John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works: Twelve Sketches by Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison, and Other Distinguished Authors — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works: Twelve Sketches by Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison, and Other Distinguished Authors
John Stuart Mill · en
But he is dead now. Although the great fruits of his life--a life in
which mind and heart, in which senses and emotions, were singularly
well balanced--are fruits that cannot die, all the tender ties of
friendship, all the strictly personal qualities that so much aided his
work as a teacher of the world, as the foremost leader of his
generation in the search after truth and righteousness, are now
snapped forever. Only four weeks ago he left London for a
three-months' stay in Avignon. Two weeks ago he was in his customary
health. On the 5th of May he was attacked by a virulent form of
erysipelas. On the 8th he died. On the 10th he was buried in the grave
to which he had, through fourteen years, looked forward as a pleasant
resting-place, because during fourteen years there had been in it a
vacant place beside the remains of the wife whom he so fondly loved.
H. R. FOX BOURNE.
II.
HIS CAREER IN THE INDIA HOUSE
I have undertaken to prepare a sketch of Mr. Mill's official career,
but find, on inquiry, scarcely any thing to add to the few particulars
on the subject which have already found their way into print. Of his
early official associates, all have, with scarcely an exception,
already passed away; and there is no one within reach to whom I can
apply for assistance in verifying or correcting my own impressions.
These are in substance the following.
In the few last decades of its existence, the East-India Company's
establishment, in Leadenhall Street, consisted of three
divisions,--the secretary's, military secretary's, and examiners'
offices,--in the last of which most of the despatches and letters were
composed which were afterwards signed by the directors or the
secretary. Into this division, in the year 1821, the directors,
perceiving an infusion of new blood to be very urgently required,
introduced, as assistant examiners, four outsiders,--Mr. Strachey
(father of the present Sir John and Major-Gen. Richard Strachey),
Thomas Love Peacock (author of "Headlong Hall"), Mr. Harcourt, and
Mr. James Mill; the selection of the last-named being all the more
creditable to them, because, in his "History of British India," he had
animadverted with much severity on some parts of the Company's
administration. Two years afterwards, in 1823, the historian's son,
the illustrious subject of these brief memoirs, then a lad of
seventeen, obtained a clerkship under his father. According to the
ordinary course of things in those days, the newly-appointed junior
would have had nothing to do, except a little abstracting, indexing,
and searching, or pretending to search, into records; but young Mill
was almost immediately set to indite despatches to the governments of
the three Indian Presidencies, on what, in India-House phraseology,
were distinguished as "political" subjects,--subjects, that is, for
the most part growing out of the relations of the said governments
with "native" states or foreign potentates. This continued to be his