John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

IQ2 INFLUENCE UNDER ESTIMATED. 1849-1872.
some of the unfavourable estimates of his character and influ
ence. His great friend, Nassau Senior a man of various ac
complishments and of large acquaintance with people spoke
of him thus, in 1844, in a letter to the Editor of the Edin
burgh :
"
Factory
labour must be left to Mill. He will be
ingenious and original, though I own I do not quite trust his
good sense. He has been bitten by Carlyle and Torrens, and
is apt to puzzle himself by the excess of his own ingenuity.
Like Ricardo too, he wants keeping . He
does not cut a
knot which is insoluble ; but lets a real, but comparatively
unimportant difficulty stand in the way of practical action."
This is a specimen of a kind of criticism that I have often
heard regarding Mill. It was really a mode of expressing
Mill was no doubt
difference of judgment on particular points.
at times unpractical, but so, in my humble opinion, was Senior.
I have met him occasionally, and admired him as a converser ;
but I never saw any great wisdom in his political views. If I
were to give an example, it would be his persistently recom
mending for years the endowment of the Irish Roman Catholic
Priests from the public exchequer.
A still more decisively unfavourable judgment is passed upon
Mill s influence by his critic in the Edinburgh Reviev. .
"
In
truth, if the whole work of his life be examined, it will be
found to be eminently destructive, but not to contain one
practical constructive idea." This comes to the very point that
I wish to start from. It lays out his two sides destructive
and constructive and pronounces distinctly upon each.
His destructive agency has undoubtedly been great j but it
is still unexhausted, and is difficult to estimate with precision.
His influence must be taken along with Bentham s and his
father s ; and a more formidable trio, for the work of pulling
down rotten structures, never came together. But it would be
a monstrous perversion of fact to call them nothing but de
stroyers.
In politics, everything must be done by co-operation, and