MR. J. S. MILL.
IT J. J. S. MILL does not seem anxious for any opportu- 111 nity to resume the Parliamentary duties which his defeat at Westminster has interrupted, and it does not seem very likely that he will again enter Parliament. In truth, he was never very well fitted for a representative. Discriminate as we will between the delegate and the representative, no system of representation could possibly hold long in any State without tending, either consciously or unconsciously, to conform the expressed views of the majority of the deputies more closely to the opinions of their constituents than Mr. Mill's expressed views have been conformed to those of his constituents. As Mr. Malleson very justly observes, Mr. Mill has apparently almost gone out of his way on purpose to assure himself that he was not suppressing in deference to his con- stituents on the eve of an election a single word or action, which he might have thought good to say or do if he had had the full liberty of private life. There is great chivalry and nobility in such conduct, no doubt, but it is simply impos- sible for it to be without a repellent effect on any great body of electors. In fact, representation would soon come to lose its meaning, if constituencies simply elected, without any refer- ence to agreement in political convictions, the men whom they deemed of the highest general calibre of mind and character. Many of Mr. Mill's former supporters no doubt thought that after his subscription to Mr. Bradlaugh, his enthusiastic moral obeisance to Mr. Chadwick, and his passionate defence of women's electoral claims, they had less in common with him, even though he would have supported Mr. Gladstone, and advocated the abolition of the Irish Church, than with Mr. Smith, even though he will support Mr. Disraeli, and maintain that Church. If they did think so,—and many doubtless did,—it was quite natural and justifiable for them to vote against him, as Mr. Mill himself would probably admit. A political individuality so complex, so angular, so sharply defined, and so unusual as Mr. Mill's is not the stuff of which a representative is made. Distinguished men must be distin- guished either for their power of expressing popular opinions, or at the very least for gifts which are not inconsistent with those popular opinions, if they are to represent popular opinions. It would scarcely have been more surprising if the Liberal electors of Westminster had been willing to endure all Mr. Mill's political peculiarities,—emphatically and almost sorely insisted upon, as they were, on the very eve of the elections,—than if theLiverynien of London had elected Brother Ignatius to the Mayoralty after his dissertations in favour of poverty, austerity, and celibacy, and against wealth, luxury, and comfortable firesides.
What impression does Mr. J. S. Mill's brief but distin- guished Parliamentary career leave upon us, now that it is probably closed ? First of all, it was the career of a bitter intel- lectual foe to political conventionality of every kind,—of a man whose standard was ideal,—who assumed nothing on the authority of mere custom,—and who was never daunted by any array of conventional authorities against him. He began his Parliamentary career by a trenchant duel with Mr. Lowe on the Cattle Plague Indemnity Bill, in which, while beaten in numbers by " the fine brute votes" of the country gentlemen, he was undoubtedly absolutely victorious in argument. He supported in a fine little speech an attempt to diminish the National Debt by an argument which was even more exalte than the policy it recommended, being founded on the dreamy assumption that posterity has, in some sense, actually done far us all the good that we may have done in anticipation of their gratitude and regard. He tried to make the Conservatives of the House see that they must necessarily be incapable of appreciating the improvements which might follow Reform, by virtue of the very fact that they did not desire Reform,—an effort to get the thin end of the intellectual wedge into their minds which, we need not say, was far less likely to succeed and far less fruitful of success, than other men's clumsier attempts to insert the thick end of the wedge. " Sir, we, all of us know that we hold erroneous opinions, but we do 'not know which of our opinions these are, for if we did, they would not be our opinions." (We wonder how many of Mr. Mill's hearers really grasped the full force of the powerful intellectual solvent of prejudice contained in that one sentence.) At a later stage of the Reform question he identified himself with the Minority principle, and with the right of women to a share in the suffrage. He early adopted and tenaciously pursued the most rigid view of Mr. Eyre's grave administrative sins, pressing his prosecution for murder, though that neces- sarily appeared to the people at large to mean something very different from what it meant in the eye of the law, and some- thing different even from that of which Mr. Mill himself pro- bably deems Mr. Eyre guilty. On the Irish Land Question he took a view, strictly economical indeed, and recommended by large historical considerations, but yet one which it requires some boldness even in a newspaper to advocate. And to all these marked political peculiarities of view, he added a curious eagerness to beard popular opinion on delicate though less public questions, by subscribing to the election expenses, not merely of an avowed atheist, but of one who was known for his utter disregard of the religious feelings of others ; and by censuring a Whig of doubtful party fidelity, and recom- mending the most doctrinaire man in England in his place,—a man who is said, but we cannot believe it even of him, to have recommended the burning of the dead as gaslights. Whatever Mr. Mill's faults have been, undoubtedly Parlia- ment will lose in him the most trenchant and the moat intellectual foe to political conventionality, who has perhaps ever sat in an English Parliament at all.
