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The 1870 Education Bill and the Method of J. S. Mill's Later Politics*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
Extract
The last fourteen years of John Stuart Mill's life (1859-1873), which followed the death of Harriet Taylor, possessed a hefty political content. They saw the publication of his essays on parliamentary reform and Considerations on Representative Government, his impassioned identification with the North in the American Civil War, the eventful parliamentary career sandwiched between the Westminster elections of 1865 and 1868, and a final phase of activity associated with causes such as women's suffrage and land tenure reform. When Mill acted politically he usually did so with strong feeling, but in his search to give deeply held principles practical effect he understood the need for dispassionate adaptation of means to ends. Both the feeling and the adaptation are evident in his treatment of the elementary education question in 1870, a treatment that vividly illustrates how Mill operated during the decade and a half before his death.
Of the host of legislation Gladstone's first administration proposed, only one item, the 1870 Education Bill, elicited a congregation of public responses from Mill. Of course, Mill's political activity in the several years following his defeat at Westminster in autumn 1868 was not confined to the adoption of a stance on ministerial measures. With respect to women's suffrage and land reform Mill was not about to wait on any government, and his conspicuous connections with the National Society for Women's Suffrage and the Land Tenure Reform Association attracted notice at the time and have been the subject of comment since. Moreover, during his last years Mill continued to cultivate his contacts in the world of London working-class radicalism, particularly with George Odger, William Randal Cremer, and George Howell. Whereas Mill's parliamentary career has been explored in some detail, the political character of his post-Westminster years has received less attention.
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- Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1997
Footnotes
*
An early version of this article was presented to the 1994 Vancouver meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies. I am grateful to Brian Harrison for his robust assault on the worst of my stylistic abominations. I also have benefited from the valuable suggestions of Albion's editor and copyeditor. My debt to the late John M. Robson, Mill scholar sans pareil, is immeasurable.
References
1 Mill and Harriet Taylor lived a secluded existence after their marriage in 1851. Both were troubled by ill health, and they were disdainful of “society.” Apart from a pamphlet on civil service reform, a miscellaneous collection of newspaper writings, and his defense in 1858 of the East India Company, Mill published nothing on any subject, political or otherwise, in the five years preceding Taylor's death in November 1858. (The dearth of publications, of course, did not mean his hand was idle—a good deal of writing was done in these years.) His life changed in 1859. Mill's step-daughter, Helen Taylor, took charge of his household, giving him welcome companionship, emotional support, and a residence open to dinner guests of a particular sort. He enjoyed a rejuvenated social life based mainly on new friendships formed with Henry Fawcett, Thomas Hare, and John Eliot Cairnes—men whose political convictions resembled Mill's. And 1859 saw a flurry of publication activity, featuring his essay On Liberty, the appearance of which made Mill a notable public figure for the first time.
2 See Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), “Recent Writers on Reform” (1859), and Considerations on Representative Government (1861), in Essays on Politics and Society, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols. (Toronto, 1977)Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, 19: 311–39, 341–70, 371–577Google Scholar (hereafter cited as CW); “The Contest in America” (1862) and “The Slave Power” (1862), in Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. Robson, John M. (Toronto, 1984)Google Scholar, CW, 21: 125–42, 143–64; for Mill's election and parliamentary speeches, see Public and Parliamentary Speeches, ed. John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1988), CW, 28-29; for Subjection of Women and Mill's post-1868 speeches on women's suffrage, see Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, CW, 21: 259–340Google Scholar, and Public and Parliamentary Speeches, CW, 29: 373–81, 386–91, 402–09Google Scholar; for Mill on the land question, see “Professor Leslie on the Land Question” (1870), in Essays on Economics and Society, ed. Robson, John M., 2 vols. (Toronto, 1967)Google Scholar, CW, 5: 669–85, “Maine on Village Communities” (1871), in Writings on India, ed. Robson, John M., Moir, Martin, and Moir, Zawahir (Toronto, 1990)Google Scholar, CW, 30: 213-28, the 1871 Programme of the Land Tenure Reform Association, in Essays on Economics and Society, CW, 5: 687–95Google Scholar, the speeches in Public and Parliamentary Speeches, CW, 29: 416–24, 425–31Google Scholar, and three 1873 contributions to the Examiner, in Newspaper Writings, ed. Robson, Ann P. and Robson, John M., 4 vols. (Toronto, 1986)Google Scholar, CW, 25: 1227–43.
3 The 1871 Army Bill prompted one public speech, see Public and Parliamentary Speeches, CW, 29: 411–15Google Scholar. Mill's speech on the Army Bill was not complimentary: “The bill … considered as a whole, is a step in the wrong direction. It does not appreciably strengthen us for national defence, and it contains no germs of a better system for the future” (p. 415).
4 For work on Mill and the women's suffrage movement, see Robson, Ann P., “Helen Taylor and the Founding of the National Society for Women's Suffrage,” Canadian Journal of History, 8 (1973): 1–22CrossRefGoogle Scholar (Robson also has written a valuable paper, as yet unpublished, on “John Stuart Mill and the Women's Suffrage Movement 1868–1873,” which she presented at the 1994 North American Conference on British Studies in Vancouver); for Mill and the land question, see Martin, David, John Stuart Mill and the Land Question (Hull, 1981)Google Scholar; Hollander, Samuel, The Economics of John Stuart Mill, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1985), 2: 833–55Google Scholar, and Wolfe, Willard, From Radicalism to Socialism: Men and Ideas in the Formation of Fabian Socialist Doctrines, 1881–1889 (New Haven, 1975), pp. 52–65Google Scholar (an insightful paper on the topic by John M. Robson, titled “Mill and Land Tenure Reform,” was read at the 1994 North American Conference on British Studies in Vancouver).
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6 A Moralist in and out of Parliament, esp. ch. 3. See also my “Introduction” to Public and Parliamentary Speeches.
7 Such matters include the 1866 bills on parliamentary reform and Irish land. It was not that Mill failed to voice his preferences, but rather that sometimes those preferences had little in common with the content of the measures to which he lent his support. Also noteworthy is Mill's restraint on the Jamaica question in the two months prior to the fall of the Russell-Gladstone administration, a period during which the substance of the “Report of the Royal Commission on Jamaica” (Parliamentary Papers [1866], 30: 489–531) was already known.
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13 Passage deleted from letter to William T. Thornton, ibid., 17: 1547n–8n.
14 Ibid., p. 1697.
15 See note 7.
16 Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of St. Andrews, in Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, CW, 21: 217Google Scholar. Two studies by Francis W. Garforth offer the most thorough treatment of Mill's ideas concerning education: Educative Democracy: John Stuart Mill on Education and Society (Oxford, 1980)Google Scholar and John Stuart Mill's Theory of Education (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar.
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57 Ibid., p. 385.
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87 Hirst, Francis W., Early Life and Letters of John Morley, 2 vols. (London, 1927), 1: 237Google Scholar. This comment on Mill appears in a letter Morley wrote to his sister Grace in April 1873.
88 Recollections, 2 vols. (London, 1917), 1: 36–67Google Scholar, of which pp. 52–67 focus on Mill. See also D. A. Hamer's treatment of Mill's influence on Morley in his book, John Morley: Liberal Intellectual in Politics (Oxford, 1968), pp. 20–31Google Scholar.
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