1. 1806-1890 CHAPTER II. 1813-1821 Moral Influences in Early Youth My Father's Character and Opinions CHAPTER III. 1821-1823 First Stage of Education and First of Self-Education CHAPTER IV. 1823-1828 Youthful Propagandism The Westminster Review CHAPTER V. 1826-1832 A Crisis in My Mental History One Stage Onward CHAPTER VI. 1830-1840 Commencement of the Most Valuable Friendship of My Life My Father's Death Writings and Other Proceedings Up to 1840 CHAPTER VII. 1840-1870 General View of the Remainder of My Life Completion of the System of Logic Publication of the Principles of Political Economy Marriage Retirement from the India House Publication of Liberty Considerations on Representative Government Civil War in America Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy Parliamentary Life Remainder of My Life End of Contents RECORDING BY GARY GILLBURD WEATON, ILLINOIS CHAPTER I PART I OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. RECORDING BY GARY GILLBURD AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY JOHN STEWART MILL CHAPTER I PART I TILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION It seems proper that I should prefix to the following biographical sketch some mention of the reasons which have made me think it desirable that I should leave behind me such a memorial of so uneventful a life as mine. I do not for a moment imagine that any part of what I have to relate can be interesting to the public as a narrative or as being connected with myself. But I have thought that in an age in which education and its improvements are the subject of more, if not of profounder study, than at any former period of English history, it may be useful that there should be some record of an education which was unusual and remarkable and which whatever else it may have done has proved how much more than is commonly supposed may be taught and well taught. In those early years which, in the common modes of what is called instruction, are little better than wasted. It has also seemed to me that in an age of transition, in opinions, there may be somewhat both of interest and of benefit in noting the successive phases of my mind which was always pressing forward, equally ready to learn and to unlearn, either from its own thoughts or from those of others. But a motive which weighs more with me than either of these is a desire to make acknowledgment of the debts which my intellectual and moral development owes to other person. Some of them have recognized eminence, others less well known than they deserve to be, and the one to whom most of all is due, one whom the world had no opportunity of knowing, the reader whom these things do not interest, has only himself to blame if he reads further, and I do not desire any other indulgence from him than that of bearing in mind that for him these pages were not written. I was born in London on the 20th of May 1806 and was the eldest son of James Mill, the author of the History of British India. My father, the son of a petty tradesman and, I believe, small farmer at Northwater Bridge in the county of Angus, was when a boy recommended by his abilities to the notice of Sir John Stuart of Fetter Karen, one of the barons of the Exchequer in Scotland, and was, in consequence, sent to the University of Edinburgh at the expense of a fund established by Lady Jane Stuart, the wife of Sir John Stuart, and some other ladies for educating young men for the Scottish Church. He there went through the usual course of study and was licensed as a preacher, but never following the profession, having satisfied himself that he could not believe the doctrine of that or any other church. For a few years he was a private tutor in various families in Scotland, among others that of the marquee of Tweeddale, but ended by taking up his residence in London. He devoted himself to authorship, nor had he any other means of support until 1819 when he obtained an appointment in the India House. In this period of my father's life there are two things which it is very impossible not to be struck with, one of them, unfortunately, a very common circumstance, the other a most uncommon one. The first is that in his position, with no resources but the precarious one of writing in periodicals, he married and had a large family, conduct that which nothing could be more opposed, both as a matter of good sense and of duty to the opinions which, at least at a later period of his life, he strenuously appealed. The other circumstance is the extraordinary energy which was required to lead the life he led, with the disadvantages under which he labored from the first, and with those which he brought upon himself by his marriage. It would have been no small thing had he done no more than to support himself and his family during so many years of writing, without ever being in debt or in any pecuniary difficulty, holding as he did opinions, both in politics and in religion, which are more odious to all persons of influence, and to the common run of prosperous Englishmen in that generation than either before or since, and being not only a man whom nothing would have induced to write against his convictions, but only who invariably threw into everything he wrote as much of his convictions as he thought the circumstances would in any way permit. Being it must also be said, one who never did anything negligently never undertook any task, literary or other, on which he did not conscientiously bestow all the labor necessary for performing it adequately. But he, with these burdens on him, planned, commenced, and completed the history of India, and this in the course of a short ten years, a shorter time than has been occupied, even by writers who had no other employment, in the production of almost any other historical work of equal bulk, and of anything approaching to the same amount of reading and research. And to this is to be added that during the whole period a considerable part of almost every day was employed in the instruction of his children. In the case of one of whom, myself, he exerted an amount of labor, care, and perseverance, rarely, if ever, employed for a similar purpose in endeavouring to give, according to his own conception, the highest order of intellectual education. A man who, in his own practice, so vigorously acted up to the principles of losing no time, was likely to adhere to the same rule in the instruction of his pupil. I have no remembrance of the time when I began to learn Greek. I have been told that it was when I was three years old. My earliest recollection on the subject is that of committing to memory what my father termed vocabals, being lists of common Greek words and their significance in English, which he wrote out for me on cards of grammar, until some years later I learnt no more than the inflections of the nouns and verbs, but after a course of vocabals preceded at once to translation, and I faintly remember going through Aesop's fables, the first Greek book which I read, The Anabasis, which I remember better, was the second. I learned it no Latin until my eighth year, at that time I had read, under my father's tuition, a number of Greek prose authors, among whom I remember the whole of Herodotus and of Xenophon's Seropadia, and Memorials of Socrates, some of the lives of the philosophers by Diogenes Laertes, part of Lucan, and Isocrates' ad Germanicum, and ad Nicolium. I also read in 1813 the first six dialogues in the common arrangement of Plato, from the Euthephron to the Theocritus, Inclusive, which last dialogue I ventured to think would have been better omitted, as it was totally impossible I should understand it. But my father, in all his teaching, demanded of me not only the utmost that I could do, but much that I could by no possibility have done. What he was himself willing to undergo, for the sake of my instruction, may be judged from the fact that I went through the whole process of preparing my Greek lessons in the same room and at the same table at which he was writing. And as in those days Greek and English lexicons were not, and I could make no more use of a Greek and Latin lexicon than could be made without having yet begun to learn Latin. I was forced to have recourse to him for the meaning of every word which I did not know. This incessant interruption he, one of the most impatient of men, submitted to, and wrote under that interruption several volumes of his history and all else that he had to write during those years. The only thing, besides Greek, that I learnt as a lesson in this part of my childhood was arithmetic. This also my father taught me. It was the task of the evenings, and I well remember its disagreeableness. But the lessons were only a part of the daily instruction I received. Much of it consisted in the books I read by myself and my father's discourses to me, chiefly during our walks. From 1810 to the end of 1813 we were living in Newington Green, then an almost rustic neighborhood. My father's health required considerable and constant exercise, and he walked habitually before breakfast, generally in the green lanes towards Hornsea. In these walks I always accompanied him, and with my earliest recollections of green fields and wildflowers, his mingled that of the account I gave him daily of what I had read the day before. To the best of my remembrance this was a voluntary rather than a prescribed exercise. I made notes on slips of paper while reading, and from these in the morning walks I told the story to him, for the books or chiefly histories of which I read in this manner a great number, Robinson's histories, Hume, Gibbon, but my greatest delight, then and for long afterward, was Watson's Philip II and III, the heroic defense of the Knights of Malta against the Turks, and of the revolted provinces of the Netherlands against Spain, excited in me an intense and lasting interest. Next to Watson my favorite historical reading was Brooke's History of Rome. Of Greece I had seen at that time no regular history except school abridgments, and the last two or three volumes of a translation of Rollins' ancient history beginning with Philip of Macedon, but I read with great delight Langhorn's translation of Plutarch in English