Autobiography by John Stuart Mill (easy books to read txt) 📖

for subsistence. Those who have to

support themselves by their pen must depend on literary drudgery, or at

best on writings addressed to the multitude; and can employ in the

pursuits of their own choice, only such time as they can spare from

those of necessity; which is generally less than the leisure allowed by

office occupations, while the effect on the mind is far more enervating

and fatiguing. For my own part I have, through life, found office duties

an actual rest from the other mental occupations which I have carried on

simultaneously with them. They were sufficiently intellectual not to be

a distasteful drudgery, without being such as to cause any strain upon

the mental powers of a person used to abstract thought, or to the labour

of careful literary composition. The drawbacks, for every mode of life

has its drawbacks, were not, however, unfelt by me. I cared little for

the loss of the chances of riches and honours held out by some of the

professions, particularly the bar, which had been, as I have already

said, the profession thought of for me. But I was not indifferent to

exclusion from Parliament, and public life: and I felt very sensibly the

more immediate unpleasantness of confinement to London; the holiday

allowed by India House practice not exceeding a month in the year, while

my taste was strong for a country life, and my sojourn in France had

left behind it an ardent desire of travelling. But though these tastes

could not be freely indulged, they were at no time entirely sacrificed.

I passed most Sundays, throughout the year, in the country, taking long

rural walks on that day even when residing in London. The month's

holiday was, for a few years, passed at my father's house in the

country; afterwards a part or the whole was spent in tours, chiefly

pedestrian, with some one or more of the young men who were my chosen

companions; and, at a later period, in longer journeys or excursions,

alone or with other friends. France, Belgium, and Rhenish Germany were

within easy reach of the annual holiday: and two longer absences, one of

three, the other of six months, under medical advice, added Switzerland,

the Tyrol, and Italy to my list. Fortunately, also, both these journeys

occurred rather early, so as to give the benefit and charm of the

remembrance to a large portion of life.

 

I am disposed to agree with what has been surmised by others, that the

opportunity which my official position gave me of learning by personal

observation the necessary conditions of the practical conduct of

public affairs, has been of considerable value to me as a theoretical

reformer of the opinions and institutions of my time. Not, indeed,

that public business transacted on paper, to take effect on the other

side of the globe, was of itself calculated to give much practical

knowledge of life. But 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. As a speculative

writer, I should have had no one to consult but myself, and should

have encountered in my speculations none of the obstacles which would

have started up whenever they came to be applied to practice. But as a

Secretary conducting political correspondence, I could not issue an

order, or express an opinion, without satisfying various persons very

unlike myself, that the thing was fit to be done. I was thus in a good

position for finding out by practice the mode of putting a thought

which gives it easiest admittance into minds not prepared for it by

habit; while 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;

instead of being indignant or dispirited because I could not have

entirely my own way, to be pleased and encouraged when I could have

the smallest part of it; and when even that could not be, to bear with

complete equanimity the being overruled altogether. I have found,

through life, these acquisitions to be of the greatest possible

importance for personal happiness, and they are also a very necessary

condition for enabling anyone, either as theorist or as practical man,

to effect the greatest amount of good compatible with his opportunities. 

CHAPTER IV (YOUTHFUL PROPAGANDISM. THE "WESTMINSTER REVIEW")

The occupation of so much of my time by office work did not relax my

attention to my own pursuits, which were never carried on more

vigorously. It was about this time that I began to write in newspapers.

The first writings of mine which got into print were two letters

published towards the end of 1822, in the _Traveller_ evening newspaper.

The _Traveller_ (which afterwards grew into the _Globe and Traveller_,

by the purchase and incorporation of the _Globe_) was then the property

of the well-known political economist, Colonel Torrens, and under the

editorship of an able man, Mr. Walter Coulson (who, after being an

amanuensis of Mr. Bentham, became a reporter, then an editor, next a

barrister and conveyancer, and died Counsel to the Home Office), it had

become one of the most important newspaper organs of Liberal politics.

Colonel Torrens himself wrote much of the political economy of his

paper; and had at this time made an attack upon some opinion of Ricardo

and my father, to which, at my father's instigation, I attempted an

answer, and Coulson, out of consideration for my father and goodwill to

me, inserted it. There was a reply by Torrens, to which I again

rejoined. I soon after attempted something considerably more ambitious.

