man of Mill’s own age, equipped with similar precocious erudition, and of utilitarian sympathies. His book dealt with the relation of Edition: current; Page: [xvi ] logic to politics, a topic in which Mill was then too deeply interested to treat casually. Two years later he confessed to Carlyle that his review was an outgrowth from his own mind and the truest he had ever written—that is, it was no mere product of an orthodox utilitarian schooling. He commended Lewis’s attempt to bring a lucid logic into the language of politics, since slovenly thinking and equivocal words were together the bane of political discussion. But he took strong exception to certain points, of which the most important concerned rights. Lewis, following his teacher John Austin, argued that all rights are creations of law and the will of the sovereign.

To call anything a right which is not enforceable in the courts is an abuse of language. In contrast Mill emphasized the reality of moral rights.

He contended that, in saying that no man has a moral right to think as he pleases, for he ought to inform himself and think justly, Dr. Johnson refers to a right Lewis evidently fails to comprehend. Yet for Mill a right in the Johnsonian sense is no abuse of terms; it is good logic and good English.

Rights are the correlatives of obligations and duties, and moral as well as legal rights have a necessary and significant place in the contemporary state. It is a moral right of subjects to be well-governed and a moral duty of the sovereign to govern well. The focus of this criticism is the mischief inherent in unduly simplified and inflexible concepts. Mill reacts here against the rigidity of some utilitarian logicians. His further complaint concerned the apparent and unjustified contempt with which Lewis disposed of Locke and Rousseau for assuming an unhistorical and fictitious state of nature and a social contract.

Mill believed that it was inconsequential whether anything like a state of nature existed. The real issue was the extent to which as an hypothesis it shed light on the fact of a morality outside the law to which men could appeal. To Mill as to Locke such morality was important. Independent states in relations with one another remained in a state of nature, without a common superior, but responsive to moral obligations and duties. However unskilfully formulated, the old theories of the social contract and the inalienable rights of man in Mill’s opinion had a rightful place in the evolution of political liberty and justice by indicating a pragmatic limit on the power of the sovereign. He concluded his review of Lewis’s book by emphasizing the necessity of recognizing, despite all the linguistic differences, the close relationship between ideas of different political thinkers, and also the possibility of combining them into a whole. In reviewing Samuel Bailey’s Rationale of Political Representation, Mill in effect summarized his own ideas on the subject.

Sharing the views of the Sheffield Radical, he employed the book to illustrate what for him were the requisites of sound representative government. In his argument he reverted Edition: current; Page: [xvii ] to the cherished utilitarian dogma of his father that in politics it was essential to achieve the closest possible identification of interest between rulers and ruled. But this, he thought, was feasible only if decisions were made, not by the uninstructed multitude, but by a carefully selected body commanding special knowledge and techniques and accountable to the public. Strict accountability would help to ensure that rulers pursued the interests of the people rather than their own. Admittedly the task of overcoming the inbred chicanery and low cunning of politicians was difficult.

It could not be accomplished simply by institutional machinery without a massive and prolonged public enlightenment. His fear of a sudden flood of new and ignorant voters made him cautious about any rapid extension of the franchise: “no one is disposed,” he wrote, “to deny that we ought cautiously to feel our way, and watch well the consequences of each extension of the suffrage before venturing upon another” (32). (This and subsequent parenthetical references are to the text of the present edition.) This caution extended even to his favourite cause of women’s enfranchisement. Despite a passionate belief in female suffrage, he thought in 1835 that its public advocacy would serve no practical purpose (29n).

Although wary about changes in the franchise, Mill supported many reforms in political machinery in harmony with orthodox Philosophic Radicalism: the secret ballot, triennial parliaments, publicity for parliamentary proceedings, payment of members and their professionalization, reduction in the size of the House of Commons to render it more efficient, and the creation of strong local government which he assumed would reduce the burdens of the national parliament. He also proposed a radical change in the House of Lords to destroy it as a rigid barrier to reforms fashioned in the Commons.