history, begun the time at which Hume leaves off. I remember reading Burnett's History of his own time, though I cared little for anything in it except the wars and battles, and the historical part of the annual register, from the beginning to about 1788 where the volumes my father borrowed for me from Mr. Bentham left off. I felt a lively interest in Frederick of Prussia during his difficulties, and in Paoli the Corsican Patriot, but when I came to the American War I took my part like a child as I was until set right by my father on the wrong side, because it was called the English side. In these frequent talks about the books I read he used as opportunity offered to give me explanations and ideas respecting civilization, government, morality, which he required me afterward to restate to him in my own work, and he also made me read and give him a verbal account of many books which would not have interested me sufficiently to induce me to read them of myself. Among others Miller's Historical View of the English Government, a book of great merit for its time, and which he highly valued, Mosheheim's Ecclesiastical History, McCree's Life of John Knox, and even Sewell and Rutty's Histories of the Quakers. He was fond of putting into my hands books which exhibited men of energy and resource in unusual circumstances, struggling against difficulties and overcoming them, of which works I remember Beaver's African Memoranda, and Collins' Account of the First Settlement of New South Wales. Two books which I never worried of reading were Anson's Voyages, So Delightful to Most Young Persons, and A Collection, Oxworth's, I believe, of Voyages Round the World, in four volumes, beginning with Drake and ending with Cook, in Boganville, of children's books, any more than of playthings, I had scantily any except an occasional gift from a relation or acquaintance among those I had. Robinson Crusoe was preeminent, and continued to delight me through all my boyhood. It was, no part, however, of my father's system, to exclude books of amusement, though he allowed them very sparingly. Of such books he possessed at that time next to none, but he borrowed several for me. Those which I remember are the Arabian Nights, Ghazati's Arabian Tales, Don Quixote, Miss Edgeworth's Popular Tales, and a book of some reputation in its way, Brooke's Fool of Quality. In my eighth year I commenced learning Latin, in conjunction with a younger sister, to whom I taught it as I went on, and who afterward repeated the lessons to my father, from this time other sisters and brothers being as successively added as pupils. A considerable part of my day's work consisted of this preparatory teaching. It was a part which I greatly disliked, the more so as I was held responsible for the lessons of my pupils, in almost as full a sense as for my own. I, however, derived from this discipline the great advantage of learning more thoroughly and retaining more lastingly the things which I was set to teach, perhaps, to the practice it afforded in explaining difficulties to others, may even at that age have been useful. In other respects the experience of my boyhood is not favorable to the plan of teaching children by means of one another. The teaching I am sure is very inefficient as teaching, and I well know that the relation between the teacher and taught is not a good moral discipline to either. I went in this manner through the Latin grammar and a considerable part of Cornelius Nepo's and Caesar's commentaries, but afterward added to the superintendence of these lessons much longer ones of my own. In the same year in which I began Latin, I made my first commencement in the Greek poets with the Iliad. After I had made some progress in this, my father put Pope's translation into my hands. It was the first English verse I had cared to read, and it became one of the books in which for many years I most delighted. I think I must have read it from twenty to thirty times through. I should not have thought it worthwhile to mention a taste apparently so natural to boyhood if I had not, as I think, observed that the keen enjoyment of this brilliant specimen of narrative and versification is not so universal with boys as I should have expected both a priori and from my individual experience. Soon after this time I commenced Euclid and somewhat later Algebra, still under my father's tuition. From my eighth to my twelfth year the Latin books which I remember reading were The Brocolics of Virgil and the first six books of the Aeneid, All Horus Except the Epocs, The Fables of Fadress, The First Five Books of Lively, to which my love of the subject I voluntarily added in my spare hours of leisure, the remainder of the first decade. All salutes a considerable part of Ovid's Metamorphosis, Some Plays of Terrence, Two or Three Books of Lucretius, Several of the Orations of Cicero and of his Writings on Oratory, Also His Letters to Atticus, My Father Taking the Trouble to Translate to Me from the French, The Historical Explanations in Migo's Notes. In Greek I read The Iliad in Odyssey Through, One or Two Plays of Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, Though by these I profited little. All Felicities, The Hellenics of Xenophon, A Great Part of Demosthenes, Eschthenes and Lyceus, Theocritus, Anachron, Part of the Anthology, A Little of Dionysus, Several Books of Polybos, and lastly Aristotle's Rhetoric, which as the first expressly scientific trici on any moral or psychological subject which I had read, and containing many of the best observations of the ancients on human nature and life, my father made me study with particular care, and throw the matter of it into syntoptic tables. During the same years I learnt elementary geometry and algebra thoroughly and differential calculus and other portions of the higher mathematics, far from thoroughly, for my father, not having kept up this part of his early acquired knowledge, could not spare time to qualify himself for removing my difficulties and left me to deal with them, with little other aid than that of books, while I was continually incurring his displeasure by my inability to solve difficult problems for which he did not see that I had not the necessary previous knowledge. As to my private reading I can only speak of what I remember. History continued to be my strongest predilection, and most of all ancient history. Mitford's Greece I read continually. My father had put me on my guard against the Tory prejudices of this writer and his perversions of fact for the whitewashing of despots and blackening of popular institutions, these points he disgorced on, exemplifying them from the Greek orators and historians with such effect that in reading Mitford my sympathies were always on the contrary side to those of the author, and I could to some extent have argued the point against him. Yet this did not diminish the ever-new pleasure with which I read the book. Roman history, both in my old favorite hook and in Ferguson, continued to delight me. A book which, in spite of what is called the dryness of its style I took great pleasure in, was the ancient universal history, through the increasing reading of which I had my head full of historical details concerning the obscurest ancient people, while about modern history, except detached passages such as the Dutch War of Independence, I knew and cared comparatively little. A voluntary exercise to which throughout my boyhood I was much addicted was what I called writing histories. I successfully composed a Roman history, picked out of hook, and an abridgment for the ancient universal history, a history of Holland from my favorite Watson, and from my anonymous compilation, and in my eleventh and twelfth year I occupied myself with writing what I flattered myself with something serious. This was no less than a history of the Roman government, compiled with the assistance of hook from Lively and Dionysus, of which I wrote as much as would have made an octavo volume extending into the epic of the Lucian Laws. It was in fact the account of the struggles between the patricians and the Poblians, which now engrossed all the interest in my mind, which I had previously felt in the mirror wars of the conquest of the Romans. I discussed all the constitutional points as they arose, though quite ignorant of Niber's researches. I, by such light as my father had given me, vindicated the agrarian laws on the evidence of Lively and upheld to the best of my ability the Roman Democratic Party. A few years later, in my contempt of my childhood efforts, I destroyed all these papers, not then anticipating that I could ever feel any curiosity about my first attempts at writing and reasoning. My father encouraged me in this useful amusement, though as I think judiciously he never asked to see what I wrote so that I did not feel that in writing it I was accountable to anyone nor had the chilling sensation of being under a critical eye. But though these exercises in history were never quite compulsory lessons, there was another kind of composition which was so, namely writing verses, and it was one of the most disagreeable of my tasks. Greek and Latin verses I did not write, nor learnt the prosody of those languages. My father, thinking this not worth the time he had required, contented himself with making me read aloud to him and correcting false quantities. I never composed at all in Greek, even in prose, and but a little in Latin. Not that my father could be indifferent to the value of this practice in giving a thorough knowledge of these languages, but because there really was not time for it. The verses I was required to write were English. When I first read Pope's Homer, I ambitiously attempted to compose something of the same kind, and achieved as much as one book of a continuation of the Iliad. There are probably the spontaneous promptings of my potential ambition which have stopped, but the exercise, begun from choice, was continued by command. Conformably to my father's usual practice of explaining to me as far as possible, the reasons for what he required me to do, he gave me for this, as I well remember, two reasons highly characteristic of him. One was that some things