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Rh the plan of his "Political Economy." It also entered into his "Representative Government"; and, if he had written a complete work on sociology, he would have made it the basis of his arrangement as Comte did.

Mill's correspondence with Comte began in 1841. I heard from himself a good deal of the substance of it as it went on. Comte's part being now published, we can judge of the character of the whole, and infer much of Mill's part in the work. In 1842 and 1843 the letters on both sides were overflowing with mutual regard. It was Comte's nature to be very frank, and he was circumstantial and minute in his accounts of himself and his ways. Mill was unusually open; and revealed, what he seldom told to anybody, all the fluctuations in his bodily and mental condition. In one of the early letters, he coined the word "pedantocracy," which Comte caught up, and threw about him right and left, ever after. Already in 1842 troubles were brewing for him in Paris, partly in consequence of his peculiar tenets, and still more from his unsparing abuse of the notables of Paris, the foremost object of his hate being the all-powerful Arago. His personal situation, always detailed with the utmost fullness, makes a considerable fraction of the correspondence on his side. When in 1843 the "Polytechnic pedantocracy," that is to say, the Council of the Polytechnic School, for which he was examiner, first assumed a hostile attitude, and when his post was in danger, Mill came forward with an offer of pecuniary assistance, in case of the worst; the generosity of this offer will be appreciated when I come to state what his own circumstances were at that moment. Comte, however, declined the proposal; he would accept assistance from men of wealth among his followers; indeed, he broadly announced that it was their duty to minister to his wants; but he did not think that philosophers should have to devote their own small means to helping one another. Mill sent the "Logic" to him as soon as published; he is overjoyed at the compliments to himself, and warmly appreciates Mill's moral courage in owning his admiration. They discuss sociological questions at large, at first with considerable cordiality and unanimity; but the harmony is short-lived. In the summer of 1843 begins the debate on women, which occupied the remainder of that year; the letters being very long on both sides. By November, Comte declares the prolongation of the discussion needless; but protests strongly against Mill's calling women "slaves." Mill copied out the letters on both sides, and I remember reading them. Some years later, when I asked him to show them to a friend of mine, he consented, but said that, having reread them himself, he was dissatisfied with the concessions he had made to Comte, and would never show them to any one again. What I remember thinking at the time I read them was, that Mill needlessly prolonged the debate, hoping against hope to produce an impression upon Comte. The correspondence was not arrested by this divergence, nor was