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

the

regulation of affairs which vitally concern them, with the superiority

of weight justly due to opinions grounded on superiority of knowledge.

The suggestion, however, was one which I had never discussed with my

almost infallible counsellor, and I have no evidence that she would have

concurred in it. As far as I have been able to observe, it has found

favour with nobody; all who desire any sort of inequality in the

electoral vote, desiring it in favour of property and not of

intelligence or knowledge. If it ever overcomes the strong feeling which

exists against it, this will only be after the establishment of a

systematic National Education by which the various grades of politically

valuable acquirement may be accurately defined and authenticated.

Without this it will always remain liable to strong, possibly

conclusive, objections; and with this, it would perhaps not be needed.

 

It was soon after the publication of _Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform_,

that I became acquainted with Mr. Hare's admirable system of Personal

Representation, which, in its present shape, was then for the first time

published. I saw in this great practical and philosophical idea, the

greatest improvement of which the system of representative government is

susceptible; an improvement which, in the most felicitous manner,

exactly meets and cures the grand, and what before seemed the inherent,

defect of the representative system; that of giving to a numerical

majority all power, instead of only a power proportional to its numbers,

and enabling the strongest party to exclude all weaker parties from

making their opinions heard in the assembly of the nation, except

through such opportunity as may be given to them by the accidentally

unequal distribution of opinions in different localities. To these great

evils nothing more than very imperfect palliations had seemed possible;

but Mr. Hare's system affords a radical cure. This great discovery, for

it is no less, in the political art, inspired me, as I believe it has

inspired all thoughtful persons who have adopted it, with new and more

sanguine hopes respecting the prospects of human society; by freeing the

form of political institutions towards which the whole civilized world

is manifestly and irresistibly tending, from the chief part of what

seemed to qualify, or render doubtful, its ultimate benefits.

Minorities, so long as they remain minorities, are, and ought to be,

outvoted; but under arrangements which enable any assemblage of voters,

amounting to a certain number, to place in the legislature a

representative of its own choice, minorities cannot be suppressed.

Independent opinions will force their way into the council of the nation

and make themselves heard there, a thing which often cannot happen in

the existing forms of representative democracy; and the legislature,

instead of being weeded of individual peculiarities and entirely made up

of men who simply represent the creed of great political or religious

parties, will comprise a large proportion of the most eminent individual

minds in the country, placed there, without reference to party, by

voters who appreciate their individual eminence. I can understand that

persons, otherwise intelligent, should, for want of sufficient

examination, be repelled from Mr. Hare's plan by what they think the

complex nature of its machinery. But any one who does not feel the want

which the scheme is intended to supply; any one who throws it over as a

mere theoretical subtlety or crotchet, tending to no valuable purpose,

and unworthy of the attention of practical men, may be pronounced an

incompetent statesman, unequal to the politics of the future. I mean,

unless he is a minister or aspires to become one: for we are quite

accustomed to a minister continuing to profess unqualified hostility to

an improvement almost to the very day when his conscience or his

interest induces him to take it up as a public measure, and carry it.

 

Had I met with Mr. Hare's system before the publication of my pamphlet,

I should have given an account of it there. Not having done so, I wrote

an article in _Fraser's Magazine_ (reprinted in my miscellaneous

writings) principally for that purpose, though I included in it, along

with Mr. Hare's book, a review of two other productions on the question

of the day; one of them a pamphlet by my early friend, Mr. John Austin,

who had in his old age become an enemy to all further Parliamentary

reform; the other an able and vigourous, though partially erroneous,

work by Mr. Lorimer.

 

In the course of the same summer I fulfilled a duty particularly

incumbent upon me, that of helping (by an article in the _Edinburgh

Review_) to make known Mr. Bain's profound treatise on the Mind, just

then completed by the publication of its second volume. And I carried

through the press a selection of my minor writings, forming the first

two volumes of _Dissertations and Discussions_. The selection had been

made during my wife's lifetime, but the revision, in concert with her,

with a view to republication, had been barely commenced; and when I had

no longer the guidance of her judgment I despaired of pursuing it

further, and republished the papers as they were, with the exception of

striking out such passages as were no longer in accordance with my

opinions. My literary work of the year was terminated with an essay in

_Fraser's Magazine_ (afterwards republished in the third volume of

_Dissertations and Discussions_), entitled "A Few Words on

Non-Intervention." I was prompted to write this paper by a desire, while

vindicating England from the imputations commonly brought against her on

the Continent, of a peculiar selfishness in matters of foreign policy to

warn Englishmen of the colour given to this imputation by the low tone

in which English statesmen are accustomed to speak of English policy as

concerned only with English interests, and by the conduct of Lord

Palmerston at that particular time in opposing the Suez Canal; and I

took the opportunity of expressing ideas which had long been in my mind

(some of them generated by my Indian experience, and others by the

international questions which then greatly occupied the European

public), respecting the true principles of international morality, and

the legitimate modifications made in it by difference of times and

circumstances; a subject I had already, to some extent, discussed in the

vindication of the French Provisional Government of 1848 against the

attacks of Lord Brougham and others, which I published at the time in

the _Westminster Review_, and which is reprinted in the _Dissertations_.

