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

adoption of much more thorough reforms in the

territorial and social relations of the country, than had yet been

contemplated. The time seemed to me to have come when it would be useful

to speak out my whole mind; and the result was my pamphlet _England and

Ireland_, which was written in the winter of 1867, and published shortly

before the commencement of the session of 1868. The leading features of

the pamphlet were, on the one hand, an argument to show the

undesirableness, for Ireland as well as England, of separation between

the countries, and on the other, a proposal for settling the land

question by giving to the existing tenants a permanent tenure, at a

fixed rent, to be assessed after due inquiry by the State.

 

The pamphlet was not popular, except in Ireland, as I did not expect it

to be. But, if no measure short of that which I proposed would do full

justice to Ireland, or afford a prospect of conciliating the mass of the

Irish people, the duty of proposing it was imperative; while if, on the

other hand, there was any intermediate course which had a claim to a

trial, I well knew that to propose something which would be called

extreme, was the true way not to impede but to facilitate a more

moderate experiment. It is most improbable that a measure conceding so

much to the tenantry as Mr. Gladstone's Irish Land Bill, would have been

proposed by a Government, or could have been carried through Parliament,

unless the British public had been led to perceive that a case might be

made, and perhaps a party formed, for a measure considerably stronger.

It is the character of the British people, or at least of the higher and

middle classes who pass muster for the British people, that to induce

them to approve of any change, it is necessary that they should look

upon it as a middle course: they think every proposal extreme and

violent unless they hear of some other proposal going still farther,

upon which their antipathy to extreme views may discharge itself. So it

proved in the present instance; my proposal was condemned, but any

scheme for Irish Land reform short of mine, came to be thought moderate

by comparison. I may observe that the attacks made on my plan usually

gave a very incorrect idea of its nature. It was usually discussed as a

proposal that the State should buy up the land and become the universal

landlord; though in fact it only offered to each individual landlord

this as an alternative, if he liked better to sell his estate than to

retain it on the new conditions; and I fully anticipated that most

landlords would continue to prefer the position of landowners to that of

Government annuitants, and would retain their existing relation to their

tenants, often on more indulgent terms than the full rents on which the

compensation to be given them by Government would have been based. This

and many other explanations I gave in a speech on Ireland, in the debate

on Mr. Maguire's Resolution, early in the session of 1868. A corrected

report of this speech, together with my speech on Mr. Fortescue's Bill,

has been published (not by me, but with my permission) in Ireland.

 

Another public duty, of a most serious kind, it was my lot to have to

perform, both in and out of Parliament, during these years. A

disturbance in Jamaica, provoked in the first instance by injustice, and

exaggerated by rage and panic into a premeditated rebellion, had been

the motive or excuse for taking hundreds of innocent lives by military

violence, or by sentence of what were called courts-martial, continuing

for weeks after the brief disturbance had been put down; with many added

atrocities of destruction of property logging women as well as men, and

a general display of the brutal recklessness which usually prevails when

fire and sword are let loose. The perpetrators of those deeds were

defended and applauded in England by the same kind of people who had so

long upheld negro slavery: and it seemed at first as if the British

nation was about to incur the disgrace of letting pass without even a

protest, excesses of authority as revolting as any of those for which,

when perpetrated by the instruments of other governments, Englishmen can

hardly find terms sufficient to express their abhorrence. After a short

time, however, an indignant feeling was roused: a voluntary Association

formed itself under the name of the Jamaica Committee, to take such

deliberation and action as the case might admit of, and adhesions poured

in from all parts of the country. I was abroad at the time, but I sent

in my name to the Committee as soon as I heard of it, and took an active

part in the proceedings from the time of my return. There was much more

at stake than only justice to the negroes, imperative as was that

consideration. The question was, whether the British dependencies, and

eventually, perhaps, Great Britain itself, were to be under the

government of law, or of military licence; whether the lives and persons

of British subjects are at the mercy of any two or three officers

however raw and inexperienced or reckless and brutal, whom a

panic-stricken Governor, or other functionary, may assume the right to

constitute into a so-called court-martial. This question could only be

decided by an appeal to the tribunals; and such an appeal the Committee

determined to make. Their determination led to a change in the

chairmanship of the Committee, as the chairman, Mr. Charles Buxton,

thought it not unjust indeed, but inexpedient, to prosecute Governor

Eyre and his principal subordinates in a criminal court: but a

numerously attended general meeting of the Association having decided

this point against him, Mr. Buxton withdrew from the Committee, though

continuing to work in the cause, and I was, quite unexpectedly on my own

part, proposed and elected chairman. It became, in consequence, my duty

to represent the Committee in the House of Commons, sometimes by putting

questions to the Government, sometimes as the recipient of questions,

more or less provocative, addressed by individual members to myself; but

especially as speaker in the important debate originated in the session

of 1866, by Mr. Buxton: and the speech I then delivered is that which I

should probably select as the best of my speeches in Parliament.[10] For

more than two years we carried on the combat, trying every avenue

legally open to us, to the Courts of Criminal Justice. A bench of

magistrates in one of the most Tory counties in England dismissed our

case: we were more successful before the magistrates at Bow Street;

which gave an opportunity to the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen's

