(_To Madame Mohl._) SOUTH ST., _Dec._ 19 [1873].... You asked me what Mill's _Autobiography_ was like: and as it is a book impossible to describe, I send it to you. I think it almost the most curious and interesting of modern books I ever read; but curious just as much for its nonsense as for its sense. I should think the account he gives of his intellectual and moral growth from the age of three quite unique: quite as singular as if a man were able to describe all his anatomy and physiology in a state of growth from the time he was three. But quite, quite as extraordinary as this is his own stupidity in not seeing that very many of his moral and intellectual, and especially of his religious, opinions were fixed inalterably for him by the process he underwent, so that all his reasoning afterwards upon them was _un_reasoning: fixed as much beyond his power to change, or even to see that a change was desirable or possible, as the eyes of a man who becomes stone-blind in his youth, or the right arm of a man who is paralysed on that side, or &c., &c., &c. He has written me pages and pages, which I never could understand--from a man so able--till I read his _Autobiography_: that--there being Laws was no proof of there being a Law-giver; that--if evil were to produce good, there ought to be _more_ of it! Then, you see he says in his book that his wife was to be applauded, because she had thrown aside the "monstrous superstition" that this world _could_ be made on the best possible design for perfecting Good thro' Evil!... And I still think the _Autobiography_, its high tone, its disinterested nobility of feeling and love of mankind, one of the most inspiring (modern) books I know. But then please to remember: when Mill left the India Office he might most materially have helped all my Sanitary Commissions, Irrigation and Civilizing Schemes for India. He did nothing. He was quite incapable of understanding anything but schemes on paper, correspondence, the literary Office aspect in short, for India. As for that jargon about the "Inspiration" coming from "woman," I really am incapable of conceiving its meaning: if it has any at all. I am sure that my part in Administration has been the very reverse of "Inspiration": it has been the fruit of dogged work, of hard experience and observation, such as few men have undergone: correcting by close detail work the errors of men which came from what I suppose is called their "inspiration": what _I_ should call their Theory without Practical knowledge or patient personal experience.