of Europe had lived in caverns and eaten each other! We are sick, it seems, like the children of Israel, of the objects of our old and legitimate worship. We pine for a new idolatry. All that is costly and all that is ornamental in our intellectual treasures must be delivered up and cast into the furnace-and there comes out this Calf.' (Edin. Rev., vol. xlix. p. 185.)

Whatever may have been the worth of the Idol, James Mill was prepared to offer his own son up to it, and setting himself in resolute opposition to the traditions of mankind, he attempted to force that young and powerful mind into the same grooves and fetters which had made life to himself so poor a thing. Happily he did not altogether succeed; and it is the dawn and progress of brighter and nobler sentiments in John Mill, who gradually grew into direct antagonism to many of his father's most cherished dogmas, which give to this narrative of his life so peculiar a charm. But the crisis and the struggle nearly killed him, and the cruel process of distortion to which he had been subjected from his infancy left its mark on him to the end. But before we reach this crisis in his life and fate, it is proper to advert to the progress John Stuart Mill had made in the world, and the position he had acquired. These, to a man of his tastes, devoted to speculative inquiries, were all that could be desired. In 1823, when he was seventeen years of age, he obtained a junior appointment in the Examiners' Office of the East India Company, under his own father, with the understanding that he was to be employed in preparing drafts of despatches. Eventually he became the chief conductor of the correspondence with India in the department of Native States, and at last head of the department. Nothing could be more fortunate for a political philosopher than such an office. It afforded him an honourable subsistence, without the wear and tear of professional life; and it left him absolutely free to devote a large portion of his time and talents to literary pursuits. We have no doubt that John Stuart Mill discharged his duties at the India House with ability and conscientiousness. But very little has ever been known about it. Hardly anything in his published writings indicates any familiar acquaintance with the affairs of India. When in Parliament, he did not speak on Indian subjects, though, probably, no other man in the House had spent thirty-five years of his life in dealing with them. And whatever may have been the opinions of his father and himself on the regeneration of the governments of Europe, it is certain that they remained for the greater part of their lives the instruments and advisers of one of the most absolute governments which ever existed

a government, too, which was in standing contradiction to the elder Mill's fundamental political principles. He had laid it down as an axiom that the government of the Few must ever be based on injustice to the Many, because, by the laws of human nature, every power will invariably stretch its forces as much as it can, and use them for its own exclusive advantage. On that ground he condemned monarchy, he condemned aristocracy, he condemned classes. The government of India was obnoxious to all his censures-it had the authority of an absolute sovereign, it had the exclusiveness of a close corporation, it had the strongest class distinctions-those of religion and colour. Yet Mr. Mill always contended-and not without reason-that few governments have ever existed which paid more attention to the welfare of the governed. He was himself one of its Ministers. Therefore, in active life, his conduct was a direct refutation of his doctrine that by the laws of human nature, all governments will get all they can for their own exclusive advantage. On what ground, then, could Mill refuse, as of necessity, to other governments of a monarchical or aristocratic form the merits he claimed for the government of India? The fact is that both the Mills, father and son, in the government of India, were by no means rash innovators. They belonged to the old school of Indian administration, which was highly conservative, not to say obstructive; and one of the bitterest sentences in the volume now before us is that in which John Stuart Mill expresses his regret at the transfer of the government of India from the Company to the Crown. He does, indeed, claim for his father, as a mere hors d'œuvre, that he was the originator of all sound statesmanship in regard to India rather a strong claim on behalf of a contemporary and subordinate servant of a host of great Indian rulers. But he was himself the chief manager of the resistance made by the Company to their own extinction, and nothing could change his opinion as to the folly and mischief of that ill-considered 'change.' So strangely are the judgments even of Utilitarian philosophers affected by their habits and feelings! Had Mill not been a servant of the East India Company it is impossible to doubt that he would have denounced it as one of the most odious of monopolies and close corporations, which held in subjection and bondage tens of millions of the human race.

In the same year, 1823, Mr. Bentham resolved to establish at his own cost a Quarterly Review, which has now subsisted for fifty years under the well-known appellation of the Westminster,' as the organ of the most advanced opinions of the Utilitarian school. We learn with regret that even in the

most successful days of our contemporary, its existence could only be prolonged by large pecuniary sacrifices on the part of its projectors. Mr. Bentham, Sir William Molesworth, Sir John Bowring, and others, were all freely laid under contribution; and many of the leading writers in this ambitious periodical were always content to work as volunteers, for the glory of their own opinions. It is not denied that a favourite portion of the scheme was that part of the work should be 'devoted to reviewing the other Reviews '-the phrase is Mr. Mill's, or we should apologise for so clumsy an expression; and it was, therefore, natural that Mill senior should lead the attack by a tremendous onslaught on ourselves. For this purpose, he resorted to the ingenious device of compelling his son to read through all the volumes of the Edinburgh,' which amounted at that time to about forty. The result was an article, which is described as one of the most striking of all his writings.

