victory has been complete. Only those who can recall the social odium that surrounded heretical opinions before Mill began to achieve popularity, are able rightly to appreciate the battle in which he was in so many aspects the protagonist. Mill's life as disclosed to us in his Autobiography has been called joyless, by that sect of religious partisans whose peculiarity is to mistake boisterousness for unction. Can the life of any man be joyful who sees and feels the tragic miseries and hardly less tragic follies of the earth? The old Preacher, when he considered all the oppressions that are done under the sun, and beheld the tears of such as were oppressed and had no comforter, therefore praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive, and declared him better than both, who hath not yet been, who hath not seen the evil work that is done under the Those who are willing to play fast and loose with words may, if they please, console themselves with the commonplaces of a philosophic optimism. They may, with eyes tight shut, cling to the notion that they live in the best of all possible worlds, or, discerning all the anguish that may be compressed into threescore years and ten, still try to accept the Stoic's paradox that pain is not an evil. Mill's conception of happiness is more intelligible if we contrast it with his father's. The Cynic element in James Mill, as his son tells us (p. 48), was that he had scarcely any belief in pleasures; he thought few of them worth the price which has to be paid for them; and he set down the greater number of the miscarriages in life as due to an excessive estimate of them. We should shrink from calling even this theory dreary, associated as it is with the rigorous enforcement of the heroic virtues of temperance and moderation, and the strenuous bracing up of every faculty to face the inevitable and make the best of it. We can have no difficulty in understanding that, when the elder Mill lay dying, "his interest in all things and persons that had interested him through life was undiminished, nor did the approach of death cause the smallest wavering (as in so strong and firm a mind it was impossible that it should), in his convictions on the subject of religion. His principal satisfaction, after he knew that his end was near, seemed to be the thought of what he had done to make the world better than he found it; and his chief regret in not living longer, that he had not had time to do more (p. 203). J. S. Mill, however, went beyond this conception. He had a belief in pleasures, and thought human life by no means a poor thing to those who know how to make the best of it. It was essential both to his utilitarian philosophy, and to the contentment of his own temperament, that the reality of happiness should be vindicated. He did both vindicate and attain it. A highly pleasurable excitement that should have no end, of course he did not think possible; but he regarded the two constituents of a satisfied life, much tranquillity combined with some excitement, as perfectly attainable by many men, and as ultimately attainable by very many more. The ingredients of this satisfaction he set forth as follows:-a willingness not to expect more from life than life is capable of bestowing; an intelligent interest in the objects of mental culture; genuine private affections; and a sincere interest in the public good. What, on the other hand, are the hindrances that prevent these elements from being in the possession of every one born in a civilised country? Ignorance; bad laws or customs, debarring a man or woman from the sources 1 For the mood in which death was faced by another person who had renounced theology and the doctrine of a future state of consciousness, see Miss Martineau's Autobiography, ii. 435, etc. of happiness within reach; and "the positive evils of life, the great sources of physical and mental suffering such as indigence, disease, and the unkindness, worthlessness, or premature loss of objects of affection." But every one of these calamitous impediments is susceptible of the weightiest modification, and some of them of final removal. Mill had learnt from Turgot and Condorcet, among many other lessons, this of the boundless improvableness of the human lot, and we may believe that he read over many a time the pages in which Condorcet delineated the Tenth Epoch in the history of human perfectibility, and traced out in words of reserved enthusiasm the operation of the forces that should consummate the progress of the race. "All the grand sources of human suffering," Mill thought, "are in a great degree, many of them almost entirely, conquerable by human care and effort; and though their removal is grievously slow-though a long succession of generations will perish in the breach before the conquest is completed, and this world becomes all that, if will and knowledge were not wanting, it might easily be made yet every mind sufficiently intelligent and generous to bear a part, however small and unconspicuous, in the endeavour, will draw a noble enjoyment from the contest itself, which he would not for any bribe in the form of selfish indulgence consent to be without " (Utilitarianism, 22). We thus see how far from dreary this wise and benignant man actually found his own life; how full it was of cheerfulness and animation. Much has been said against Mill's strictures on society, and his withdrawal from it. If we realise the full force of all that he says of his own purpose in life, it is hard to see how either his opinion or his practice could have been different. He ceased to 1 For this exposition see Utilitarianism, pp. 18-24. be content with "seconding the superficial improvements" in common ways of thinking, and saw the necessity of working at a fundamental reconstitution of accepted modes of thought. This in itself implies a condemnation of a social intercourse that rests on the base of conventional ways of looking at things. The better kind of society, it is true, appears to contain two classes; not only the class that will hear nothing said hostile to the greater social conventions, including among these the popular theology, but also another class who will tolerate or even encourage attack on the greater social conventions, and a certain mild discussion of improvements in them-provided only neither attack nor discussion be conducted in too serious a vein. A new idea about a Supreme Being, or property, or the family, is handed round among the company, as ladies of quality in Queen Anne's time handed round a black page or a China monster. In Bishop Butler's phrase, these people only want to know what is said, not what is true. In the later years, when he had travelled over the smooth places of a man's life and the rough places, his younger friends never heard a word fall from him that did not encourage and direct; and nobody that ever lived enjoyed more of that highest of pleasures, the pointing the right path for new wayfarers, urging them to walk in it. "Montesquieu must die," exclaimed old Bentham, in a rare mood of rhapsody; "he must die as his great countryman, Descartes, had died before him he must wither as the blade withers when the corn is ripe; he must die, but let tears of gratitude and admiration bedew his grave." So the pilgrim may feel to-day, as he stands by that mournful grave at windy Avignon, city of sombre history and forlorn memories, where Mill's remains were laid a generation ago this month (May 1873). Measure the permanence of his contribution to thought or |