8 May: Boreham on John Stuart Mill

Evolution of an Economist
It is just three years and ten since John Stuart Mill passed from us.[1] He died on May 8, 1873. The extraordinary thing about him is that he combined in his own person two virtues seldom found in unison. He cherished a profound respect for hoary precedent, and at the same time was ever on the look-out for some means of improving upon existing customs and advancing beyond the rigid frontier of accepted thought. He was both a conservative and a rebel. The story of his education, as told by himself, will probably stand for all time as one of literature's most amazing revelations. He had the most remarkable father by whom any man was ever blessed—or cursed.

The elder Mill believed that if you want a thing well done you should do it yourself. He desired above all things that his boy should be well-educated, and therefore appointed himself his son's instructor and set about the responsible duties of that high office in a way peculiarly his own. As soon as the child could lisp the first broken syllables of baby speech he was compelled to tackle subjects usually reserved for a secondary or higher education. At the age of three, under his father's stern tuition, Mill was hard at work on Greek idioms. "My earliest recollection," he says, "is that of committing to memory what my father termed vocables, being lists of Greek words with their signification in English, which he wrote out for me on cards." By the time the boy was eight he had read most of the Greek classics and was grinding away at Latin. Such studies occupied his daylight hours. In the evening he was allowed, as a recreation, to amuse himself with mathematics!

The Triumph Of A Benevolent Despotism
When, under this severe regime, Mill reached the mature age of 13, he deliberately selected as his life work the study of political economy. It is always a difficult realm to conquest but Mill's position was made the more embarrassing by the circumstance that the field was strongly held by two illustrious and authoritative predecessors. Adam Smith and Ricardo were then truly Homeric figures. They bestrode the narrow world of contemporary thought like a pair of colossi. The magic of their names was a thing to conjure with. A citation from their work was hailed as the last word that wisdom was able to utter. Mill can have had little hope, when he first essayed such an abstruse and unalluring study, of making for himself a name that would carry even greater weight than the names of these old masters.

In nine cases out of 10 discipline as severe as that which the elder Mill imposed on the budding economist would have issued in intellectual revolt. In this instance no such disaster occurred. The boy marvelled at his father's enthusiasm, while the elder man's patience awoke his ceaseless admiration. The two sat on opposite sides of the same desk. John was under the necessity, every few minutes, of appealing to his mentor on some point that puzzled him. This incessant fusillade of troublesome questions," he says, "he endured with unruffled serenity, and in such trying conditions wrote several volumes of his famous 'History of India.'" It is significant, too, that when, for his health's sake, the father took his daily walk across the fields and down the lanes that surrounded their home, the son invariably accompanied him, not by compulsion but from choice and, to his dying day, remembered pleasurably this communion with his taskmaster in the open air. And when, at the age of 14, the son passed from beneath the father's hands, he voluntarily continued the studies to which his father had introduced him and maintained them unabated to the end.

Man Who Set Political Economy To Music
It has to be recognised, too, that if the old man made the boyhood of his son a little difficult, he made easy the life work of the years that followed. For when, at the age of 40, John Stuart Mill sat down to write his "Principles of Political Economy," he wrote, not slowly and laboriously, but swiftly and with the facility that was made possible to him by a richly-stored and overflowing mind. His whole personality saturated in the subjects that he had so endlessly discussed with his father, he wrote as rapidly and with as easy a flow as if he had been writing a novel, the web of which he was weaving entirely from the tissue of his own imagination. The facts were all at his fingers' end. The arguments were the commonplaces of his daily reflections. His scheme of thought was mature. He penned his pages with the utmost readiness and fluency. The public, on opening a volume of his works, found in it nothing stilted, involved, or intricate. The skein was never tangled, the thread easily unwound. Here was a massive mind talking familiarly on massive subjects and making the most obscure points crystal clear.

Later Mill broadened the scope of his activities. Haunted doubtless by the memory of those primrosed walks in his father's company, he wrote essays on Nature, poetry, and many lighter and more popular subjects. He refused to allow the arteries of his fancy to harden. His mind never shrivelled. When nearly 60 he entered Parliament but, with all his learning, he had failed to acquire the art of ingratiating himself with the crowd and of accommodating his judgment to the will of party leaders. His extreme candour soon lost him his seat and he retired, with an amused smile, to a flowery retreat specially prepared for him in the south of France. There, just 70 years ago today, he died, bequeathing to his country the memory of a singularly honest man who, thinking clearly and speaking simply, would rather die a thousand deaths than utter one single word that did not accurately reflect his secret and most profound convictions.

[1] This editorial appeared in the Hobart Mercury on 8 May 1943.

F W Boreham

Image: John Stuart Mill