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

Personal, or, as it is called with equal propriety,

Proportional Representation. I brought this under the consideration of

the House, by an expository and argumentative speech on Mr. Hare's plan;

and subsequently I was active in support of the very imperfect

substitute for that plan, which, in a small number of constituencies,

Parliament was induced to adopt. This poor makeshift had scarcely any

recommendation, except that it was a partial recognition of the evil

which it did so little to remedy. As such, however, it was attacked by

the same fallacies, and required to be defended on the same principles,

as a really good measure; and its adoption in a few Parliamentary

elections, as well as the subsequent introduction of what is called the

Cumulative Vote in the elections for the London School Board, have had

the good effect of converting the equal claim of all electors to a

proportional share in the representation, from a subject of merely

speculative discussion, into a question of practical politics, much

sooner than would otherwise have been the case.

 

This assertion of my opinions on Personal Representation cannot be

credited with any considerable or visible amount of practical result. It

was otherwise with the other motion which I made in the form of an

amendment to the Reform Bill, and which was by far the most important,

perhaps the only really important, public service I performed in the

capacity of a Member of Parliament: a motion to strike out the words

which were understood to limit the electoral franchise to males, and

thereby to admit to the suffrage all women who, as householders or

otherwise, possessed the qualification required of male electors. For

women not to make their claim to the suffrage, at the time when the

elective franchise was being largely extended, would have been to abjure

the claim altogether; and a movement on the subject was begun in 1866,

when I presented a petition for the suffrage, signed by a considerable

number of distinguished women. But it was as yet uncertain whether the

proposal would obtain more than a few stray votes in the House: and

when, after a debate in which the speaker's on the contrary side were

conspicuous by their feebleness, the votes recorded in favour of the

motion amounted to 73--made up by pairs and tellers to above 80--the

surprise was general, and the encouragement great: the greater, too,

because one of those who voted for the motion was Mr. Bright, a fact

which could only be attributed to the impression made on him by the

debate, as he had previously made no secret of his nonconcurrence in the

proposal. [The time appeared to my daughter, Miss Helen Taylor, to have

come for forming a Society for the extension of the suffrage to women.

The existence of the Society is due to my daughter's initiative; its

constitution was planned entirely by her, and she was the soul of the

movement during its first years, though delicate health and

superabundant occupation made her decline to be a member of the

Executive Committee. Many distinguished members of parliament,

professors, and others, and some of the most eminent women of whom the

country can boast, became members of the Society, a large proportion

either directly or indirectly through my daughter's influence, she

having written the greater number, and all the best, of the letters by

which adhesions was obtained, even when those letters bore my signature.

In two remarkable instances, those of Miss Nightingale and Miss Mary

Carpenter, the reluctance those ladies had at first felt to come

forward, (for it was not on their past difference of opinion) was

overcome by appeals written by my daughter though signed by me.

Associations for the same object were formed in various local centres,

Manchester, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Bristol, and Glasgow; and others

which have done much valuable work for the cause. All the Societies take

the title of branches of the National Society for Women's Suffrage; but

each has its own governing body, and acts in complete independence of

the others.]

 

I believe I have mentioned all that is worth remembering of my

proceedings in the House. But their enumeration, even if complete, would

give but an inadequate idea of my occupations during that period, and

especially of the time taken up by correspondence. For many years before

my election to Parliament, I had been continually receiving letters from

strangers, mostly addressed to me as a writer on philosophy, and either

propounding difficulties or communicating thoughts on subjects connected

with logic or political economy. In common, I suppose, with all who are

known as political economists, I was a recipient of all the shallow

theories and absurd proposals by which people are perpetually

endeavouring to show the way to universal wealth and happiness by some

artful reorganization of the currency. When there were signs of

sufficient intelligence in the writers to make it worth while attempting

to put them right, I took the trouble to point out their errors, until

the growth of my correspondence made it necessary to dismiss such

persons with very brief answers. Many, however, of the communications I

received were more worthy of attention than these, and in some,

oversights of detail were pointed out in my writings, which I was thus

enabled to correct. Correspondence of this sort naturally multiplied

with the multiplication of the subjects on which I wrote, especially

those of a metaphysical character. But when I became a member of

Parliament. I began to receive letters on private grievances and on

every imaginable subject that related to any kind of public affairs,

however remote from my knowledge or pursuits. It was not my constituents

in Westminster who laid this burthen on me: they kept with remarkable

fidelity to the understanding on which I had consented to serve. I

received, indeed, now and then an application from some ingenuous youth

to procure for him a small government appointment; but these were few,

and how simple and ignorant the writers were, was shown by the fact that

the applications came in about equally whichever party was in power. My

invariable answer was, that it was contrary to the principles on which I

was elected to ask favours of any Government. But, on the whole, hardly

any part of the country gave me less trouble than my own constituents.

The general mass of correspondence, however, swelled into an oppressive

burthen.