He would abolish its hereditary principle and select its membership from the lower house. By such changes he hoped to transform Britain’s government from an aristocracy into a special kind of democracy led by an enlightened few. He said little about the enlightened few beyond emphasizing that they consist of those specially endowed with public spirit and educated to conduct a thoughtful direction of national affairs: the fittest persons whom the existing society could produce. He believed that since 1688 the landed aristocracy had governed England badly: it reflected the attitudes of unimaginative dilettantes incapable of the rigorous intellect that government needed, and it was fettered by its own enormous wealth and special privileges. Anxious to protect its own position, it could do little to bridge the chasm between the social classes, which increasingly endangered a Britain subject to the new powerful pressures of nineteenth-century industrialism. To Mill Edition: current; Page: [xviii ] its strength and effectiveness seemed inferior to those of the aristocracy of Prussia (23-4). Through his reform programme Mill hoped to create a new and independent ruling class of paid and professional parliamentarians freed from electoral pledges.

He believed that unpaid legislators and magistrates sustained the monopoly power of the aristocracy because aristocrats could usually afford to serve without pay (35). Among the Radicals the issue of pledges provoked acrimonious debate. In 1832 Mill had irritated some in arguing that, although in cases of constitutional change pledges might sometimes be justified, they were in general bad. “The sovereignty of the people,” he wrote, “is essentially a delegated sovereignty. Government must be performed by the few, for the benefit of the many....” The same view he repeated in the “Rationale of Representation,” contending that electors are obligated to select representatives fully qualified to form sound decisions on public matters. They must not expect that those they elect should act slavishly in parliament according to popular judgment any more than patients expect a physician to cure their ills according to their own chosen ideas of medicine (40). For Mill, pledges conflicted with the essence of representative government.

Voters were free to reward or punish, by re-election or rejection, a representative at the end of his term, but to shackle him from the outset with inflexible instructions would cripple his powers of initiative and responsibility. I have even ceased to think that a leisured class, in the ordinary sense of the term, is an essential constituent of the best form of society. What does seem to me essential is that society at large should not be overworked, nor over-anxious about the means of subsistence, for which we must look to the grand source of improvement, repression of population, combined with laws or customs of inheritance which shall favour the diffusion of property instead of its accumulation in masses. At this time Mill was working on his Principles of Political Economy, and the healing virtues of the stationary state were fresh and vivid in his mind. In his essay on the “State of Society in America” Mill expressed not merely some additional reflections on the American experiment, but also briefly raised questions on how environment determines a nation’s politics, how nations could benefit from one another’s experience through a science of comparative institutions, and how American society was judged by European observers in the doubtful light of their own prejudices, especially hostility to popular rule.

He was strongly convinced that the American form of democracy must be directly related to the special character of American society, moulded by a wide variety of forces: abundant natural wealth, a fast growing population, a remarkable opportunity for all classes to raise their standards of living, the absence of aggressive neighbours, the lack of a leisured class except in the southern states, and the inheritance of a language and culture from a parent nation three thousand miles away. Its experiment in politics was scarcely comprehensible apart from the interplay of these numerous influences, all of which, although seldom the product of government, impinged directly on government. They were not all favourable to the success of democracy. To Mill the United States was a classic demonstration of the intimate bonds between social circumstances and political forms.

Characteristic is the sentence: “High wages and universal reading are the two elements of democracy; where they co-exist, all government, except the government of public opinion, is impossible” (99). Mill held that the high premium on labour in North America meant that the common man was not merely well remunerated but also had to be consulted about his government. Likewise the general literacy of the Puritans, originally cherished as a means for reading Holy Writ, had become the invaluable medium for political and forensic debates whereby the Americans established and Edition: current; Page: [xxv ] sustained their freedoms. Thus with the strokes of a broad brush Mill explained to readers in the London Review American democracy in terms of environment, history, and social conditions. He may have provided an unduly simplified version of reality, but it was well calculated to correct the partisan bias of the many itinerant writers who came and went across the Atlantic. “CIVILIZATION” Mill’s long essay, “Civilization,” is closely related to those on America and the ideas of Tocqueville.

It reflects the same concern over certain profound changes then occurring or about to occur in society and their significance for the individual and his government. Alexander Bain thought Mill’s definition of civilization inadequate and much of his article merely a Philosophic Radical’s criticism of contemporary British society.

Mill explicitly restricted use of the term to institutions and practices different from those of the savage. “Whatever be the characteristics of what we call savage life,” he wrote, “the contrary of these, or the qualities which society puts on as it throws off these, constitute civilization” (120). A modern anthropologist may be even less likely than Bain to feel satisfied with this definition. Yet whatever its deficiency it in no way hampered Mill in discussing that in which he was principally interested—certain aspects of contemporary Britain on which he had strong opinions. He advocated reform in many established institutions, ideas, and prejudices.