The prosecutions of Richard Carlile and his wife and sister for

publications hostile to Christianity were then exciting much attention,

and nowhere more than among the people I frequented. Freedom of

discussion even in politics, much more in religion, was at that time far

from being, even in theory, the conceded point which it at least seems

to be now; and the holders of obnoxious opinions had to be always ready

to argue and re-argue for the liberty of expressing them. I wrote a

series of five letters, under the signature of Wickliffe, going over the

whole length and breadth of the question of free publication of all

opinions on religion, and offered them to the _Morning Chronicle_. Three

of them were published in January and February, 1823; the other two,

containing things too outspoken for that journal, never appeared at all.

But a paper which I wrote soon after on the same subject, _à propos_ of

a debate in the House of Commons, was inserted as a leading article; and

during the whole of this year, 1823, a considerable number of my

contributions were printed in the _Chronicle_ and _Traveller_: sometimes

notices of books, but oftener letters, commenting on some nonsense

talked in Parliament, or some defect of the law, or misdoings of the

magistracy or the courts of justice. In this last department the

_Chronicle_ was now rendering signal service. After the death of Mr.

Perry, the editorship and management of the paper had devolved on Mr.

John Black, long a reporter on its establishment; a man of most

extensive reading and information, great honesty and simplicity of mind;

a particular friend of my father, imbued with many of his and Bentham's

ideas, which he reproduced in his articles, among other valuable

thoughts, with great facility and skill. From this time the _Chronicle_

ceased to be the merely Whig organ it was before, and during the next

ten years became to a considerable extent a vehicle of the opinions of

the Utilitarian Radicals. This was mainly by what Black himself wrote,

with some assistance from Fonblanque, who first showed his eminent

qualities as a writer by articles and _jeux d'esprit_ in the

_Chronicle_. The defects of the law, and of the administration of

justice, were the subject on which that paper rendered most service to

improvement. Up to that time hardly a word had been said, except by

Bentham and my father, against that most peccant part of English

institutions and of their administration. It was the almost universal

creed of Englishmen, that the law of England, the judicature of England,

the unpaid magistracy of England, were models of excellence. I do not go

beyond the mark in saying, that after Bentham, who supplied the

principal materials, the greatest share of the merit of breaking down

this wretched superstition belongs to Black, as editor of the _Morning

Chronicle_. He kept up an incessant fire against it, exposing the

absurdities and vices of the law and the courts of justice, paid and

unpaid, until he forced some sense of them into people's minds. On many

other questions he became the organ of opinions much in advance of any

which had ever before found regular advocacy in the newspaper press.

Black was a frequent visitor of my father, and Mr. Grote used to say

that he always knew by the Monday morning's article whether Black had

been with my father on the Sunday. Black was one of the most influential

of the many channels through which my father's conversation and personal

influence made his opinions tell on the world; cooperating with the

effect of his writings in making him a power in the country such as it

has rarely been the lot of an individual in a private station to be,

through the mere force of intellect and character: and a power which was

often acting the most efficiently where it was least seen and suspected.

I have already noticed how much of what was done by Ricardo, Hume, and

Grote was the result, in part, of his prompting and persuasion. He was

the good genius by the side of Brougham in most of what he did for the

public, either on education, law reform, or any other subject. And his

influence flowed in minor streams too numerous to be specified. This

influence was now about to receive a great extension by the foundation

of the _Westminster Review_.

 

Contrary to what may have been supposed, my father was in no degree a

party to setting up the _Westminster Review_. The need of a Radical

organ to make head against the _Edinburgh_ and _Quarterly_ (then in the

period of their greatest reputation and influence) had been a topic of

conversation between him and Mr. Bentham many years earlier, and it had

been a part of their _Château en Espagne_ that my father should be the

editor; but the idea had never assumed any practical shape. In 1823,

however, Mr. Bentham determined to establish the _Review_ at his own

cost, and offered the editorship to my father, who declined it as

incompatible with his India House appointment. It was then entrusted to

Mr. (now Sir John) Bowring, at that time a merchant in the City. Mr.

Bowring had been for two or three years previous an assiduous frequenter

of Mr. Bentham, to whom he was recommended by many personal good

qualities, by an ardent admiration for Bentham, a zealous adoption of

many, though not all of his opinions, and, not least, by an extensive

acquaintanceship and correspondence with Liberals of all countries,

which seemed to qualify him for being a powerful agent in spreading

Bentham's fame and doctrines through all quarters of the world. My

father had seen little of Bowring, but knew enough of him to have formed

a strong opinion, that he was a man of an entirely different type from

what my father considered suitable for conducting a political and

philosophical Review: and he augured so ill of the enterprise that he

regretted it altogether, feeling persuaded not only that Mr. Bentham

would lose his money, but that