could be expressed better and more forcibly inverse than in prose. This, he said, was a real advantage. The other was that people in general attached more value to verse than it deserved, and the power of writing it was on this account was acquiring. He generally left me to choose my own subjects, which, as far as I remember, were mostly addresses to some mythological personage or allegorical abstraction. But he made me translate into English verse many of Horace's shorter poems. I also remember his giving me Thompson's winter to read, and afterwards making me attempt, without book, to write something myself on the same subject. The verses I wrote were, of course, the most merest rubbish, nor did I ever attain any facility of versification, but the practice may have been useful in making it easier for me, at a later period, to acquire readiness of expression. Begin footnote. In a subsequent stage of boyhood, when these exercises had ceased to be compulsory, like most youthful writers, I wrote tragedies under the inspiration not so much of Shakespeare as of Joanna Bailey, whose Constantine Paleogis, in particular, appeared to me one of the most glorious of human compositions. I still think it is one of the best dramas of the last two centuries. End footnote. I had read up to this time very little English poetry. Shakespeare, my father, had put into my hands chiefly for the sake of the historical plays, from which, however, I went on to the others. My father never was a great admirer of Shakespeare, the English idolatry of whom he used to attack with some severity. He cared little for any English poetry except Milton, for whom he had the highest admiration. Goldsmith Burns and Grace Bard, which he preferred to his elegy. Perhaps I may add, Calper and Bady, he had some value for Spencer, and I remember his reading to me, unlike his usual practice of making me read to him, the first book of the Fairy Queen. But I took little pleasure in it. The poetry of the present century he saw scarcely any merit in, and I hardly became acquainted with any of it until I was grown up to manhood, except the metrical romances of Walter Scott, which I read at his recommendation, and was intensely delighted with, as I always was with animated narrative. Dryden's poems were among my father's books, and many of these he made me read, but I never cared for any of them except Alexander's Feast, which as well as many of the songs in Walter Scott, I used to sing internally to a music of my own. To some of the latter, indeed, I went so far as to compose Heirs, which I still remember. Calper's short poems I read with some pleasure, but never got far into the longer ones, and nothing in the two volumes interested me, like the prose account of his three Hares. In my thirteenth year I met with Campbell's poems, among which Lachael, Homenlender, The Exile of Aaron, and some others, gave me sensations I had never before experienced from poetry. Here, too, I made nothing of the longer poems except the striking openness of Gertrude of Wyoming, which long kept its place in my feelings as the perfection of pathos. During this part of my childhood, one of my greatest amusements was experimental science. In the theoretical, however, not the practical, sense of the word. Not trying experiments, a kind of discipline which I have often regretted not having had, nor even seen, but merely reading about them. I never remember being so wrapped up in any book as I was in Joyce's scientific dialogues, and I was rather recalcitrant to my father's criticism of the bad reasoning respecting the first principles of physics, which abounds in the early part of that work. I devoured Treesies on Chemistry, especially that of my father's early friend and school fellow, Dr. Thompson, for years before I attended a lecture or saw an experiment. From about the age of twelve I entered into another and more advanced stage in my course of instruction, in which the main object was no longer the aids and appliances of thought, but the thoughts themselves. This commenced with logic in which I began at once with the Organon and read it to the analytics inclusive, but profited little by the posterior analytics, which belonged to a branch of speculation I was not yet ripe for. Contemporaneously with the Organon, my father made me read the whole or parts of several of the Latin Treesies on the scholastic logic, giving each day to him, in our walks, a minute account of what I had read, and answering his numerous and most searching questions. After this I went in a similar manner through the computational logica of Hobbes, a work of a much higher order of thought than the books of the school logisticians, and which he estimated very highly, on my own opinion beyond its merits, great as they are. It was his invariable practice whatsoever studies he extracted from me to make me as far as possible understand the feel, the utility of them, and this he deemed particularly fitting in the case of the syllogistic logic, the usefulness of which had been impugned by many writers of authority. I well remember how and in what particular walk to the neighborhood of Bagshot Heath, where we were on a visit to his old friend Mr. Wallace, then one of the mathematical professors at Sandhurst. He first attempted by questions to make me think on the subject and frame some conception of what constituted the utility of the syllogistic logic, and when I had failed in this make me understand it by explanations. The explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me at the time, but they were not therefore useless. They remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections to crystallize upon the import of his general remarks being interpreted to me by the particular instances which came under my notice afterward. My own consciousness and experience ultimately led me to appreciate quite as highly as he did the value of an early practical familiarity with the school logic. I know of nothing in my education to which I think myself more indebted for whatever capacity of thinking I have attained. The first intellectual operations in which I arrived at any proficiency was dissecting a bad argument and finding in what part of the fallacy lie, and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained was due to the fact it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveredly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school logic and the mental habits acquired in studying it were among the principal instruments of this drilling. I am persuaded that nothing in modern education tends so much when properly used to form exact thinkers who attach a precise meaning to words and propositions and are not imposed upon by vague, loose, or ambiguous terms. The boasted influence of mathematical studies is nothing to it. For in mathematical processes, none of the real difficulties of correct racialization occur. It is also a study particularly adopted to an early stage in the education of philosophical students, since it does not presuppose the sole process of acquiring by experience and reflection valuable thoughts of their own. They may become capable of disentangling the intricacies of confused and self-contradictory thought. Before their own thinking, facilities are much advanced, a power which, for want of some such discipline, many otherwise able men altogether lack, and when they have to answer opponents, only endeavors by which arguments as they can command, to support the opposite conclusion scarcely ever attempting to confute the reasonings of their antagonists, and therefore at the utmost leaving the question as far as it depends on argument a balanced one. CHAPTER 1 PART 2 CHILDHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION During this time the Latin and Greek books which I continued to read with my father were chiefly such as were worth studying, not for the language merely, but also for the thoughts. This included much of the orators, and especially demastates, some of whose principal orations I read several times over and wrote out, by way of exercise, a full analysis of them. My father's comments on these orations, when I read them to him, were very instructive to me. He not only drew my attention to the insight they afforded into Athenian institutions, and the principles of legislation and government which they often illustrated, but pointed out the skill and art of the orator. How everything important to his purpose was said at the exact moment when he had brought the minds of his audience into the state most fitted to receive it. How he made steel into their minds, gradually, and by insinuation, thoughts which, if expressed in a more direct manner, would have roused their opposition. Most of these reflections were beyond my capacity of full comprehension at the time, but they left seed behind, which germinated in due season. At this time I also read the whole of Tacitus, Juvenile, and Quintillan, the latter owing to his obscure style and to the scholastic details of which many parts of his Tresacy are made up, is little read, and seldom sufficiently appreciated. His book is a kind of encyclopedia of the thoughts of the ancients on the whole field of education and culture, and I have retained through life many valuable ideas which I can distinctly trace to my reading of him, even at that early age. It was at this period that I read, for the first time, some of the most important dialogues of Plato, in particular the Gorgias, the Protagoras, and the Republic. There is no author to whom my father thought himself more indebted for his own mental culture than Plato, or whom he more frequently recommended to young students. I can bear similar testimony in regard to myself. The Socratic method, of which the Platonic Dialogues are the chief example, is unsurpassed as a discipline for correcting the errors and clearing up the confusions incident to the Intellectious Siby Permissimus, the understanding which has made up all the bundles of associations under the guidance of popular phraseology. The close searching ellentusis, by which the man of vague generalities is constrained, either to express his meaning to himself in definite terms, or