John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

PROMOTION TO BE HEAD EXAMINER. 95
appointed to the India House, as a clerk in the Examiner s
Office ; but an ill-judged walking tour in Switzerland, over
tasked his strength, and affected his lungs, which were naturally
weak. John and he, strange to say, did not get on very
harmoniously together : I cannot tell why ; and John was
positively unkind to him in his last years of failing health. He
had admirable ability, and was very genial ; but constitutionally
feeble. It should have fallen to him, failing
his next elder
brother Henry, also a victim of consumption, to write their
father s life.
In 1854, he had an illness so serious that he mentions it in
the Autobiography. It was an attack in the chest, ending in
the partial destruction of one lung. He took the usual remedy
of a long tour, being absent about eight months, in Italy, Sicily
and Greece. I remember Sir James Clark giving a very de
sponding view of his state ; the local disease, however, he said,
was not so serious as the general debility, and, in all likelihood,
he would never be fit for any other considerable work. Accord
ing to a remark made to Grote by Peacock, the head of his
office, his absence was felt severely at the India House. He
rallied, nevertheless, and resumed his usual routine.
In the year following his recovery, 1856, his two seniors in
the Examiner s office retired together, and he became head of
the office. This made an entire change in his work ; instead of
preparing despatches in one department, he had to superintend
all the departments. The engrossment of his official time was
consequently much greater ; and he had often to cut short the
visits of friends. In little more than a year after his promotion,
in the end of 1857, the extinction of the company was resolved
upon by the Government, and he had to give his aid to the
Court of Directors in their unavailing resistance to their doom.
For this purpose he drafted the Petition to Parliament in behalf
of the Company, in which he brought to bear all his resources
in the theory and practice of politics. The Petition, as ulti-