He recognized that in every country civilization exhibits ill as well as salutary traits, and both he scrutinized. Civilized men, unlike savages, have clustered in great and fixed concentrations, acted together in large bodies for common purposes, and proceeded from one material achievement to another.

They have created populous cities, developed specialized industries, accepted fully the division of labour, expanded channels of trade, improvised techniques of production, and applied science to the cultivation of the soil. Thus they have augmented their material comforts and satisfactions as well as their pleasures in social intercourse.

Mill welcomed the general results of this onward thrust of civilization, but was disturbed by some of its features, and especially by the passing of power increasingly from individuals and small groups of individuals to the masses, whose importance grew while that of individuals shrank. The characteristic product of modern material civilization has been a mass society, which Mill no less than Tocqueville feared. “When the masses become powerful,” he wrote, “an individual, or a small band of Edition: current; Page: [xxvi ] individuals, can accomplish nothing considerable except by influencing the masses; and to do this becomes daily more difficult, from the constantly increasing number of those who are vying with one another to attract public attention” (126). Not the least interesting part of his essay is a sketch of the possible strategy whereby the literate and educated elements of the population might guide the masses or create a rival power to them.

He believed that an effective civilization is possible only through the capacity of individuals to combine for common ends. Combination, as in trade unions and benefit societies, had already made the workers more powerful. Combination and compromise also could enlarge the influence of the literate middle class, demolish old barriers between all classes, and extend the range of law and justice. Cichowicz Trumpet Flow Studies Pdf Files. English educational institutions were imperfectly organized for their task, and he feared the advent of democracy before the people were sufficiently educated and ready to shoulder their responsibilities. He censured the ancient English universities for failing to make the present rulers grasp what had to be done in reform to avoid the worst features of mass domination. Smackdown Vs Raw 2008 Download Free. In pursuing narrow sectarian ends, as in the exclusion of Dissenters, the universities were ignoring political realities.

They must moreover extend their scope to serve a larger proportion of the population, and at the same time sponsor more through research in the manner of the German universities. In his targets for criticism Mill included the Established Church. For this ancient instrument of national religion and culture he had little reverence, partly because he was not a believer, and partly because its intimate alliance with the aristocracy had bolstered conservative forces hostile to reform.

Evident throughout his essay is what Matthew Arnold called Mill’s insensitivity to religion, especially dogmatic religion. On this subject he was explicit: “The principle itself of dogmatic religion, dogmatic morality, dogmatic philosophy, is what requires to be rooted out” (144). For him the Establishment in particular was too sectarian, too protective of its own institutional monopoly, and too much a prop of the existing social order. With satisfaction he witnessed the shrinkage of its power as other religious bodies secured a greater public freedom. In 1829 he described to Gustave d’Eichthal the immense significance of Catholic emancipation. “It forms an era in civilization.

It is one of those great events, which periodically occur, by which the institutions of a country are brought into harmony with the better part of the mind of that country....” He was gratified that the Established Edition: current; Page: [xxvii ] Church and its ally the aristocracy had suffered a defeat, for he felt the emancipation had dealt a fatal blow in general to exclusion from political rights on grounds of religion. As a sequel to this event, Mill was inclined in the early 1830s to predict an imminent collapse of the power of the Church. Here his perception failed him. He greatly underestimated the Church’s resilience, vitality, and capacity for change and survival, as he also misunderstood the human feelings that helped to sustain it. In turning from the general aspects of contemporary civilization to its moral effects. Mill generalized freely about the imponderables in individual conduct.

He thought that civilization relaxed individual energy and tended to focus it within the narrow sphere of the individual’s money-getting pursuits. He believed that in the civilized milieu the individual received so many elements of security and protection for himself, family, and property, that he depended less on his own unaided initiatives and exertions. This profound change in man’s spirit and temper was illustrated in all phases of society, including literature and the arts, which now tended to lose their older distinct and enduring standards. As literacy spread, good literature diminished.

The influence of superior minds over the multitude weakened. “The individual,” wrote Mill, “becomes so lost in the crowd, that though he depends more and more upon opinion, he is apt to depend less and less upon well-grounded opinion; upon the opinion of those who know him.

An established character becomes at once more difficult to gain, and more easily to be dispensed with” (132). In Mill’s view it was now only in small communities that the valuable influence of public opinion could be demonstrated.