to confess that he does not know what he is talking about. The perpetual testing of all general statements, by particular instances, the siege in form which is laid to the meaning of large abstract terms, by fixing upon some still larger class name, which includes that and more, and dividing down to the thing sought, marked out its limits and definition by a series of accurately drawn distinctions between it and each of the cognate objects which are successively parted off from it, all this, as an education for precise thinking, is inestinable, and all this, even at that age, took such hold of me that it became part of my own mind. I have felt ever since that the title of Platonist belongs by far better right to those who have been nourished in and have endeavored to practice Plato's mode of investigation, than to those who are distinguished only by the adoption of certain dogmatical conclusions, drawn mostly from the least intelligible of his works, and which the character of his mind and writings makes it uncertain whether he himself regarded as anything more than poetic fancies, or philosophic conjectures. In going through Plato and Demostheses, since I could now read these authors, as far as the language was concerned, with perfect ease, I was not required to construe them sentence by sentence, but to read them aloud to my father, answering questions when he asked. But the particular attention which he paid to Elocution, in which his own excellence was remarkable, made this reading aloud to him a most painful task. Of all things which he required me to do, there was none which I did so consistently ill, or in which he so perpetually lost his temper with me. He had thought much on the principles of the art of reading, especially the most neglected part of it, the inflections of the voice, or modulation, as writers on Elocution call it, in contrast with articulation on the one side and expression on the other, and had reduced it to rules grounded on the logical analysis of a sentence. These rules he strongly impressed upon me, and took me severely to task for every violation of them, but I even then remarked, though I did not venture to make the remark to him, that though he reproached me when I read something ill, and told me how I ought to have read it, he never by reading it himself showed me how it ought to be read. A defect running through his otherwise admirable modes of instruction, as it did, through all his modes of thought, was that of trusting too much to the intelligibleness of the abstract when not embodied in the concrete. It was at a much later period of my youth, when practicing Elocution by myself, or with companions of my own age, that I for the first time understood the object of these rules, and saw the psychological grounds of them. At that time I and others followed out of the subject into its ramifications, and could have composed a very useful treatise grounded on my father's principles. He himself left those principles and rules unwritten. I regret that when my mind was full of the subject, from systematic practice, I did not put them, and our improvements of them, into a formal shape. A book which contributed largely to my education, in the best sense of the term, was my father's History of India. It was published in the beginning of 1818, during the year previous, while it was passing through the press. I used to read the proof sheets to him, or rather I read the manuscripts to him, while he corrected the proofs. The number of new ideas which I received from this remarkable book, and the impulse and stimulus as well as guidance given to my thoughts, by its criticism and discletations on society and civilization in the Hindu part, or the institutions and the acts of governments in the English part, made my early familiarity with it eminently useful to my subsequent progress. And though I can perceive deficiencies in it now as compared with a perfect standard, I still think it, if not the most, one of the most instructive histories ever written, and one of the books from which most benefit may be derived by a mind in the course of making up its opinions. The preface among the most characteristic of my father's writings, as well as the richness in materials of thought, gives a picture, which may be entirely depended on, of the sentiments and expectations with which he wrote the history, saturated as the book is, with the opinions and modes of judgment of a democratic radicalism, then regarded as extreme, and treating with a severity, at that time most unusual, the English constitution, the English law, and all parties and classes who possessed any considerable influence in the country. He may have expected reputation, but certainly not advancement in life, from its publication, nor could he have supposed that it would raise up anything but enemies for him in powerful quarters. Least of all could he have expected favor from the East India Company, to whose commercial privileges he was unqualifiededly hostile, and on the acts of whose government he had made so many severe comments, though in various parts of his book he bore a testimony to their favor, which he felt to be their just due, namely, that no government had, on the whole, given so much proof to the extent of its lights, of good intention toward its subjects, and that if the acts of any other government had the light of publicity as completely let in upon them, they would, in all probability, still less bear scrutiny. On learning, however, in the spring of 1819, about a year after the publication of the history, that the East India directors desired to strengthen the part of their home establishment, which was employed in carrying out the correspondence with India, my father declared himself a candidate for that employment, and to the credit of the directors, successfully. He was appointed one of the assistants of the examiner of India correspondence, officers whose duty it was to prepare drafts of dispatches to India, for consideration by the directors, in the principal departments of administration, in this office, and in that of examiner, which he subsequently attained, the influence which his talents, his reputation, and his decisions of character gave him with superiors who readily desired the good government of India, enabled him, to a great extent, to throw into his drafts of dispatches, and to carry through the ordeal of the court of directors and board of control, without having their force much weakened, his real opinions on Indian subjects. In his history he had set forth for the first time many of the true principles of Indian administration, and his dispatches following his history did more than had ever been done before to promote the improvement of India, and teach Indian officials to understand their business. If a selection of them were published, they would, I am convinced, place his character as a practical statesman fully on a level, with his eminence as a speculative writer. This new employment of his time caused no relaxation in his attention to my education. It was in this same year, 1819, that he took me through a complete course of political economy. His loved and intimate friend, Ricardo, had shortly before published the book which formed so great an epoch in political economy, a book which would never have been published or written but for the infreedy and strong encouragement of my father. For Ricardo, the most modest of men, though firmly convinced of the truth of his doctrines, deemed himself so little capable of doing them justice in exposition and expression that he shrank from the idea of publicity. The same friendly encouragement induced Ricardo, a year or two later, to become a member of the House of Commons, where, during the remaining years of his life, unhappily cut short in the full vigor of his intellect, he rendered so much service to his and my father's opinions, both on political economy and on other subjects. Though Ricardo's great work was already in print, no didactic treatise embodying its doctrine in a manner fit for learners had yet appeared, my father, therefore, commenced instructing me in the science by a sort of lectures, which he delivered to me in our walks. He expounded each day a portion of the subject, and I gave him, next day, a written account of it, which he made me rewrite over and over again until it was clear, precise, and tolerably complete. In this manner I went through the whole extent of the science, and the written outline of it, which resulted from my daily compter riddendue, served him afterwards as notes from which to write his elements of political economy. After this I read Ricardo, giving my account daily, of what I read, and discussing, in the best manner I could, the collateral points which offered themselves in our progress. On money, as the most intricate part of the subject, he made me read in all the same manner Ricardo's admirable pamphlets, written during what was called the bullion controversy. To these succeeded Adam Smith, and in this reading it was one of my father's main objects to make me apply to Smith's more superficial view of political economy, the superior lights of Ricardo, and detect what was fallacious in Smith's arguments, or erroneous in any of his conclusions. Such a mode of instruction was exceedingly calculated to form a thinker, but it required to be worked, by a thinker, as close and vigorous as my father. The path was a thorny one, even to him, and I am sure it was so to me. Notwithstanding the strong interest I took in the subject, he was often, and much beyond reason, provoked by my failure in cases where success could not have been expected, but in the main his method was right, and it succeeded. I do not believe that any scientific teaching ever was more thorough or better fitted for training the facilities than the mode in which logic and political economy were taught to me by my father. Striving even in an exaggerated degree, everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt the full force of the difficulties, and not only gave me an accurate knowledge of these two great subjects, as far as they were then understood, but made me a thinker on both. I thought for myself almost from