Bench, Sir Alexander Cockburn, for delivering his celebrated charge,

which settled the law of the question in favour of liberty, as far as it

is in the power of a judge's charge to settle it. There, however, our

success ended, for the Old Bailey Grand jury by throwing out our bill

prevented the case from coming to trial. It was clear that to bring

English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power

committed against negroes and mulattoes was not a popular proceeding

with the English middle classes. We had, however, redeemed, so far as

lay in us, the character of our country, by showing that there was at

any rate a body of persons determined to use all the means which the law

afforded to obtain justice for the injured. We had elicited from the

highest criminal judge in the nation an authoritative declaration that

the law was what we maintained it to be; and we had given an emphatic

warning to those who might be tempted to similar guilt hereafter, that,

though they might escape the actual sentence of a criminal tribunal,

they were not safe against being put to some trouble and expense in

order to avoid it. Colonial governors and other persons in authority,

will have a considerable motive to stop short of such extremities in

future.

 

As a matter of curiosity I kept some specimens of the abusive letters,

almost all of them anonymous, which I received while these proceedings

were going on. They are evidence of the sympathy felt with the

brutalities in Jamaica by the brutal part of the population at home.

They graduated from coarse jokes, verbal and pictorial, up to threats of

assassination.

 

Among other matters of importance in which I took an active part, but

which excited little interest in the public, two deserve particular

mention. I joined with several other independent Liberals in defeating

an Extradition Bill introduced at the very end of the session of 1866,

and by which, though surrender avowedly for political offences was not

authorized, political refugees, if charged by a foreign Government with

acts which are necessarily incident to all attempts at insurrection,

would have been surrendered to be dealt with by the criminal courts of

the Government against which they had rebelled: thus making the British

Government an accomplice in the vengeance of foreign despotisms. The

defeat of this proposal led to the appointment of a Select Committee (in

which I was included), to examine and report on the whole subject of

Extradition Treaties; and the result was, that in the Extradition Act

which passed through Parliament after I had ceased to be a member,

opportunity is given to any one whose extradition is demanded, of being

heard before an English court of justice to prove that the offence with

which he is charged, is really political. The cause of European freedom

has thus been saved from a serious misfortune, and our own country from

a great iniquity. The other subject to be mentioned is the fight kept up

by a body of advanced Liberals in the session of 1868, on the Bribery

Bill of Mr. Disraeli's Government, in which I took a very active part. I

had taken counsel with several of those who had applied their minds most

carefully to the details of the subject--Mr. W.D. Christie, Serjeant

Pulling, Mr. Chadwick--as well as bestowed much thought of my own, for

the purpose of framing such amendments and additional clauses as might

make the Bill really effective against the numerous modes of corruption,

direct and indirect, which might otherwise, as there was much reason to

fear, be increased instead of diminished by the Reform Act. We also

aimed at engrafting on the Bill, measures for diminishing the

mischievous burden of what are called the legitimate expenses of

elections. Among our many amendments, was that of Mr. Fawcett for making

the returning officer's expenses a charge on the rates, instead of on

the candidates; another was the prohibition of paid canvassers, and the

limitation of paid agents to one for each candidate; a third was the

extension of the precautions and penalties against bribery to municipal

elections, which are well known to be not only a preparatory school for

bribery at parliamentary elections, but an habitual cover for it. The

Conservative Government, however, when once they had carried the leading

provision of their Bill (for which I voted and spoke), the transfer of

the jurisdiction in elections from the House of Commons to the Judges,

made a determined resistance to all other improvements; and after one of

our most important proposals, that of Mr. Fawcett, had actually obtained

a majority, they summoned the strength of their party and threw out the

clause in a subsequent stage. The Liberal party in the House was greatly

dishonoured by the conduct of many of its members in giving no help

whatever to this attempt to secure the necessary conditions of an honest

representation of the people. With their large majority in the House

they could have carried all the amendments, or better ones if they had

better to propose. But it was late in the session; members were eager to

set about their preparations for the impending General Election: and

while some (such as Sir Robert Anstruther) honourably remained at their

post, though rival candidates were already canvassing their constituency,

a much greater number placed their electioneering interests before their

public duty. Many Liberals also looked with indifference on legislation

against bribery, thinking that it merely diverted public interest from

the Ballot, which they considered--very mistakenly as I expect it will

turn out--to be a sufficient, and the only, remedy. From these causes our

fight, though kept up with great vigour for several nights, was wholly

unsuccessful, and the practices which we sought to render more difficult,

prevailed more widely than ever in the first General Election held under

the new electoral law.

 

In the general debates on Mr. Disraeli's Reform Bill, my participation

was limited to the one speech already mentioned; but I made the Bill an

occasion for bringing the two great improvements which remain to be made

in Representative Government, formally before the House and the nation.

One of them was