John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

^6 LONDON REVIEW STARTED. 1820-1840.
The London Review, projected in 1834, started in April,
i835- Sir William Molesworth undertook the whole risk ; and
Mill was to be Editor ; although he considered it incompatible
with his office to be openly proclaimed in that capacity. His
father lent his latest energies to the scheme, and opened the
first number with a political article, entitled The State of the
Nation a survey of the situation of public affairs in the
beginning of 1835, in his usual style. John Mill s first contri
bution was the Sedgwick article. I have heard that
Sedgwick himself confessed that he had been writing about
what he did not understand, but my informant was not him
self a Cambridge man. Effective as the article was for its
main purpose of defending the Utilitarian Ethics against a
seemed to me rather weak in the Introduc
sciolist, it always
tion, which consists in putting the question,
"
For what end do
endowed Universities exist," and in answering "To keep
alive philosophy ".
In
his mind, philosophy
seemed to mean
chiefly advanced views in politics and in ethics ; which, of
course, came into collision with religious orthodoxy and the
received commonplaces of society. Such a view of the
functions of a University would not be put forth by any man
that had ever resided in a University ; and this is not the
only occasion when Mill dogmatized
on Universities in total
ignorance of their working.
The second number of the Review is chiefly notable for his
father s article on Reform in the Church. It is understood
that this article gave a severe shock to the religious public ; it
was a style of reform that the ordinary churchman could not
enter into. The prospects of the Review were said to be very
much damaged in consequence. John Mill wrote on Samuel
Bailey s Rationale of Political Representation. Bailey s view
being in close accordance with his own, he chiefly uses the
philosophy of the rise of the Roman power, but he failed to satisfy himself that
he possessed an adequate clue. So late as 1844 or 1845, he was brooding over
a review-article on this subject.