the first, and occasionally thought differently from him, though for a long time only on minor points, and making his opinion the ultimate standard at a later period I even occasionally convinced him, and altered his opinion on some points of detail which I state to his honor not to my own. It at once exemplified his perfect candor and the real worth of his method of teaching. At this point concluded what can properly be called my lessons. When I was about fourteen I left England, and for more than a year, and after my return, though my studies went on under my father's general direction, he was no longer my schoolmaster. I shall therefore pause here and turn back to matters of a more general nature connected with the part of my life and education included in the preceding reminiscences. In the course of instruction which I have partly retracted, the point most superficially apparent is the great effort to give during the years of childhood an amount of knowledge in what are considered the highest branches of education, which is seldom acquired, if acquired at all, until the age of manhood. The result of this experiment shows the ease with which this may be done, and places in a strong light the wretched waste of so many precious years we are spent in acquiring the modicum of Latin and Greek commonly taught to schoolboys, a waste which has led so many educational reformers to entertain the ill-judged proposal of discarding these languages altogether from general education. If I had been by nature extremely quick of apprehension, or had possessed a very accurate and retentive memory, or were of a remarkably active and energetic character, the trial would not be conclusive. But in all these natural gifts I am rather below than above par. What I could do could assuredly be done by any boy or girl of average capacity and healthy physical constitution, and if I have accomplished anything, I owe it, among other fortunate circumstances, to the fact that through the early training bestowed upon me by my father, I started, I may fairly say, with an advantage of a quarter of a century over my contemporaries. There was one cardinal point in this training of which I have already given some indication, and which, more than anything else, was the cause of whatever good it affected. Most boys or youths who have had much knowledge drilled into them have their mental capacities not strengthened but overlaid by it. They are crammed with mere facts and with the opinions or phrases of other people, and these are accepted as a substitute for the power to form opinions of their own, and thus the sons of eminent fathers who have spared no pains in their education so often grow up mere paroders of what they have learnt, incapable of using their minds except in the furrows traced for them. Mine, however, was not an education of cram. My father never permitted anything which I learnt to degenerate into a mere exercise of memory. He strove to make the understanding not only go along with every step of the teaching, but, if possible, preceded anything which could be found out by thinking I never was told until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself. As far as I can trust my remembrance, I acquitted myself very lamely in this department. My recollection of such matters is almost totally of failures, hardly ever of success. It is true that the failures were often in things in which success in so early a stage of my progress was almost impossible. I remember at some time in my thirteenth year, on my happening to use the word idea, he asked me what an idea was and expressed some displeasure at my ineffectual efforts to define the word. I recollect also his indignation at my using the common expression that sometimes was true in theory, but required correction in practice, and how, after making me vainly strive to define the word theory, he explained its meaning and showed the fallacy of the vulgar form of speech which I had used, leaving me fully persuaded that in being unable to give a correct definition of theory and in speaking of it as something which might be at variance with practice, I had shown unparalleled ignorance. In this, he seems, and perhaps was, very unreasonable, but I think only in being angry at my failure, a pupil from whom nothing is ever demanded, which he cannot do, never does all he can. One of the evils most liable, to attend to any sort of early proficiency and which often fatally blights its promise, my father most anxiously guarded against. This was self-conceit. He kept me with extreme vigilance, out of the way of hearing myself praised, or of being led to make self-flattering comparisons between myself and others. From his own intercourse with me, I could derive none but a very humble opinion of myself. The standard of comparison he always held up to me was not what other people did, but what a man could and ought to do. He completely succeeded in preserving me from the sort of influences he so much dreaded. I was not at all aware that my attainments were anything unusual at my age, if I accidentally had my attention drawn to the fact that some other boy knew less than myself, which happened less often than might be imagined, I concluded. Not that I knew much, but that he, for some reason or other, knew little, or that his knowledge was of a different kind from mine. My state of mind was not humility, but neither was it arrogance. I never thought of saying to myself, I am, or I can do, so and so. I neither estimated myself highly nor lowly. I did not estimate myself at all. If I thought anything about myself, it was that I was rather backward in my studies, since I always found myself so, in comparison with what my father expected of me. I assert this with confidence, though it was not the impression of various persons who saw me in my childhood. They, as I have since found, thought me greatly and disagreeably self-conceited, probably because I was disputatious, and did not scruple to give direct contradictions to things which I heard said. I suppose I acquired this bad habit, from having been encouraged in an unusual degree to talk on matters beyond my age, and with grown persons, while I never had inculcated on me the usual respect for them. My father did not correct this ill-breeding and impertinence, probably from not being aware of it, for I was always too much in awe of him to be otherwise than extremely subdued and quiet in his presence. Yet with all this I had no notion of any superiority in myself, and well as it for me that I had not. I remember the very place in Hyde Park where, in my fourteenth year, on the eve of leaving my father's house for a long absence, he told me that I should find, as I got acquainted with new people, that I had been taught many things which youths of my age did not commonly know, and that many persons would be disposed to talk to me of this and to compliment me on it. What other things he said on this topic I remember very imperfectly, but he wound up by saying that whatever I knew more than others could not be ascribed to any merit in me, but to the very unusual advantage which had fallen to my lot of having a father who was able to teach me and willing to give me the necessary trouble and at time, that it was no matter of praise to me if I knew more than those who had not had a similar advantage, but the deepest disgrace to me if I did not. I have a distinct remembrance that the suggestion thus for the first time made to me that I knew more than other youths who were considered well educated was to me a piece of information to which, as to all other things which my father told me, I gave implicit credence, but which did not at all impress me, as a personal matter. I felt no disposition to glorify myself upon the circumstance that there were other persons who did not know what I knew, nor had I ever flattered myself that my acquirements, whatever they might be, were any merit of mine, but now when my attention was called to the subject, I felt that what my father had said respecting my peculiar advantage was exactly the truth and common sense of the matter, and it fixed my opinion and feeling from that time forward. CHAPTER I. AUTOBIOGRAPHY CHAPTER II. PART I Moral influences in early youth, my father's character and opinions. In my education, as in that of everyone, the moral influences, which are so much more important than all others, are also the most complicated, and the most difficult to specify with any approach to completeness, without attempting the hopeless task of detailing the circumstances by which, in disrespect, my early character may have been shaped, I shall confine myself to a few leading points which form an indispensable part of any true account of my education. I was brought up from the first without any religious belief, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. My father, educated in the creed of Scotch Presbyterianism, had by his own studies and reflections been led early to reject not only the belief in revelation, but the foundations of what is commonly called natural religion. I have heard him say that the turning point of his mind on the subject was reading Butler's analogy, that work of which he always continued to speak with respect, kept him, as he said, for some considerable time, a believer in the divine authority of Christianity, by proving to him that whatever are the difficulties in believing that the old and new testaments proceed from, or record the acts of, a perfectly wise and good being, the same and still greater difficulties stand in the way of the belief that a being of such a character can have been the maker of the universe. He considered Butler's argument as conclusive against the only opponents for whom it was intended. Those who admit an omnipotent as well as perfectly just and benevolent maker and ruler of such a world as this can say little against Christianity, but what can, with at least equal force, be retorted against themselves? Finding therefore no halting place in deism, he remained in a state of perplexity until, doubtless after many struggles, he yielded to the conviction that concerning the origin of things nothing whatever can be known. This is the only