John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections

58 MILL TAKES THE WHOLE RISK. 1820-1840.
The watch-word in those days of the Review, was Sympathize
in order to learn. That doctrine, preached by Goethe and
echoed by Carlyle, was in everybody s mouth, and had its
fling.
Mill s account of the management of the Review,
first as
held by Molesworth, and afterwards by himself, leaves un
certainties on various interesting points. He was at first sole
editor, it appears, without being he
the avowed editor :
does
not say what this exactly meant. In point of fact, he rather
supervised than edited the Review The first acting editor, as
I am informed, was Mr. Thomas Falconer, a barrister, and now
a county court judge ; Mill guiding him, but not being the
active correspondent with contributors. During Mill s absence
in the autumn of 1836, Mr. Falconer did all the editing un
controlled, and, in the exercise of his editorial discretion,
rejected Carlyle s article on Mirabeau, which Mill had previ
ously approved of: the rejection was afterwards reversed by
Mill, who printed the article in the following January (1837).
Although not the impression left by the narrative in the Auto
biography, I am constrained by the facts within my knowledge
to believe that Robertson s period as assistant-editor must have
begun in the summer of 1837 ; and Molesworth s retirement
could not have been till the end of the year. This affects our
estimate of the numbers issued at Mill s sole risk. Molesworth
may have borne the cost of ten or eleven numbers, which would
leave Mill seven or eight, of the eighteen in all. Molesworth
expended, no doubt, a considerable sum in starting it; and Mill
must have been both very sanguine, and also very much bent
upon propagating his views in politics, philosophy and literature,
to take the whole risk upon himself. He paid his sub-editor,
and gave sixteen pounds a sheet to such of the contributors as
took payment. On these eight numbers he must have lost
considerably ; perhaps somewhere between fifteen hundred and
two thousand pounds. I can form some estimate of the loss
from knowing what Hickson paid to contributors, when he