John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

158 COURAGE IN MAINTAINING HIS OPINIONS. 1849-1872.
the interests of progress better than any violent shock, on his
part would have done. Courage was a quality he was never
deficient in ; the reason being that he was ready to incur
the sacrifice that it necessarily involves. Perhaps,
with one
exception, the most signal example of his courage was the
composition of the Essay on Theism. It was a more extra
ordinary revelation of departure from opinions that he had been
known to maintain, than had been his Bentham and Coleridge
articles ; and, while it might be grateful to some of his friends
and the opposite to others, it was certainly hard to reconcile
with his former self.
These aspects of his character properly connect themselves
with the great central peculiarity of an ardent public spirit,
contracted under his father s influence and fostered by his own
natural dispositions. He is admitted on all hands to have
had a pure and genuine love of his kind. It was the key to
his life-long exertions ; and had the very minimum of inter
mixture with purely personal ambition. He cordially sympapathized
with every form of improvement ; and did whatever
lay in him to aid the contrivers of new and beneficial schemes.
He was a strong supporter of Mr. Chadwick s Poor Law and
Sanitary legislation. He was quite exultant when the Peel
Government of 1841 acquiesced in the Penny Postage, which
Peel had at first opposed. He gave a willing hand to any
plausible projects of improvement. His taking up of Hare s
scheme of representation was a notable illustration of his readi
ness to embrace proposals that he had no hand in suggesting.
If anything, he was perhaps too eager and hopeful, and prone
to be led away by fair promises ; his natural temperament was
confiding rather than sceptical ; when he had not knowledge
enough to check what other people said, he was ready to take
them at their word.
It is, then, to his zeal for the welfare of mankind, that we
must refer the direction of his pursuits and the intensity of his