correct statement of his opinion, for dogmatic atheism he looked upon as absurd, as most of those whom the world has considered atheists have always done. These particulars are important, because they show that my father's rejection of all that is called religious belief was not, as many might suppose, primarily a matter of logic and evidence. The grounds of it were moral, still more than intellectual. He found it impossible to believe that a world so full of evil was the work of an author combining infinite power with perfect goodness and righteousness. His intellect spurred the contradiction, the Sabian, or Manachian theory, of a good and an evil principle, struggling against each other for the government of the universe he would not have equally condemned. And I have heard him express surprise that no one revived it in our time. He would have regarded it as a mere hypothesis, but he would have ascribed to it no depraving influence. As it was, this aversion to religion, in the sense usually attached to the term, was of the kind with that of Lucretius. He regarded it with the feelings due not to a mere mental delusion, but to a great moral evil. He looked upon it as the greatest enemy of morality. First by setting up fictitious excellencies, belief in creeds, devotional feelings, and ceremonies not connected with the good of humankind, and causing these to be accepted as substitutes for genuine virtues. But, above all, by radically viviating the standard of morals, making it consistent in doing the will of a being on whom it lavishes, indeed, all the phrases of adulation, but whom in sober truth it depicts as eminently hateful. I have heard him say that all ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked in a consistently increasing progression, that mankind have gone on adding trait after trait till they reached the most perfect conception of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have called this God, and prostrated themselves before it. This knee-plus-ultra of wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity. Think, he used to say, of a being who would make a hell, who would create the human race with the infallible foreknowledge, and, therefore, with the intention that the greater majority of them were to be consigned to horrible and everlasting torment. The time, I believe, is drawing near when this dreadful conception of an object of worship will be no longer identified with Christianity, and when all persons, with any sense of moral good and evil, will look upon it with the same indignation with which my father regarded it. My father was as well aware as anyone that Christians do not, in general, undergo the demoralizing consequences which seem inherent in such a creed, in the matter, or to the extent which might have been expected from it. The same slovenliness of thought and subjugation of the reason to fears, wishes, and affectations which enable them to accept a theory involving a contradiction in terms, prevents them from perceiving the logical consequences of the theory, such as the facility with which mankind believes, at one and the same time, things inconsistent with one another, and so few are those who draw from what they receive as truths any consequences but those recommended to them by their feelings that multitudes have held the undoubting belief in an omnipotent author of hell, and have, nevertheless, identified that being with the best conception they were able to form of perfect goodness, their worship was not paid to the demon which such a being as they imagined would really be, but to their own ideal of excellence. The evil is that such a belief keeps the ideal wretchedly low, and opposes the most obstinate resistance to all thought which has a tendency to raise it higher. Believers shrink from the very train of ideas which would lead the mind to a clear conception and an elevated standard of excellence because they feel, even when they do not distinctly see, that such a standard would conflict with many of the dispensations of nature and with much of what they are accustomed to consider as the Christian creed, and thus morally constitutes a matter of blind tradition with no consistent principle, not even any consistent feeling, to guide it. It would have been wholly inconsistent with my father's ideas of duty to allow me to acquire impressions contrary to his convictions and feelings respecting religion, and he impressed upon me from the first that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known, that the question, who made me, cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it, and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, who made God? He at the same time took care that I should be acquainted with what had been thought by mankind on these impenetrable problems. I have mentioned at how early an age he made me a reader of ecclesiastical history, and he taught me to take the strongest interest in the Reformation as the great and decisive contest against priestly tyranny for liberty of thought. I am thus one of the very few examples in this country of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it. I grew up in a negative state with regard to it. I looked upon the modern, exactly as I did upon the ancient religion, as something which in no way concerned me. It did not seem to me more strange that English people should believe what I did not, than that the men I read of in Herodotus should have done so. History had made the variety of opinions among mankind a fact familiar to me, and this was but a prolongation of that fact. This point in my early education had, however, incidentally one bad consequence deserving notice. In giving me an opinion contrary to that of the world, my father thought it necessary to give it as one which could not prudently be avowed to the world. This lesson of keeping my thoughts to myself at that early age was attended with some moral disadvantages, though my limited intercourse with strangers, especially such as were likely to speak to me on religion, prevented me from being placed in the alternative of avowal of hypocrisy. I remember two occasions in my boyhood on which I felt myself in this alternative, and in both cases I avowed my disbelief and defended it. My opponents were boys considerably older than myself, one of them I certainly staggered at the time, but the subject was never renewed between us. The other one, who was surprised and somewhat shocked, did his best to convince me for some time without effect. The great advance in liberty of discussion, which is one of the most important differences between the present time and that of my childhood, has greatly altered the moralities of this question, and I think that a few men of my father's intellect and public spirit, holding with such intensity of moral conviction as he did, unpopular opinions on religion or on any other of the great subjects of thought, would now either practice or inculcate the withholding of them from the world, unless in the cases becoming fewer every day, in which frankness on these subjects would either risk the loss of means of substance, or would amount to exclusion from some sphere of usefulness particularly suitable to the capabilities of the individual. On religion in particular, the time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all men, being qualified in point of knowledge, have on mature consideration, satisfied themselves that the current opinions are not only false but hurtful, to make their descent known, at least if they are among those whose station or reputation gives their opinion a chance of being attended to. Such an avowal would put an end, at once and forever, to the vulgar prejudice that what is called very improperly unbelief is connected with any bad qualities either of mind or heart. The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue are complete skeptics in religion. Many of them refrained from avowal, less from personal considerations than from a conscientiousness, though now in my opinion a most mistaken apprehension, least by speaking out what would tend to weaken existing beliefs, and by consequence, as they suppose, existing restraints, they should do harm instead of good. Of unbelievers so-called, as well as of believers, there are many species, including almost every variety of moral type, but the best among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will hesitate to affirm, are more genuinely religious in the best sense of the word religion than those who excessively arrogate to themselves the title. This liberality of the age, or in other words, the weakening of the obstinate prejudice which makes men unable to see what is before their eyes, because it is contrary to their expectations, has caused it to be very commonly admitted that a deist may be truly religious, but if religion stands for any graces of character, and not for mere dogma, the assertion may equally be made of many whose belief is far short of deism. Though they may think the proof incomplete that the universe is a work of design, and though they assertedly disbelieve that if they can have an author and governor who is absolute in power, as well as perfect in goodness, they have that which constitutes the principal worth of all religions whatever, an ideal conception of a perfect being, to which they habitually refer as the guide of their conscience, and this ideal of good is usually far nearer to perfection than the objective deity of those who think themselves obliged to find absolute goodness in the author of a world so crowded with suffering, and so deformed by injustice as ours. My father's moral convictions wholly deserved from a religion were very much of the character of those of the Greek philosophers, and were delivered with the force and decision which characterized all that came from him, even in the very early age at which I read with him the memorabilia of Xenophon, I imbibed from that work and from his comments a deep respect for the character of Socrates, who stood in my mind as a model of ideal excellence, and I well remember how my father at that time impressed upon me the lessons of the choice of Hercules. At a somewhat later period the