In discussing the advance of civilization Mill attempted no confident and systematic balance-sheet of gains and losses for mankind. In his own age of transition he evidently felt that his chief task as a utilitarian reformer was to concentrate on augmenting the gains and minimizing the losses in the best way possible. To this end his reformist recommendations were directed. MATURE VIEWS, 1840-73 two related themes dominated Mill’s political thought from 1840 to his death: the invention and maintenance of institutions that would efficiently express the sanction of citizens for what rulers did in their name; and the appropriate role of the state in furthering human betterment in a Britain hurrying deeper into the industrial age. On the first theme his Considerations on Representative Government summarized most of his thinking over many years and became his chief classic in political science, providing a practical and liberal guide to nineteenth-century man searching for stable and competent government.

On his second theme, however, Mill produced no equivalent single volume, although of cardinal importance were his On Liberty and his Principles of Political Economy in its successive editions. Illuminating also on this subject are his occasional writings and speeches, especially those on Ireland. In the last century some Englishmen viewed Ireland as a social laboratory where it was necessary to try special experiments not tolerable at home. Mill in particular was ready to enlarge greatly the agenda of government to combat Ireland’s indigenous and lingering poverty. CIVIL SERVICE REFORM In the seven years before Considerations on Representative Government appeared, Mill produced some papers that foreshadowed the arguments in Edition: current; Page: [xxix ] his major essay.

First in time was the submission, requested by Sir Charles Trevelyan, then Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, which strongly commended the Northcote-Trevelyan Report for advocating the recruitment of civil servants, not by the casual methods of political patronage, but by open competitive examinations. For Mill this genuine reform harmonized with his long-held conviction that representative government could be efficient only if conducted by the country’s best-educated and orderly minds. On reading the report he quickly dispatched a characteristic comment to Harriet: “it is as direct, uncompromising, & to the point, without reservation, as if we had written it.” Apart from placing administration under the control of competent and professional officials, he hoped that the new mode of recruitment would strengthen existing political institutions by opening public positions to the competition of all classes and persons, thus diminishing the traditional sway of the aristocracy and privileged classes.

This in turn, he thought, would extend intellectual cultivation and encourage talented individuals. Sir Charles Trevelyan, an unshakably determined man, was not content simply to submit a report. To overcome troublesome opposition he carefully primed the press, solicited the opinions of influential individuals likely to support it (Mill being one), and printed them in a special blue book, Papers on the Reorganisation of the Civil Service.

Yet his effort won little immediate success. The proposals were bitterly resisted, and their supporters had to be content with piecemeal reforms until their final triumph under Gladstone in 1870. PARLIAMENTARY REFORM It is evident from Mill’s correspondence that throughout the 1850s he thought frequently about the contentious issue of parliamentary reform. The outcome was a pamphlet and a major article, both published in 1859: Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform and “Recent Writers on Reform.” The first of these was largely written in 1853 with subsequent revisions and additions.

In it he argued that since the Reform Bill British opinion had profoundly changed. A new and restless public came to believe that a further improvement in parliamentary representation was a national necessity. An unremitting trial of strength between the progressive and stationary forces confronted all party leaders, who were compelled to recognize that out of Edition: current; Page: [xxx ] the ceaseless dialectic of debate change must come. For them the main issue was its extent and timing. In the light of this situation, Mill in his pamphlet attempted to formulate his own electoral programme in seven main proposals: grouping of small boroughs into districts, gradual steps to universal male and female suffrage, electioneering reform to free candidates from expenses amounting to a burdensome property qualification, a minimal educational requirement for the franchise, plural voting based on educational attainments, representation of minorities through the cumulative vote, and rejection of the ballot, which had not yet become a part of British electoral law. Some of these topics naturally figured more prominently in public discussion than others, and it is needless here to examine Mill’s arguments on all of them.

His proposal to protect the views of minorities through the cumulative vote became obsolete a month after the publication of Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, with the appearance of Thomas Hare’s Election of Representatives. Hare’s book, discussed below, promptly convinced Mill.

In March 1859 he enthusiastically wrote to its author: “You appear to me to have exactly, and for the first time, solved the difficulty of popular representation; and by doing so, to have raised up the cloud of gloom and uncertainty which hung over the futurity of representative government and therefore of civilization.” Henceforth he was committed to Hare’s scheme of electoral reform, with its preferential and transferable vote, calculated quota, and transformation of the country into a single constituency. To him it seemed the best protection for minorities that parliament could provide. Mill’s proposals in Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform had in the preceding years evolved through prolonged discussions with his wife, who then greatly influenced his thinking.