'He began by an analysis of the tendencies of periodical literature in general; pointing out, that it cannot, like books, wait for success, but must succeed immediately, or not at all, and is hence almost certain to profess and inculcate the opinions already held by the public to which it addresses itself, instead of attempting to rectify or improve those opinions. He next, to characterise the position of the "Edinburgh "Review" as a political organ, entered into a complete analysis, from the Radical point of view, of the British Constitution. He held up to notice its thoroughly aristocratic character: the nomination of a majority of the House of Commons by a few hundred families; the entire identification of the more independent portion, the county members, with the great landowners; the different classes whom this narrow oligarchy was induced, for convenience, to admit to a share of power; and finally, what he called its two props, the Church, and the legal profession. He pointed out the natural tendency of an aristocratic body of this composition, to group itself into two parties, one of them in possession of the executive, the other endeavouring to supplant the former and become the predominant section by the aid of public opinion, without any essential sacrifice of the aristocratical predominance. He described the course likely to be pursued, and the political ground occupied, by an aristocratic party in opposition, coquetting with popular principles for the sake of popular support. He showed how this idea was realised in the conduct of the Whig party, and of the "Edinburgh Review" as its chief literary organ. . . So formidable an attack on the Whig party and policy had never before been made; nor had so great a blow been ever struck, in this country, for Radicalism; nor was there, I believe, any living person capable of writing that article, except my father.'

As half a century has elapsed since we sustained this attack, we may be pardoned for remarking that it had escaped our

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recollection. But as far as Mill senior is concerned, we do not think that we owe him anything in the form of castigation. He probably accepted Mr. Macaulay's article on his Essay ' on Government' as a full discharge of all claims of that nature. But since the matter is now revived by the junior partner in the firm, who seems also to have fleshed his virgin sword by a further attack upon us in the Westminster Review,' No. II., we must bestow on it a passing notice. The truth is that nothing can be more flattering to ourselves than the view our opponents took of our principles. They asserted that the Edinburgh Review' is the chief literary organ of the Whig party; and that the Whig party absolutely realised the idea of the British Constitution, which is government by institutions in the main aristocratic. Let then the Review,' the Whig party, and the British Constitution stand or fall together. If we are to understand by the word aristocratic' that which it really means, the government of the best, we accept the charge. Yes; we desire to see the government of the country carried on by those who most faithfully represent the intelligence, the property, and the highest honour and culture of the nation: we desire to see it carried on by men who look to the interests of the whole community and not to those of a class: we believe that the true liberty and progress of the people owe infinitely more to the gradual and measured advance of the leaders of the Whig party than to the wild schemes and agitation of pure democracy; and if we wish to measure the progress of countries in which the aristocratic element has been eliminated and destroyed, we have only to contrast the state of France and Spain at the. present moment with our own. The Whig theory of aristocracy is not that of a close nobility, or of a body propped up by the privilege of birth, but of an aristocracy open to the whole intelligence of the country through the four great avenues of civil service, military service, the Church, and the Bar, and indeed extending in its minor ramifications throughout the educated classes of the nation. The true basis of the British aristocracy is merit, for the great majority of peerages have been bestowed originally on men of ability, but merit conferring hereditary distinctions and influence. We agree with Mr. Mill that the British Constitution has rested for the last two centuries mainly on institutions of this nature; and the gradual process of evolution by which our system of government has adjusted itself to the growing wants of society, is the very opposite of the process of revolution, which overturns the structure of society itself. The author of this volume acknowledges that

Macaulay's article gave him much to think about, and he was not at all satisfied with the mode in which his father met those criticisms. He began to think that there must be something fundamentally erroneous in his father's conception of philosophical method, as applied to politics: though by a most singular process of abstract reasoning he satisfied himself that both Macaulay and his father were wrong, and that politics must, after all, be a deductive science (p. 159-60). Deductive or not, where in all history could he find a more glorious example of freedom and of progress, than the condition of these islands, for nearly two centuries of unbroken order? What other land has been blessed for two hundred years with an exemption from the curse of revolution and civil war, whilst the course of beneficial change and improvement has been equally steady and unbroken? These are results which it suited Mr. Mill to denounce, for they are based on principles of government which he derided and denied. For ourselves, we are not ashamed to say that we adhere to them with greater firmness than ever.

The share of the younger Mill in the Westminster Review' was considerable for about five years; though we now learn with surprise that the periodical organ of Benthamism was from the first extremely unsatisfactory to those whose opinions it was supposed to represent. When Mr. Mill claims for it a distinguished part in resisting the reaction that followed the war, manifested in the Holy Alliance and the Six Acts, and in advocating Public Economy, Catholic Emancipation, Free Trade, and Law Reform, we must take the liberty to observe that on all these questions the hated organ of aristocratic government had anticipated the philosophers of Queen Square by several years. His sketch of his fellow-contributors, John and Charles Austin, Roebuck, Bingham, and others, is at once just and graphic-of himself he says modestly enough:

'I conceive that the description so often given of a Benthamite, as a mere reasoning machine, though extremely inapplicable to most of those who have been designated by that title, was during two or three years of my life not altogether untrue of me. It was perhaps as applicable to me as it can well be to anyone just entering into life, to whom the common objects of desire must in general have at least the attraction of novelty. There is nothing very extraordinary in this fact: no youth of the age I then was, can be expected to be more than one thing, and this was the thing I happened to be. 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