lofty moral standard exhibited by the writings of Plato operated upon me with great force. My father's moral inclinations were at all times mainly those of the Socrates Viri, justice, temperance, to which he gave a very extended application, veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain, and especially labor, regard for the public good, estimation of persons according to their merits, and of things according to their intrinsic usefulness, a life of exertion in contradiction to one of self-indulgent ease and sloth. These and other moralities he conveyed in brief sentences uttered as occasion arose of grave exhortation or stern reprobation and contempt, but though direct moral teaching does much, indirect does more, and the effect my father produced on my character did not depend solely on what he said or did with that direct object, but also and still more on what matter of man he was. In his view of life he partook of the character of the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the cynic, not in the modern but in the ancient sense of the word. In his personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His standard of morals was Epicurean in as much as it was utilitarian, taking as the exclusive text of right and wrong, the tendency of actions to produce pleasure or pain. But he had, and this was the cynic element, scarcely any belief in pleasure, at least in his later years, of which alone on this point I can speak confidently. He was not insensitive to pleasures, but he deemed a very few of them worth the price which, at least in the present state of society, must be paid for them. The greater number of miscarriages in life he considered to be attributable to the overvaluing of pleasures. Accordingly temperance, in the large sense intended by the Greek philosophers, stopping short at the point of moderation in all indulgences, was with him, as with him, almost the central point of educational precip.  He thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by. This was a topic on which he did not often speak, especially, it may be supposed, in the presence of young persons, but when he did, it was with an air of settled and profound conviction. He would sometimes say that if life were made what it might be, by good government and good education, it would be worth having. But he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm, even of that possibility. He never varied in rating intellectual enjoyments above all others, even in value as pleasures, independently of their ulterior benefits. The pleasures of benevolent affections he placed high in the scale, and used to say that he had never known a happy old man, except those who were able to live over again in the pleasures of the young. For passionate emotions of all sorts, and for everything which has been said or written in exaltation of them, he professed the greatest contempt. He regarded them as a form of madness. The intense was with him a byword of scornful disappropriation. He regarded as an aberration of the moral standard of modern times, compared with that of the ancients the great stress laid upon feeling, feelings as such he considered to be no proper subjects of praise or blame. Right or wrong, good and bad, he regarded as qualities solely of conduct, of acts and omissions. There being no feeling which may not lead and does not frequently lead, either to good or to bad actions, conscience itself and the very desire to act right, often leading people to act wrong. Consistently carrying out the doctrine that the object of praise and blame should be the discouragement of wrong conduct and the encouragement of right. He refused to let his praise or blame be influenced by the motive of the agent. He blamed as severely what he thought a bad action when the motive was a feeling of duty as if the agents had been consciously evil doers. He would not have accepted as a plea in mitigation for inquisitors that they sincerely believed burning heretics to be an obligation of conscience. But though he did not allow honesty of purpose to soften his disappropriation of actions, it had its full effect on his estimation of character. No one prized conscientiousness and recititude of intention more highly, nor was more incapable of valuing any person in whom he did not feel assurance of it. But he disliked people quite as much for any other deficiency, provided he thought it equally likely to make them act ill. He disliked, for instance, a fanatic in any bad cause as much as or more than one who adopted the same cause from self-interest, because he thought him even more likely to be practically mischievous. And thus his aversion to many intellectual errors or what he regarded as such partook in a certain sense of the character of a moral feeling. All this is merely saying that he in a degree once common but now very unusual through his feelings into his opinions, which truly it is difficult to understand how any one who possesses much of both can fail to do. None but those who do not care about opinions will confound this with intolerance. Those who having opinions which they hold to be immensely important, and their contraries to be prodigiously hurtful, have any deep regard for the general good, will necessarily dislike, as a class and in the abstract, those who think wrong that they think right, and right what they think wrong. Though they need not therefore be, nor was my father insensitive to good qualities in an opponent, nor governed in their estimation of individuals by one general presumption, instead of by the whole of their character. I grant that an earnest person, being no more infallible than other men, is liable to dislike people on account of opinions which do not merit dislike. But if he neither himself does them any ill offense, nor connives at it being done by others, he is not intolerant, and the forbearance which flows from a conscientious sense of the importance to mankind of the equal freedom of all opinions is the only tolerance which is commendable, or to the highest moral order of minds possible. Part 1. Recording by Gary Gilbert, Wheaton, Illinois. Chapter 2. Part 2. Autobiography. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Gary Gilbert. Autobiography by John Stuart Mill. Chapter 2. Part 2. Moral Influences In Early Youth My Father's Character and Opinions. It will be admitted that a man of the opinions and the character above described was likely to leave a strong moral impression on any mind principally formed by him, and that his moral teaching was not likely to air on the side of laxity or indulgence. The element which was chiefly deficient in his moral relation to his children was that of tenderness. I do not believe that this deficiency lay in his own nature. I believe him to have had much more feeling than he habitually showed, and much greater capacities of feeling than were ever developed. He resembled most Englishmen in being ashamed of the signs of feeling, and by the absence of demonstration starving the feelings themselves. If we consider further that he was in the trying position of soul teacher, and add to this that his temper was constitutionally irritable, it is impossible not to feel true pity for a father who did, and strove to do, so much for his children, who would have so valued their affection, yet who must have been consistently feeling that fear of him was drying it up at its source. This was no longer the case later in life, and with his younger children. They loved him tenderly, and if I cannot say so much of myself, I was always loyally devoted to him. As regards my own education, I hesitate to pronounce whether I was more a looser or gainer by his severity. It was not such as to prevent me from having a happy childhood, and I do not believe that boys can be induced to apply themselves with vigor, and what is so much more difficult, perseverance, to dry and irksome studies by the sole force of persuasion and soft words. Much must be done, and much must be learnt by children for which rapid discipline and known liability to punishment are indispensable as means. It is no doubt a very laudable effect in modern teaching to render as much as possible of what the youth are required to learn easy and interesting to them. But when this principle is pushed to the length of not requiring them to learn anything, but what has been made easy and interesting, one of the chief objects of education is sacrificed. I rejoice in the decline of the old brutal and tyrannical system of teaching which, however, did succeed in enforcing habits of application, but the new, as it seems to me, is training up a race of men who will be incapable of doing anything which is disagreeable to them. I do not then believe that fear, as an element of education, can be dispensed with, but I am sure that it ought not to be the main element, but when it predominates so much as to preclude love and confidence on the part of the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisors of after-years, and perhaps to seal up the fountains of frank and spontaneous communicativeness in the child's nature. It is an evil for which a large abatement must be made from the benefits, moral and intellectual, which may follow. During the first period of my life, the habitual frequenters of my father's house were limited to a very few persons, most of them little known to the world, but whom personal worth and more or less of congeniality with at least his political opinions, not so frequently to be met with them as since, inclined him to cultivate and his conversations with them I listened to with interest and instruction. My being and habitual inmate of my father's study made me acquainted with the dearest of his friends, David Ricardo, who by his benevolent continence and kindness of manner was very attractive to young persons, and who, after I became a student of political economy, invited me to his house and to talk with him in order to converse on the subject. I was a more frequent visitor, from about 1817 or 1818, to Mr. Hume, who, born in the same part of Scotland as my father, and having been, I rather think, a younger school fellow or college companion of his, had, on returning from