His suggested educational qualification for the franchise, and his rejection of the secret ballot provoked much controversy. On the first of these, he argued that a minimal education test must accompany a universal franchise. In view of the high value he consistently placed on a trained intelligence, he found it impossible to accept the equality of educated and uneducated electors. If it is asserted that all persons ought to be equal in every description of right recognized by society, I answer, not until all are equal in worth as human beings. It is the fact, that one person is not as good as another; and it is reversing all the rules of rational conduct, to attempt to raise a political fabric on a supposition which is at variance with fact Putting aside for the present the consideration of moral worth,...

A person who cannot read, is not as good, for the purpose of human life, as one who can. (323.) Taking off from a premise that rejected the old radical dogma of “one man one vote,” Mill argued that all adult men and women who passed an Edition: current; Page: [xxxi ] education test should be enfranchised, but those with superior training should receive plural or extra voting power, even to the extent of some individuals having three or more votes. In this Mill’s logic may have been impeccable, but the political practicability of his proposal was a different matter. The passion for equality that Tocqueville saw as part and parcel of the democratic movement was unlikely to render possible the kind of voting that Mill described. He himself appeared to have doubts. In the same year he admitted to John Elliot Cairnes that his proposal for plural voting on the basis of intellectual qualification was intended “not as an immediately practical measure but as a standard of theoretical excellence.” Yet on the same matter he commented to Alexander Bain: “One must never suppose what is good in itself to be visionary because it may be far off....

We must remember too that the numerical majority are not the politically strongest force yet. The point to be decided is, how much power is to be yielded to them; & justice always affords the best basis for a compromise, which even if only temporary may be eminently useful.” On the issue of the ballot, Mill in Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform publicly expressed for the first time his volte-face from a position stoutly held in the 1830s. In the earlier period, he, like other Philosophic Radicals, had extolled the ballot as scarcely less important than an extended franchise in overthrowing the ruling oligarchy in Britain.

Without it the franchise might mean little. For him and his associates it became virtually a symbol of their radicalism. Secret voting, once established, was expected to demolish the political power of the aristocracy and privileged classes, and hence open the road for the march of the Radical party. It would protect tenants from coercion by landlords, customers from coercion by shopkeepers and vice versa, employees from coercion by employers, and the general public from coercion by miscellaneous and often sinister interests of every kind.

It would benefit the people in that comprehensive way so dear to the Radicals. In 1837 Mill told Tocqueville with simplistic assurance that with the ballot “reform will have finally triumphed: the aristocratical principle will be completely annihilated, & we shall enter into a new era of government.” He then believed that in the country there was a deep radicalism which without the ballot was repressed. Two years later, in a letter to John M.

Kemble, he wrote in more moderate terms, but still considered the ballot essential for the success of the radical cause. In defending his change of mind in the 1850s, Mill argued that when earlier he and the Philosophic Radicals had first advocated the ballot they were justified by the circumstances of the time. Many voters were then artfully manipulated by landlords and employers, and unable to declare their Edition: current; Page: [xxxii ] real convictions in an open election. Twenty-five years later, however, the conditions were different. No longer were the rich the masters of the country. The middle classes and workers were less subservient to those above them, felt their own strength, and resented attempts by others to coerce them.

In the larger electorates the real evil now lay in the selfish partialities of the voter himself, which reduced his concern for the general interest. Open voting, Mill thought, might best correct this egocentric attitude, foster a wholesome sense of public responsibility, and emphasize the vote as a trust for which the voter was accountable to the community. Social circumstances had unquestionably changed, but for most Liberals the changes had failed to diminish the practical advantages of the ballot as a means for moderating the influences of wealth and power. Mill and his wife thus fell singularly out of step with the main army of reformers, who persistently advocated this change until its final triumph under Gladstone in 1872. Competent studies of the electoral system in this period seem to support the practical utility of the ballot. The few remaining active Philosophic Radicals, like George Grote and Francis Place, deplored Mill’s change of view.

Place, often critical of Mill, was specially irritated by his pronounced shift of opinion on the ballot. “If James Mill,” he wrote bitterly, “could have anticipated that his son John Stuart should preach so abominable a heresy... He would have cracked his skull..