“_Mr. Mill never asserted ‘that under no despotic government does any human being, except the tools of the sovereign possess more than the necessaries of life, and that the most intense degree of terror is kept up by constant cruelty.’ He said that absolute power leads to such results, ‘by infallible sequence, where power over a community is attained, and nothing checks’ The critic on the Mount never made a more palpable misquotation. “The spirit of this misquotation runs through every part of the reply of the Edinburgh Review that relates to the Essay on Government; and is repeated in as many shapes as the Roman pork. The whole description of ‘Mr. Mill’s argument against despotism,’--including the illustration from right-angled triangles and the square of the hypothenuse,--is founded on this invention of saying what an author has not said, and leaving unsaid what he has_.” We thought, and still think, for reasons which our readers will soon understand, that we represented Mr. Mill’s principle quite fairly, and according to the rule of law and common sense, _ut res magis valeat guam pereat_. Let us, however, give him all the advantage of the explanation tendered by his advocate, and see what he will gain by it. The Utilitarian doctrine then is, not that despots and aristocracies will always plunder and oppress the people to the last point, but that they will do so if nothing checks them. In the first place, it is quite clear that the doctrine {100}thus stated is of no use at all, unless the force of the checks be estimated. The first law of motion is, that a ball once projected will fly on to all eternity with undiminished velocity, unless something checks. The fact is, that a ball stops in a few seconds after proceeding a few yards with very variable motion. Every man would wring his child’s neck and pick his friend’s pocket if nothing checked him. In fact, the principle thus stated means only that governments will oppress unless they abstain from oppressing. This is quite true, we own. But we might with equal propriety turn the maxim round, and lay it down, as the fundamental principle of government, that all rulers will govern well, unless some motive interferes to keep them from doing so. If there be, as the Westminster Reviewer acknowledges, certain checks which, under political institutions the most arbitrary in seeming, sometimes produce good government, and almost always place some restraint on the rapacity and cruelty of the powerful, surely the knowledge of those checks, of their nature, and of their effect, must be a most important part of the science of government. Does Mr. Mill say any thing upon this part of the subject? Not one word.