India, renewed their youthful acquaintance, and who, coming, like many others, greatly under the influence of my father's intellect and energy of character, was induced partly by that influence to go into Parliament, and there adopt the line of conduct which has given him an honourable place in the history of this country. Of Mr. Bentham I saw much more, owing to the close intimacy which existed between him and my father. I do not know how, soon after my father's first arrival in England, they became acquainted, that my father was the earliest Englishman of any great mark who thoroughly understood, and in the main adopted, Bentham's general views of ethics, government, and law, and this was a natural foundation for sympathy between them and made them familiar companions in a period of Bentham's life during which he admitted much fewer visitors than was the case subsequently. At this time Mr. Bentham passed some part of every year at Barrow Greenhouse, in a beautiful part of the Surrey Hills, a few miles from Godstone, and there I each summer accompanied my father with a long visit. In 1813 Mr. Bentham, my father and I made an excursion which included Oxford, Bath, and Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth, and Portsmouth. In this journey I saw many things which were instructive to me and acquired my first taste for natural scenery in the elementary form of fondness for a view. In the succeeding winter we moved into the house very near Mr. Bentham's, which my father rented from him, in Queen Square West Minster, from 1814 to 1817, Mr. Bentham lived during half of each year at Fort Abbey, in Somersetshire, or rather in a part of Devonshire surrounded by Somersetshire, which intervals I had the advantage of passing at that place. His sojourn was, I think, an important circumstance in my education. Nothing contributes more to nourish evaluation of sentiments in a people than the large and free character of their habituations. The middle age architecture, the baronial hall, and the spacious and lofty rooms of this fine old place, so unlike the mean and cramped intervals of English middle-class life, gave the sentiment of a larger and freer existence, and were to me a sort of poetic cultivation aided also by the character of the grounds in which the Abbey stood, which were rayant and secluded, umbragueous and full of the sound of falling waters. I owed another of the fortunate circumstances in my education, a year's residence in France, to Mr. Bentham's brother, General Sir Samuel Bentham. I had seen Sir Samuel Bentham and his family at their house, near Gosport, in the course of the tour already mentioned, he being then superintendent of the dockyard at Portsmouth, and during a stay of a few days, which they made at Fort Abbey shortly after the peace, before going to live on the continent. In 1820 they invited me for a six-month visit to them in the south of France, which their kindness ultimately prolonged to nearly a twelve-month. Sir Samuel Bentham, though of a character of mind different from that of his illustrious brother, was a man of very considerable attainments and general powers, with a decided genius for mechanical art. His wife, a daughter of the celebrated chemist, Mr. Fordyce, was a woman of strong will and decided character, much general knowledge and great practical good sense of the Edgeworth kind. She was the ruling spirit of the household, as she deserved, and was well qualified to be. Their family consisted of one son, the eminent botanist, and three daughters, the younger about two years my senior. I am indebted to them for much and various instruction, and for an almost parental interest in my welfare. When I first joined them in May 1920, they occupied the Chateau of Pompayne, still belonging to a descendant of Voltaire's enemy, on the heights overlooking the plain of the Garonne, between Montbonne and Toulouse. I accompanied them in an excursion to the Pyrenees, including a stay of some duration at Tener, the Bégor, a journey to Pau, Bayonne, and the Grays des Leschons, and an ascent of the Pique du Midi de Vigiorre. The first introduction to the highest order of mountain scenery made the deepest impression on me, and gave a color to my taste through life. In October we proceeded by the beautiful mountain route of Casters and Saint-Ponze, from Toulouse to Mont-Pierre, in which last neighborhood Sir Samuel had just bought the estate of Reticillière, near the foot of the singular mountain of Saint-Lô. During this residence in France I acquired a familiar knowledge of the French language, and a acquaintance with the ordinary French literature. I took lessons in various bodily exercises, in none of which, however, I made any proficiency. And at Mont-Pierre I attended the excellent winter courses of lectures at the Fajolier des Sciences, those of Mishur Aglada, on chemistry of Mishur Provachel, on zoology, and of a very accomplished representative of the 18th century metaphysics, Mr. Guerron, on logic, under the name of philosophy of the sciences. I also went through a course of the higher mathematics, under the private tuition of Mishur Leterech, a professor at the Lycine of Mont-Pierre. But the greatest, perhaps, of the many advantages which I owed to this episode in my education, was that of having breathed for a whole year the free and genial atmosphere of continental life. This advantage was not the less real, though I could not then estimate, nor even consciously feel it, having so little experience of English life, and the few people I knew being mostly such as had public objects of a large and personally disinterested kind at heart, I was ignorant of the low moral tone of what in England is called society, the habit of, not indeed, professing, but taking for granted in every mode of implication. That conduct is, of course, always directed toward low and petty objects, the absence of high feelings which manifest themselves by sneering depreciation of all demonstrations of them, and by general abstinence, except among a few of the stricter religionists, from professing any high principles of action at all, except in those preordained cases in which such profession is put on as part of the costume and formalities of the occasion. I could not then know or estimate the difference between this manner of existence and that of a people like the French, whose faults, if equally real, are at events different, among whom sentiments, which by comparison at least may be called elevated, are the current coin of human intercourse, both in books and in private life, and though often evaporating in profession, are yet kept alive in the nation at large by constant exercise and simulated by sympathy. So as to form a living and active part of the existence of great numbers of persons, and to be recognized and understood by all, neither could I then appreciate the general culture of the understanding which results from the habitual exercise of the feelings, and is thus carried down into the most uneducated classes of several countries on the continent. In a degree not equaled in England among the so-called educated, except where an unusual tenderness of conscience leads to a habitual exercise of the intellect on questions of right and wrong. I did not know the way in which, among the ordinary English, the absence of interest in things of an unselfish kind, except occasionally, in a special thing, here and there, the habit of not speaking to others, nor much even to themselves, about the things in which they do feel interest, causes, both to their feelings and their intellectual facilities, to remain undeveloped, or to develop themselves only in some singular and very limited direction, reducing them, considered as spiritual beings, to a kind of negative existence, all these things I did not perceive till long afterward. But I even then felt, though without stating it clearly to myself, the contrast between the frank sociability and amicability of a French personal intercourse and the English mode of existence, in which everybody acts as if everybody else, with few or no exceptions, was either an enemy or a bore. In France it is true, the bad as well as the good points, both of individual and of national character, come more to the surface and break out more fearlessly in ordinary intercourse than in England, but the general habit of the people is to show, as well as to expect, friendly feelings in everyone towards every other, wherever there is not some positive cause for the opposite. In England it is only of the best-read people in the upper or upper middle ranks that anything like this can be said. In my way through Paris, both going and returning, I passed some time in the house of Michel Say, the imminent political economist, who was a friend and correspondent of my father. Having become acquainted with him on a visit to England a year or two after the peace, he was a man of the later period of the French Revolution, a fine specimen of the best kind of French Republican, one of those who had never bent the knee to Bonaparte, though courted by him to do so, a truly upright, brave, and enlightened man. He lived a quiet and studious life, made happy by warm affections, public and private. He was acquainted with many of the chiefs of the Liberal Party, and I saw various noteworthy persons while staying at his house, among whom I have pleasure in the recollection of having once seen Saint Simon, not yet the founder either of a philosophy or a religion, and considered only as a clever original. The chief fruit which I carried away from the society I saw was a strong and permanent interest in continental liberalism, of which I ever afterward kept myself all current, as much as of English politics, a thing not at all unusual in those days with Englishmen, and which had a very salutary influence on my development. Keeping me free from the error always prevalent in England, and from which even my father, with all his superiority to prejudice, was not exempt of judging universal questions by a merely English standard. After passing a few weeks at Cannes, with an old friend of my father's, I returned to England in July 1821, and my education resumed its ordinary course.