Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 16.djvu/327

Rh MILL 309 standing that lie should be employed from the beginning in preparing drafts of despatches, and be thus trained up as a successor to those who then filled the highest depart ments of the office.&quot; Mill s work at the India House, which was henceforth his livelihood, did not come before the public, and those who have scouted his political writings as the work of an abstract philosopher, entirely unacquainted with affairs, have ignored the nature of his duties. From the first he was more than a clerk, and after a short apprenticeship he was promoted, in 1828, to the responsible position of assistant-examiner. The duty of the so-called examiners was to examine the letters of the agents of the Company in India, and to draft instructions in reply. The character of the Company s government was almost entirely depend ent upon their abilities as statesmen. For twenty years, from 1836 to 1856, Mill had charge of the Company s relations with the native states. In the hundreds of despatches that he wrote in this capacity, much, no doubt, was done in accordance with established routine, but few statesmen of his generation had a wider experience of the responsible application of principles of government to actual emergencies. That he said so little about this work in the Autobiography was probably because his main con cern there was to expound the influences that affected his moral and mental development. A man of different temperament might have found abundance of dramatic interest in watching the personal and political changes in so many distinct states. But Mill makes no reminiscences of this kind, nor does he give any clue to the results of his own initiative. To return to his extra-official activity, which received an immense impulse about the time of his entering the India House from what must strike a man of the world as a strange source. The reading of Dumont s exposition of Bentham s doctrines in the Traite de Legislation was an epoch in Mill s life. It awoke in him an ambition as enthusiastic and impassioned as a young man s first love. The language that he uses about it in his autobiography reveals a warmth of inner life that few people would suspect from the record of his dry studies. When he laid down the last volume, he says, he had become a different being. It gave unity to the detached and fragmentary component parts of his knowledge and beliefs. &quot;I now had opinions a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy in one among the best senses of the word, a religion, the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life. And I had a grand conception laid before me of changes to be effected in the condition of mankind through that doctrine.&quot; He had been carefully bred to contemplate work for human welfare as the ruling motive of his life ; that motive had now received definite direction. Many a youth has entered the world with ambition equally high, but few have felt as Mill felt the first shock of despair, and fewer still have rallied from that despair with such indomitable resolution. The main secret of the great &quot; crisis &quot; of his youthful life is probably to be found in the lofty ardour of the aspirations then conceived and shaped. For four years he worked with faith and hope in his mission, and these were years of incessant propagandist activity. The enthusiast of seventeen, burning to reorganize human affairs so as to secure the greatest happiness of the greatest number, set siege to the public mind through several approaches. He constituted a few of his youthful friends, imbued with the principles of his new creed, into a society which he called the &quot; Utilitarian &quot; Society, taking the word, as he tells us, from one of Gait s novels. Two newspapers were open to him the Traveller, edited by a friend of Bentham s, and the Chronicle, edited by his father s friend Black. One of his first efforts was a solid argument for freedom of discussion, in a series of letters to the Chronicle apropos of the prosecution of Richard Carlile. But he watched all public incidents with a vigilant eye, and seized every passing opportunity of exposing departures from sound principle in parliament and courts of justice. Another outlet was opened up for him in 1824 by the starting of the Westminster Review, and still another in the following year in the Parliamentary History and Revieiv. This year also he found a congenial occupation in editing Bentham s Rationale of Judicial Evidence. Into this he threw himself with zeal. And all the time, his mind full of public questions, he discussed and argued eagerly with the many men of promise and distinction who came to his father s house. He engaged in set discussions at a reading society formed at Grote s house in 1825, and in set debates at a Speculative Society formed in the same year. &quot;A very disquisitive youth,&quot; was Peacock s description of young Mill at this period, and this was probably how the enthusiast struck most of his outside acquaintances. But the glow of a great ambition as well as the energy of a piercing intellect might have been felt in his writings. His mission was none the less arduous that he proposed to convert the world by reason. Only the fulness of unbroken hope could have supported his powers, if he had had a frame of iron, under the strain of such incessant labour. All of a sudden, a misgiving which he compares to the Methodist s &quot; first conviction of sin &quot; made a rift in the wholeness of his faith in his mission. &quot; It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to ; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement ; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times becomes insipid or indifferent In this frame of mind it occurred -to me to put the question directly to myself, Suppose that all your objects in life were realized, that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are now looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant, would this be a great joy and happiness to you 1 And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, No ! At this my heart sank within me ; the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means ? I seemed to have nothing left to live for.&quot; The passage in his autobiography in which Mill gives an account of this prostrating disenchantment and his gradual release from its benumbing spell is one of the most interesting chapters in personal history. The first break in the gloom came, he tells us, from his reading in Marmontel s Memoir es &quot;the passage which relates his father s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them would supply the place of all that they had lost.&quot; Mill was moved to tears by the narrative, and his burden grew lighter at the thought that all feeling was not dead within him, that he was not a mere intellectual machine. This incident, and the delight that he now began to take in Wordsworth s &quot; Poems founded on the Affections,&quot; gives a clue to one of the secrets of Mill s despondency. It was an unsatisfied longing for personal affection, for love and friendship, of which his life hitherto had been barren. His father seems to have been reserved, undemonstrative- even to the pitch of chilling sternness in his intercourse with his family ; and among young Mill s comrades con tempt of feeling was almost a watchword, because it is so often associated with mischievous prejudice and wrong conduct. Himself absorbed in abstract questions and pro-