And yet the impression left upon us by Mr. Mill's Parlia- mentary career is by no means that of a man whose intellect was unaffected, or even slightly affected, by the agitated world into which it was plunged. Though we recognize a far more distinctly intellectual foundation for Mr. Mill's opinions than for Mr. Bright's,—(we are by no means certain, by the way, that the best foundation for truth of opinions is one purely intellectual),—we believe Mr. Bright to have been infinitely less moved, less affected, by the sphere of political excitement in which he has moved, than Mr. Mill. We do not know, indeed, any single view of Mr. Mill's, except his view on the danger of democracy, which has been essentially affected by the necessity of party strife. But what has been essentially affected has been his tone of mind, his style, his accentuation of different elements of thought, his range of view in con- ducting a discussion, his mode of treatment. This has not only become, we think, somewhat less judicial and more sensitive and dictatorial, since he entered Parliament, but increasingly so from session to session. His recent letters have been rather ipse-dixits than arguments. Take, for instance, the one on the least exciting of all subjects, —the treatment of professional criminals, — published in the Pall Mall on Tuesday. How positively he overrules, or seems to overrule, the most mature conclusions of Sir Walter Crofton, without even meeting or discussing them, without advancing more than the merest shadow of a very well- worn and often repeated argument against them. Or take even his rather sharp epigrammatic rebuke of the women whom he wishes to enfranchise, for their prejudices in favour of the white caste and against the negro, to the effect that the sympathies of the women of England on this question have " afforded one more evidence that the renunciation of masculine intelligence gives no security for womanly kindness." Is that not rather assuming that, if women had had masculine intelligence, they could only have arrived at one conclusion,—and this in spite of the notorious sympathy of the exceedingly masculine intelli- gence of the land to which he was writing, Scotland, for Mr. Eyre and his policy of risking the wholesale slaughter of negroes rather than the most infinitesimal danger to the whites ? Surely political struggle has made Mr. Mill's intellectual tone more arbitrary and less dispassionate, has given some soreness, shrillness, and dictatorialness to his manner, and diminished perceptibly the peculiar weight of his style—which arises from its wide and exhaustive survey. In- tellectual discussion of the first order has deteriorated in some of his recent writings and speeches into controversy of the second order, mingled with reproaches of a less weighty order still.
That Mr. Mill was a great accession to the strength of Par- liament at a certain sacrifice of personal power and calmness, or, to put it in other words, that he will be a very great loss to Parliament, but that the loss will be compensated by a certain amount of gain to himself and the general public, is the general impression which his Parliamentary career leaves upon us. No man, now he is gone, will be likely to review great political questions with so single an eye to the intellectual and moral bearings of the subjects to be discussed, and so complete a disregard of the momentary possibilities of the situation,—nay, it is perhaps part of Mr. Mill's weakness that he has shown even more than dispassionate disregard of the possibilities of the situation, something even of anger and irritation against that poverty of popular resource which so terribly limits those possibilities. It cannot, however, but be an immense loss to the deliberative power of Parliament to lose the one man who was not influenced by,—who earnestly and even aeriminiously struggled against,—the timidity and poverty of public opinion, who was capable of discussing a large policy without painfully choosing his steps so as to avoid annoying powerful interests, who could see the narrow public feeling of the moment with something of the pity and surprise with which it may be regarded centuries hence by dispassionate historians.
One question more we cannot help asking,—and that is, how Mr. Mill's political career will bear on the philosophical cause% of which he is the representative,—in ethics, utilitarianism,— in metaphysics, the sceptical school which rejects all but experience ? Doubtless it will tend to popularize them by the proof of that—which, indeed, to well-informed men, needed no proof,—that the rigid Utilitarian may be one of the most chivalrous of politicians ; that the representative of the Experience-philosophy may assign infinitely more importance to sentiment, and express the most generous sentiments with more depth and ardour, than plenty of the representatives of what are called " higher " schools of thought. We believe no one who has watched Mr. Mill's political career could for a moment attribute essential frigidity to the empirical and Utilitarian school of thought. We suspect, however, that to more thoughtful critics the impression produced by Mr. Mill's political achievements will not be favourable to his philosophy, though it will be to his individual nature. There has been a straining after laying frail and fancy foundations for obvious duties,—as in the example we referred to before of Mr. Mill's insisting on the obligations we owe to posterity, in considera- tion of what posterity, though it does not yet exist, has done for us,—which seems to imply a mind anything but satisfied with the solidity of its own philosophical foundations, and bent on refining them away into glittering cobwebs. So far from discrediting the utilitarian and empirical philosophy by diffusing the notion of its vulgarity, Mr. Mill's public life has tended to injure it on the exactly opposite ground,—that he him- self so seems to distrust the natural bases and roots of his own doctrines that he cannot help straining after artificially manu- factming them into somethingfar airier than any idealism, some- thing less tangible than any theology. The subtlety of Mr. Mill's political assumptions, the elaborate disguises under which he has been wont to present his own fundamental principles, are by no means a surprise to the students of his books ; but they will tend to sow in thoughtful critics of his career a distrust of the philosopher, while they inspire a sincere admiration for the man. A thinker who spins utilitarianism and sensa- tionalism into highly visionary and idealistic forms of thought, is scarcely likely to be the more trusted as a thinker, for his power of transformation.
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