Mill’s work at the India House, which was henceforth his
livelihood, did not come before the public; hence some have
scouted his political writings as the work of an abstract philosopher,
entirely unacquainted with affairs. From the first he
was more than a clerk, and after a short apprenticeship he was
promoted, in 1828, to the responsible position of assistant-examiner
with a salary of £600 a year. The duty of the so-called
examiners was to examine the letters of the agents of the
Company in India, and to draft instructions in reply. The
character of the Company’s government was almost entirely
dependent upon their abilities as statesmen. For twenty years,
from 1836 (when his father died) to 1856, Mill had charge of the
Company’s relations with the native states, and in 1856 he
became chief of the office with a salary of £2000. In the
hundreds of despatches that he wrote in this capacity, much,
no doubt, was done in accordance with established routine, but
few statesmen of his generation had a wider experience of the
responsible application of the principles of government. About
this work he said little in the Autobiography, probably because
his main concern there was to expound the influences that
effected his moral and mental development.
About the time of his entering the India House Mill read Dumont’s exposition of Bentham’s doctrines in the Traité de Législation, which made a lasting impression upon him. When he laid down the last volume, he says, he had become a different being. It gave unity to the detached and fragmentary parts of his knowledge and beliefs. The impression was confirmed by the study of the English psychologists, as well as Condillac and Helvetius, and in 1822–1823 he established among a few friends the “Utilitarian” Society, taking the word, as he tells us, from Galt’s Annals of the Parish. Two newspapers were open to him—the Traveller, edited by a friend of Bentham’s, and the Morning Chronicle, edited by his father’s friend Black. One of his first efforts was a solid argument for freedom of discussion, in a series of letters to the Chronicle apropos of the prosecution of Richard Carlile. But he watched all public incidents with a vigilant eye, and seized every passing opportunity of exposing departures from sound principle in parliament and courts of justice. Another outlet was opened up for him (April 1824) by the starting of the Westminster Review, and still another in the following year in the Parliamentary History and Review. This year also he found a congenial occupation in editing Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence. All the time, his mind full of public questions, he discussed eagerly with the many men of distinction who came to his father’s house. He engaged in set discussions at a reading society formed at Grote’s house in 1825, and in set debates at a Speculative Society formed in the same year.
From the Autobiography we learn that in 1826 Mill’s enthusiasm was checked by a misgiving as to the value of the ends which he had set before him. This expression was the result, no doubt, of his strenuous training and the comparative lack of congenial friendships. His father was reserved, undemonstrative even to the pitch of chilling sternness, and among young Mill’s comrades contempt of feeling was almost a watchword. Himself absorbed in abstract questions and projects of general philanthropy, he had been careless of personal attachment. On the other hand without experience he could not have been prepared for the actual slowness of the reformer’s work. In 1826 he looked back to four years of eager toil. What were the results? He had become convinced that his comrades in the Utilitarian Society, never more than ten, had not the stuff in them for a world-shaking propaganda; the society itself was dissolved; the Parliamentary Review was a failure; the Westminster did not pay its expenses; Bentham’s Judicial Evidence produced little effect on the reviewers. His own reception at the Speculative Debating Society, where he first measured his strength in public conflict, was calculated to produce self-distrust. He found himself looked upon with curiosity as a precocious phenomenon, a “made man,” an intellectual machine set to grind certain tunes. The outcome of this period of depression was a broadening of his outlook on the problems which he had set himself to solve. He now saw that regard for the public good was too vague an object for the satisfaction of a man’s affections. It is a proof of the dominating force of his father’s character that it cost the younger Mill such an effort to shake off his stern creed about poetry and personal emotion. Like Plato, the elder Mill would have put poets under ban as enemies of truth, and he subordinated private to public affections. Landor’s maxims of “few acquaintances, fewer friends, no familiarities” had his cordial approval. These doctrines the younger Mill now felt himself forced in reason to abandon. Too much in awe of his father to make him a confidant, he wrestled in the gloomy solitude of his own mind. He gained from the struggle a more catholic view of human happiness, at delight in the poetry of nature and the affections as well as the poetry of heroic unselfishness, a disposition to study more sympathetically the point of view of opponents, a more courteous style of polemic, a hatred of sectarianism, an ambition, no less noble and disinterested, but moderated to practical possibilities.
In the course of the next few years he wrote comparatively little, but he continued his reading, and also derived much benefit from discussions held twice a week at Grote’s house in Threadneedle Street. Gradually also he had the satisfaction of seeing the debates in the Speculative Society becoming famous enough to attract men with whom it was profitable for him to interchange opinions, among others Maurice and John Sterling. He ceased to attend the society in 1829, but he carried away from it the strengthening memory of failure overcome by persevering effort, and the important doctrinal conviction that a true system of political philosophy was “something much more complex and many-sided than he had previously had any idea of, and that its office was to supply, not a set of model institutions but principles from which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be deduced.”
The first sketch of Mill’s political philosophy appeared in a series of contributions to the Examiner in the autumn of 1830 entitled “Prospects in France.” He was in Paris soon after the July Revolution, and made the acquaintance of the leading spirits among the younger men; in his discussion of their proposals we find the germs of many thoughts afterwards more fully developed in his Representative Government. It is from this time that Mill’s letters supply a connected account of his life (see Hugh Elliott, Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1910).
The letters in the Examiner may be taken as marking the close of his period of meditative search, and his return to hopeful aspiring activity. It was characteristic of his nature that he should be stirred to such delight by the Revolution in France, and should labour so earnestly to make his countrymen understand with what gravity and sobriety it had been effected. Their own Reform Bill came soon after and it is again characteristic of Mill—at once of his enthusiasm and of his steady determination to do work that nobody else seemed able or willing to do—that we find him in the heat of the struggle in 1831 writing to the Examiner a series of letters on “The Spirit of the Age” which drew from Carlyle the singular exclamation “Here is a new mystic!” How little this criticism was justified may be seen from the fact that Mill’s inductive logic was the direct result of his aspirations after political stability as determined by the dominion of the wisest (Examiner letters). “Why is it,” he asked, “that the multitude accept implicitly the decisions of the wisest, of the specially skilled, in physical science?” Because in physical science there is all but complete agreement in opinion. “And why this agreement?” Because all accept the same methods of investigation, the same tests of truth. Is it possible then to obtain unanimity as to the methods of arriving at conclusions in social and political matters, so as to secure similar agreement of opinion among the specially skilled, and similar general respect for their authority? The same thought appears in a review of Herschel’s Natural Philosophy, written about the same time. Mill remarks that the uncertainty hanging over the very elements of moral and social philosophy proves that the means of arriving at the truth in those sciences are not yet
