John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

BENTHAM AND COLERIDGE ARTICLES. 55
faculties unjustly narrowed ; who are denied the importance in
society, or the influence in public affairs, which they consider
due to them as a class, or who feel debarred as individuals
from a fair chance of rising in the world especially if others,
in whom they do not recognize any superiority of merit, are
artificially : Radicals ;
exalted above their heads these compose the natural
to whom must be added a large proportion of those
who, from whatever cause, are habitualy
ill at ease in their
pecuniary circumstances ; the sufferers from low wages, low
profits, or want of employment : for even if they
do not im
pute their situation to the government, they almost always
think that the government could if it chose, do something to
relieve them ; and, at all events, finding themselves ill of as
they are, think they should not fare worse and would stand a
chance of faring better under a change."
The article is the farewell to Mill s political agitatation.
As this was the year of his second bad illness, I presume was
written in the end of 1838, in the midst of great suffering.
After six months interval, the next number appears October,
1839. It contains no article of Mill s : he had been abroad
the first half of the year. The number is otherwise notable for
Sterling s article on Carlyle, and Robertson s on Cromwell. In
March, 1840, is published the last number under Mill s pro
prietorship. It opens with his Coleridge article.
The Bentham article both stands alone as an appreciation of
Bentham s work, and also forms one member of a correlative
couple with the disquisition on Coleridge. No one possessed
the qualification of Mill for setting forth Bentham s merits and
defects : we wish that he had made still more use of his means
in depicting Bentham s personality.
But in the mode of dealing
with the defective side of Bentham, he undoubtedly gave offence
to the Benthamite circle. He admits (in the Autobiography)
that it was too soon to bring forward the faults of Bentham ;
and, looking at the article now, we may be allowed to say that
a little more explanation is wanted on both points ; as, for