 

[At this time, and thenceforth, a great proportion of all my letters

(including many which found their way into the newspapers) were not

written by me but by my daughter; at first merely from her willingness

to help in disposing of a mass of letters greater than I could get

through without assistance, but afterwards because I thought the letters

she wrote superior to mine, and more so in proportion to the difficulty

and importance of the occasion. Even those which I wrote myself were

generally much improved by her, as is also the case with all the more

recent of my prepared speeches, of which, and of some of my published

writings, not a few passages, and those the most successful, were hers.]

 

While I remained in Parliament my work as an author was unavoidably

limited to the recess. During that time I wrote (besides the pamphlet on

Ireland, already mentioned), the Essay on Plato, published in the

_Edinburgh Review_, and reprinted in the third volume of _Dissertations

and Discussions_; and the address which, conformably to custom, I

delivered to the University of St. Andrew's, whose students had done me

the honour of electing me to the office of Rector. In this Discourse I

gave expression to many thoughts and opinions which had been

accumulating in me through life, respecting the various studies which

belong to a liberal education, their uses and influences, and the mode

in which they should be pursued to render their influences most

beneficial. The position taken up, vindicating the high educational

value alike of the old classic and the new scientific studies, on even

stronger grounds than are urged by most of their advocates, and

insisting that it is only the stupid inefficiency of the usual teaching

which makes those studies be regarded as competitors instead of allies,

was, I think, calculated, not only to aid and stimulate the improvement

which has happily commenced in the national institutions for higher

education, but to diffuse juster ideas than we often find, even in

highly educated men, on the conditions of the highest mental

cultivation.

 

During this period also I commenced (and completed soon after I had left

Parliament) the performance of a duty to philosophy and to the memory of

my father, by preparing and publishing an edition of the _Analysis of

the Phenomena of the Human Mind_, with notes bringing up the doctrines

of that admirable book to the latest improvements in science and in

speculation. This was a joint undertaking: the psychological notes being

furnished in about equal proportions by Mr. Bain and myself, while Mr.

Grote supplied some valuable contributions on points in the history of

philosophy incidentally raised, and Dr. Andrew Findlater supplied the

deficiencies in the book which had been occasioned by the imperfect

philological knowledge of the time when it was written. Having been

originally published at a time when the current of metaphysical

speculation ran in a quite opposite direction to the psychology of

Experience and Association, the _Analysis_ had not obtained the amount

of immediate success which it deserved, though it had made a deep

impression on many individual minds, and had largely contributed,

through those minds, to create that more favourable atmosphere for the

Association Psychology of which we now have the benefit. Admirably

adapted for a class book of the Experience Metaphysics, it only required

to be enriched, and in some cases corrected, by the results of more

recent labours in the same school of thought, to stand, as it now does,

in company with Mr. Bain's treatises, at the head of the systematic

works on Analytic psychology.

 

In the autumn of 1868 the Parliament which passed the Reform Act was

dissolved, and at the new election for Westminster I was thrown out; not

to my surprise, nor, I believe, to that of my principal supporters,

though in the few days preceding the election they had become more

sanguine than before. That I should not have been elected at all would

not have required any explanation; what excites curiosity is that I

should have been elected the first time, or, having been elected then,

should have been defeated afterwards. But the efforts made to defeat me

were far greater on the second occasion than on the first. For one

thing, the Tory Government was now struggling for existence, and success

in any contest was of more importance to them. Then, too, all persons of

Tory feelings were far more embittered against me individually than on

the previous occasion; many who had at first been either favourable or

indifferent, were vehemently opposed to my re-election. As I had shown

in my political writings that I was aware of the weak points in

democratic opinions, some Conservatives, it seems, had not been without

hopes of finding me an opponent of democracy: as I was able to see the

Conservative side of the question, they presumed that, like them, I

could not see any other side. Yet if they had really read my writings,

they would have known that after giving full weight to all that appeared

to me well grounded in the arguments against democracy, I unhesitatingly

decided in its favour, while recommending that it should be accompanied

by such institutions as were consistent with its principle and

calculated to ward off its inconveniences: one of the chief of these

remedies being Proportional Representation, on which scarcely any of the

Conservatives gave me any support. Some Tory expectations appear to have

been founded on the approbation I had expressed of plural voting, under

certain conditions: and it has been surmised that the suggestion of this

sort made in one of the resolutions which Mr. Disraeli introduced into

the House preparatory to his Reform Bill (a suggestion which meeting

with no favour, he did not press), may have been occasioned by what I

had written on the point: but if so, it was forgotten that I had made it

an express condition that the privilege of a plurality of votes should

be annexed to education, not to property, and even so, had approved of

it only on the supposition of universal suffrage. How utterly

inadmissible such plural voting would be under the suffrage given by the

present Reform Act, is proved, to any who could otherwise doubt it, by

the very small weight which the working classes are found to possess in

elections, even under the law which gives no more votes to any one

elector than to any other.

 

While I thus was far more obnoxious to the Tory interest, and to many

Conservative Liberals than I had formerly been, the course I pursued in

Parliament had by no means been such as to make Liberals