He now joined the Baptist Church at Low Hampton, and, after two years of minute study of the Bible, about 1818 became a Second Adventist. In 1831 he began to lecture, arguing that the “two thousand three hundred days” of Daniel viii. 14 meant 2300 years, and that these years began with Ezra’s going up to Jerusalem in 457 B.C., and therefore came to an end in 1843, and urging his hearers to make ready for the final coming of Christ in that year. To his many followers, after the year 1843 had passed, he proclaimed that 1844 was the year, that his error was due to following Hebrew instead of Roman chronology, and that the 22nd of October was to be the day. There was renewed excitement among Miller’s followers; many of them left their business, and in white muslin robes, on house tops and hills, awaited the epiphany. In spite of disappointment, many still believed with him that the time was near. He returned to Low Hampton and died there on the 20th of December 1849. The Adventists or Millerites, who were formed into a single body in a convention called by him in April 1845, have since separated into several sects: the Evangelical Adventists (1147 in the United States in 1908), who believe in everlasting punishment; the Seventh Day Adventists (64,332), who observe the seventh day, and practise the sacrament of foot-washing; the Advent Christians (26,500), the Churches of God in Jesus Christ (2872), and the Life and Advent Union (3800). Their total number in the United States in 1908 was about 99,300. Miller published in 1833 a pamphlet which was the basis of his lectures; these were published in 1842 as Evidence from Scripture and History of the Second Coming of Christ about the Year 1843.
See Sylvester Bliss, Memoirs of William Miller (Boston, 1853); James White, Sketches of the Christian Life and Public Labors of William Miller (Battle Creek, 1875); and Edward Eggleston’s novel, End of the World (1872).
MILLER, WILLIAM (1795–1861), British soldier, who took a prominent part in the South American Wars of Liberation, entered the British artillery service in 1811, and till 1814 he was
continuously on active service with Wellington’s army in the
Peninsula. In the latter year he accompanied the ill-fated New
Orleans expedition. After the general peace he travelled for two
years about Europe, and then went to South America. The war
which culminated in the expulsion of the Spaniards was just
breaking out, and he took command in the Chilean artillery,
with which he served during the Chilean part of the war. As a
major he commanded the marines on Cochrane’s vessel, the
“O’Higgins.” In 1821 he landed in Peru, to assist General San
Martin against the Spanish General Canterac. He was made
general of brigade, and became very intimate with Simon Bolivar.
He rendered the most conspicuous services at Junin (Aug. 6,
1824), and his regiment, the “Hussars of Junin,” covered itself
with glory in the decisive victory of Ayacucho (Dec. 9, 1824).
From 1830 to 1839 he filled various high military and political
offices in Peru. In the latter year he was involved in the fall of
Santa Cruz, and went into exile. For some years he filled the post
of British Consul-General of the Pacific Coast. He died on board
H.M.S. “Naiad” at Callao, on the 31st of October 1861.
See the Memoirs published by his brother John Miller (London,1827).
MILLER, WILLIAM (1796–1882), Scottish line-engraver, was born in Edinburgh on the 28th of May 1796. After studying in London under George Cook, a pupil of Basire’s, he returned to Edinburgh. He executed plates after Thomson of Duddingston, Macculloch, D. O. Hill, Sir George Harvey, and other Scottish
landscapists, but his chief works were his transcripts from Turner.
The first of these was the Clovelly (1824), of The Southern Coast, a
publication undertaken by George Cook and his brother William
B. Cook, to which Miller also contributed the Combe Martin
and the Portsmouth. He was engaged on the illustrations of
England and Wales, 1827–1838; of The Rivers of France, 1833–1835;
of Roger’s Poems, 1834; and very largely on those of The
Prose and Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott, 1834. In The Provincial
Antiquities and Picturesque Scenery of Scotland, 1826, he
executed a few excellent plates after Thomson and Turner.
Among his larger engravings of Turner’s works may be mentioned
“The Grand Canal, Venice”; “The Rhine, Osterprey and
Feltzen”; “The Bell Rock”; “The Tower of London”; and
“The Shepherd.” The art of William Miller was warmly appreciated
by Turner himself, and Ruskin pronounced him to be on
the whole the most successful translator into line of the paintings
of the greatest English landscapist. His renderings of complex
Turnerian sky-effects are especially delicate and masterly. Towards
the end of his life Miller abandoned engraving and occupied
his leisure in the production of water-colours, many of which
were exhibited in the Royal Scottish Academy, of which he was
an honorary member. He resumed his burin, however, to
produce two final series of vignettes from drawings by Birket
Foster illustrative of Hood’s Poems, published by Moxon in 1871.
Miller, who was a Quaker, died on the 20th of January 1882.
MILLER, WILLIAM HALLOWES (1801–1880), British
mineralogist and crystallographer, was born at Velindre near
Llandovery, Carmarthenshire, on the 6th of April 1801. He
was educated at St John’s College, Cambridge, where he graduated
in 1826 as fifth Wrangler, and became a fellow in 1829.
For a few years he was occupied as a college tutor and during
this time he published treatises on hydrostatics and hydrodynamics.
He also gave special attention to crystallography,
and on the resignation of W. Whewell he succeeded in 1832 to
the professorship of mineralogy, a post which he occupied until
1870. His chief work, on Crystallography, was published in
1838. He was elected F.R.S. in 1838. In 1852 he edited a
new edition of H. J. Brooke’s Elementary Introduction to Mineralogy.
He assisted in 1843 the committee appointed to superintend
the construction of the new Parliamentary standards
of length and weight (see Phil. Trans., 1856). He died in
Cambridge on the 20th of May 1880.
MILLERAND, ALEXANDRE (1859–), French socialist
and politician, was born in Paris on the 10th of February 1859.
He was educated for the bar, and made his reputation by his
defence, in company with Georges Laguerre, of Ernest Roche
and Duc-Quercy, the instigators of the strike at Decazeville
in 1883; he then took Laguerre’s place on M. Clemenceau’s
paper, La Justice. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies
for the department of the Seine in 1885 as a radical socialist.
He was associated with MM. Clemenceau and Camille Pelletan
as an arbitrator in the Carmaux strike (1892). He had long had
the ear of the Chamber in matters of social legislation, and after
the Panama scandals had discredited so many politicians his
influence grew. He was chief of the Socialist left, which then
mustered sixty members, and edited until 1896 their organ in
the press, La Petite République. His programme included
the collective ownership of the means of production and the
international association of labour, but when in June 1899
he entered Waldeck-Rousseau’s cabinet of “republican defence”
as minister of commerce he limited himself to practical reforms,
devoting his attention to the improvement of the mercantile
marine, to the development of trade, of technical education,
of the postal system, and to the amelioration of the conditions
of labour. Labour questions were entrusted to a separate
department, the Direction du Travail, and the pension and
insurance office was also raised to the status of a “direction.”
The introduction of trades-union representatives on the Supreme
Labour Council, the organization of local labour councils, and
the instructions to factory inspectors to put themselves in
communication with the councils of the trades-unions, were
valuable concessions to labour, and he further secured the
rigorous application of earlier laws devised for the protection
of the working-classes. His name was especially associated
with a project for the establishment of old age pensions, which
became law in 1905. He became in 1898 editor of La Lanterne.
His influence with the extreme Socialists had already declined,
for it was said that his departure from the true Marxist tradition
had disintegrated the party.
For his administration in the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet see A. Lavy, L’Œuvre de Millerand (1902); his speeches between 1899 and 1907 were published in 1907 as Travail et travailleurs.
MILLERITE, a mineral consisting of nickel sulphide, NiS. Crystals belong to the rhombohedral system and have the form