 

I had now settled, as I believed, for the remainder of my existence into

a purely literary life; if that can be called literary which continued

to be occupied in a pre-eminent degree with politics, and not merely

with theoretical, but practical politics, although a great part of the

year was spent at a distance of many hundred miles from the chief seat

of the politics of my own country, to which, and primarily for which, I

wrote. But, in truth, the modern facilities of communication have not

only removed all the disadvantages, to a political writer in tolerably

easy circumstances, of distance from the scene of political action, but

have converted them into advantages. The immediate and regular receipt

of newspapers and periodicals keeps him _au courant_ of even the most

temporary politics, and gives him a much more correct view of the state

and progress of opinion than he could acquire by personal contact with

individuals: for every one's social intercourse is more or less limited

to particular sets or classes, whose impressions and no others reach him

through that channel; and experience has taught me that those who give

their time to the absorbing claims of what is called society, not having

leisure to keep up a large acquaintance with the organs of opinion,

remain much more ignorant of the general state either of the public

mind, or of the active and instructed part of it, than a recluse who

reads the newspapers need be. There are, no doubt, disadvantages in too

long a separation from one's country--in not occasionally renewing

one's impressions of the light in which men and things appear when seen

from a position in the midst of them; but the deliberate judgment formed

at a distance, and undisturbed by inequalities of perspective, is the

most to be depended on, even for application to practice. Alternating

between the two positions, I combined the advantages of both. And,

though the inspirer of my best thoughts was no longer with me, I was not

alone: she had left a daughter, my stepdaughter, [Miss Helen Taylor, the

inheritor of much of her wisdom, and of all her nobleness of character,]

whose ever growing and ripening talents from that day to this have been

devoted to the same great purposes [and have already made her name

better and more widely known than was that of her mother, though far

less so than I predict, that if she lives it is destined to become. Of

the value of her direct cooperation with me, something will be said

hereafter, of what I owe in the way of instruction to her great powers

of original thought and soundness of practical judgment, it would be a

vain attempt to give an adequate idea]. Surely no one ever before was so

fortunate, as, after such a loss as mine, to draw another prize in the

lottery of life [--another companion, stimulator, adviser, and

instructor of the rarest quality]. Whoever, either now or hereafter, may

think of me and of the work I have done, must never forget that it is

the product not of one intellect and conscience, but of three[, the

least considerable of whom, and above all the least original, is the one

whose name is attached to it].

 

The work of the years 1860 and 1861 consisted chiefly of two treatises,

only one of which was intended for immediate publication. This was the

_Considerations on Representative Government_; a connected exposition of

what, by the thoughts of many years, I had come to regard as the best

form of a popular constitution. Along with as much of the general theory

of government as is necessary to support this particular portion of its

practice, the volume contains many matured views of the principal

questions which occupy the present age, within the province of purely

organic institutions, and raises, by anticipation, some other questions

to which growing necessities will sooner or later compel the attention

both of theoretical and of practical politicians. The chief of these

last, is the distinction between the function of making laws, for which

a numerous popular assembly is radically unfit, and that of getting good

laws made, which is its proper duty and cannot be satisfactorily

fulfilled by any other authority: and the consequent need of a

Legislative Commission, as a permanent part of the constitution of a

free country; consisting of a small number of highly trained political

minds, on whom, when Parliament has determined that a law shall be made,

the task of making it should be devolved: Parliament retaining the power

of passing or rejecting the bill when drawn up, but not of altering it

otherwise than by sending proposed amendments to be dealt with by the

Commission. The question here raised respecting the most important of

all public functions, that of legislation, is a particular case of the

great problem of modern political organization, stated, I believe, for

the first time in its full extent by Bentham, though in my opinion not

always satisfactorily resolved by him; the combination of complete

popular control over public affairs, with the greatest attainable

perfection of skilled agency.

 

The other treatise written at this time is the one which was published

some years[7] later under the title of _The Subjection of Women._ It was

written [at my daughter's suggestion] that there might, in any event, be

in existence a written exposition of my opinions on that great question,

as full and conclusive as I could make it. The intention was to keep

this among other unpublished papers, improving it from time to time if I

was able, and to publish it at the time when it should seem likely to be

most useful. As ultimately published [it was enriched with some

important ideas of my daughter's, and passages of her writing. But] in

what was of my own composition, all that is most striking and profound

belongs to my wife; coming from the fund of thought which had been made

common to us both, by our innumerable conversations and discussions on a

topic which filled so large a place in our minds.

 

Soon after this time I took from their repository a portion of the

unpublished papers which I had written during the last years of our

married life, and shaped them, with some additional matter, into the

little work entitled _Utilitarianism_; which was first published, in

three parts, in successive numbers of _Fraser's Magazine_, and

afterwards reprinted in a volume.

 

Before this, however, the state of public affairs had become extremely

critical, by the commencement of the American civil war. My strongest

feelings