very well. James Mill, also a reformer up against wickedness in high places, was impressed by the same thing. Hence this important doctrine of the utilitarian psychology. It was useful as a psychological principle; it simplified explanation because it gave one universal motive in place of many different motives; and the Utilitarians found it unpleasantly and persistently true in their experience. It came to be a central element, not only in their psychology, but in their economic and political theory.

But in spite of this theoretical individualism, and in spite of their zeal for reform, the Utilitarians had no real interest in individuals as individuals. With interest in personality there has always seemed to go a certain warmth and freedom and enthusiasm, and this the Utilitarians studiously avoided. There was no warmth and fire about them. John Stuart Mill says of his father:

"For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. "The intense' was with him a bye-word of scornful disapprobation."

With this there seems to have gone a certain coldness and aloofness in dealing with other people. Place, who had been seeing much of Mill and his family, writes of him in his diary, "He could help the mass, but he could not help the individual, not even himself or his own.' What interest they had in liberty had nothing to do with the development of personality. Liberty had an insignificant place in Bentham's system. For the happiness of the body politic, he says, are necessary "subsistence, abundance, equality, and security." Liberty is a "branch of security; personal liberty is security against a certain species of injury which affects the person, political liberty is security against injustice of members of

J. S. Mill, Autobiography, P. 49.

the government. ." To be able to look ahead and count on the future with some degree of confidence, is essential if people are to be industrious, thrifty, and saving, and if commerce is to be possible. In order to bring about security, the Government creates rights, which it confers upon individuals.

"To these rights correspond offenses of all classes. The law cannot create rights without creating the corresponding obligations. It cannot create rights and obligations without creating offenses. It can neither command nor prohibit without restraining the liberty of individuals. The citizen, therefore, cannot acquire any right without sacrificing part of his liberty."

"Every law is contrary to liberty.” *

"All government is only a tissue of "acrifices."

II.

It was in this tradition that John Stuart Mill was brought up. His father and Jeremy Bentham set themselves to educate him in such a way that, as Mill wrote Bentham, "we may perhaps leave him a successor worthy of both of us." The story of this schooling is familiar and need not be recounted here. After a strenuous course of study with his father at home, the younger Mill, at the age of fourteen, went to spend fourteen months with Sir Samuel Bentham, brother of Jeremy, in Southern France. He came back to England in July, 1821. The following year he read the story of the French Revolution and also Bentham's philosophy in the shape of Dumont's Traité de Législation. The reading of these books came at a critical time, and taken together had a powerful effect on his imagination. The story of the French Revolution filled him with zeal for the Revolutionary cause, and Bentham's work seemed to give him

• Bentham, Works, Vol. I. p. 302.

་ Bentham, Works, p. 302. Bentham, Works, p. 301. Bentham, Works, p. 313.

precisely what was needed on the positive side, the basis for a program of reform. Says Mill:

"When I laid down the last volume of the Traité I had become a different being. The 'principle of utility' understood as Bentham understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conceptions of things. I 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. And I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the condition of mankind through that doctrine."

He had an "object in life." It was to be a "reformer of the world."

99 20

In March, 1824, appeared the first number of the Westminster Review, the hope and the despair of the Benthamites. It contained, among other articles, James Mill's attack on the Edinburgh Review. In the second number John Stuart Mill tries his weapons against the same enemy. This article, and those that immediately follow it, are characterized by an uncompromising, uncritical, and juvenile Benthamism, coupled with a merciless attack on the weak points of the adversaries of Utilitarianism. Writing of this period of his life in the Autobiography, after summing up the opinions of James Mill and his friends, John Stuart Mill says:

"These various opinions were seized on with youthful fanaticism by the little knot of young men of whom I was one; and we put into them a sectarian spirit, from which, in intention at least, my father was wholly free. Ambition and desire of distinction I had in abundance; and zeal for what I thought the good of mankind was my strongest sentiment, mixing with and colouring all others. But my zeal was as yet little else, at that period of my life, than zeal for speculative opinions. It had not its root in genuine benevolence, or sympathy with mankind;

though these qualities held their due place in my ethical standard."

Ample illustrations of this are found in the early Westminster Review articles. Hear, for example, the Mill of these years on "Liberty," in the above mentioned article on the Edinburgh Review:

“Liberty, another favourite word with the Edinburgh Review, is equally suited with the word 'constitution,' to the ends of compromise. Liberty, in its original sense, means freedom from restraint. in this sense, every law, and every rule of morals, is contrary to liberty. A despot, who is entirely emancipated from both, is the only person whose freedom of action is complete. A measure of government, therefore, is not necessarily bad, because it is contrary to liberty; and to blame it for that reason, leads to confusion of ideas. But to create confusion of ideas, is essential to the purpose of those who have to persuade the people, that small abuses should be reformed, while great ones should remain untouched." 12

He had a typical early Utilitarian faith in the education of the masses as the road to social well-being:

"The attention of those who wish to see an amelioration in the condition of the great mass of mankind ought henceforth to be mainly directed to the means of communicating to all that which is now known only to a few. The principal difficulty is overcomethe road to happiness is discovered-no groping, no perplexing research, no hopeless, thankless toil is required—all that remains to be done is, to remove the obstacles which conceal that road from the view of those who are less fortunate than ourselves."

Again, in discussing an explanation in an article in the Edinburgh Review as to why the poor stopped sending their children to the Westminster Infant School where the payment of three pence a week was required, he says:

"But if he (the author of this article) means to insinuate that they refrain from sending their children to the school because

"J. S. Mill, Autobiography, p. 76.7. Westminster Review, Vol. 1. p. 509. Westminster Review, Vol. 4. p. 89.

they suspect the motives of the gentlemen who set it on foot, the absurdity is so palpable as scarcely to need a refutation. The idea that anyone, in determining whether he will avail himself of a proffered benefit, is influenced by any other considerations than, first whether it is really a benefit, and secondly, whether the cost does not exceed the advantage, almost provokes a laugh."

In the fourth number of the Westminster Mill has a review of a book on English History, by George Brodie. The review is largely an attack on Hume as an historian, and shows the young champion of Benthamism at his fiercest:

"Hume possessed powers of a very high order; but regard for truth formed no part of his character.... Hume may very possibly have been sincere. He may, perhaps, have been weak enough to believe that the pleasures and pains of one individual are of unspeakable importance, those of the many of no importance at all. But though it be possible to defend Charles I, and be an honest man, it is not possible to be an honest man, and defend him as Hume has done.

"A skillful advocate will never tell a lie, when suppressing the truth will answer his purpose; and if a lie must be told, he will rather, if he can, lie by insinuation than by direct assertion. In all the arts of a rhetorician, Hume was a master; and it would be a vain attempt to describe the systematic suppression of the truth which is exemplified in this portion of his history; and which, within the sphere of our reading, we have scarcely,

if ever, seen matched. Particular instances of this species of mendacity, Mr. Brodie has brought to light in abundance.” “

In 1825 Bentham asked the younger Mill to undertake the task of preparing for the press his notes on Evidence, which finally appeared in five volumes on the Rationale of Judicial Evidence. This work not only gave its editor considerable knowledge of English law, but had a marked influence on Mill's own style. The Westminster Review articles of 1825, 1826, and 1827 show an increasing maturity of thought and structure.

14 Westminster Review, Vol. 1. p. 520.