Mr. Mill seems cut out by nature not to be a parliamentary success. He has a thin, fragile, awkward frame; he has a nervous, incessant twitching of the lips and eyes; he has a weak voice and a sort of stammer; he is over sixty years of age; he had never, so far as I know, addressed a political meeting of any kind up to the time of the Westminster contest. Yet with all these disadvantages, Mill has, as a political leader and speaker, been an undoubted success with the country, and a sort of success in the House. An orator of any kind he never could be. One might call him a wretchedly bad speaker, if his speaking were not so utterly unlike anybody else's, as to refuse to be classified with any other speaking, good or bad. But, so far as the best selection of words, the clearest style, the most coherent and convincing argument can constitute eloquence, Mill's speeches are eloquent. They are, of course, only spoken essays. They differ in no wise from the speaker's writings; and I need hardly say that a speech, to be effective, must never be just what the speaker would have written if it were to be consigned at once to print as a letter or an essay. As speeches, therefore, Mr. Mill's utterances in the House have little or no effect. Indeed, they are only listened to by a very few men of real intelligence and judgment on both sides. Some of the more boisterous of the Tories made many attempts to cough and laugh Mill into silence; indeed, there was obviously a deliberate plan of this kind in operation at one time. But Mill is a man whom nothing can deter from saying or doing what he thinks right. A more absolutely fearless being does not exist. He is even free from that fear which has sometimes paralyzed the boldest spirits, the fear of becoming ridiculous. So the Tory trick failed. Mill went on with patient, imperturbable, proud good-humor, despite all interruption—now and then paying off his Tory enemies by some keen contemptuous epigram or sarcasm, made all the more pungent by the thin, bland tone in which it was uttered. So the Tories gave up shouting, groaning and laughing; the more quickly because one at least of their chiefs, the Marquis of Salisbury (then in the House of Commons as Lord Cranbourne) had the spirit and sense to express openly and loudly his anger and disgust at the vulgar and brutal behaviour of some of his followers. Therefore Mr. Mill ceased to be interrupted; but he is not much listened to. That supreme, irrefutable evidence that a man fails to interest the House—the fact that a hum and buzz of conversation may be heard all the time he is speaking—is always fatally manifest when Mr. Mill addresses the Commons. But the House, after all, is only a platform from which a man endeavors to speak to the country, and if Mill does not always get the ear of the House, he never fails to be heard by the nation. I have no doubt that even the Tory members of the House read Mill's speeches when they appear in print; assuredly all intelligent Tories do. These speeches, in any case, are never lost on the country. They form at once a part of the really successful literature of each session. They always excite controversy of some kind—not even the great orations of Bright and Gladstone are more talked of.
So far they are a success, and there is something in the personal character of Mr. Mill himself, which makes him specially popular with the working classes of England. I doubt if there is now any Englishman whose name would be received with a more cordial outburst of applause at a popular meeting. Working-men, in fact, are very proud of Mr. Mill's scholarship, culture, and profundity. They can perceive easily enough that he is remarkable for just those intellectual qualities which the conventional demagogue never has. Tory newspapers and the "Saturday Review" sometimes affect to regard Mr. Bright as a man of defective education, but it is impossible to pretend to think that Mill is ignorant of Greek or superficial in his knowledge of history. When such a man makes himself especially the champion of working-men, the working-men think of him very much as the Irish peasants of '98 and '48 did of Edward Fitzgerald and Smith O'Brien, the aristocrats of birth and rank, who stepped down from their high places and gave themselves up to the cause of the unlettered and the poor.
There is something fascinating, moreover, about the singular blending of the emotional, and even the romantic, with the keen, vigorous, logical intellect, which is to be observed in Mill. Even political economy, in Mill's mind, is strangely guided and governed by mere feeling. Somebody said he was a combination of Ricardo and Tom Hughes—somebody else said, rather more happily, I think, that he is Adam Smith and Fénélon revived and rolled into one. The "Pall Mall Gazette" found his picture well painted in Lord Macaulay's analysis of the motives which influenced Edmund Burke, when he flung his soul into the impeachment of Warren Hastings. The mere eccentricities, the very defects of such a nature have in them something captivating. The admirers of Mr. Mill are therefore not unusually somewhat given to exalting admiration into idolatry. The classes who most admire him are the scholarly and adventurous young Radicals, who have a dash of Positivism in them; the extreme Radicals, who are prepared to go any and all lengths for the mere sake of change; and the working-men.
This is the Triumvirate of the English Liberal Party. Combined they represent, guide, and govern every section and fraction of that party that is worth taking into any consideration. Mr. Gladstone represents official Liberalism; Mr. Bright speaks for and directs the old-fashioned, robust, popular Liberalism of which Manchester was the school; Mr. Mill is the exponent of the new Liberalism, the Liberalism of Idea and Logic. Bright's programme is a little ahead of Gladstone's, but Gladstone will probably be easily pulled up to it. Mill goes far beyond either, far beyond any point at which either is ever likely to arrive. Indeed, Mr. Mill may be fairly described by a phrase, which I believe is German, as a man in advance of every possible future—at least in England. But he is quite prepared to act loyally and steadily with his party and its leader on all momentous issues. On some minor questions he has lately gone widely away from them, and given thereby much offence; and indeed I am sure there are not a few of the old-fashioned Liberals and the Manchester men who would rather Mr. Mill had never come into Parliament and sat at their side. But on nearly all questions of Parliamentary Reform, and on that of the Irish Church, Mill and his Liberal colleagues will pull cordially together. So, too, on most economic questions, reduction of taxation, imposition of duties and the like. Where a sharp difference is likely to arise will only be in relation to some subject having an idea behind it—some question of foreign policy perhaps, something not at present imminent; and, let us hope, not destined in any case to be vital to the interests of the party. Only where an idea is involved will Mr. Mill refuse to allow his own judgment to bend to the general necessities of the party. It was his objection (a very unwise one, I think) to the idea behind the system of the ballot, which led him to separate himself sharply from Bright and other Liberals on that subject; it was the idea which lies at the bottom of a representation of minorities, which beguiled him into lending his advocacy to that most chimerical, awkward, and absurd piece of political mechanism which we know in England as the three-cornered constituency. The cohesion of Gladstone and Bright is decidedly more close and likely to endure than that between Bright and Mill. But on all immediate questions of great importance, these two men are sure to be found side by side. Mill has a deep and earnest admiration for Bright, who is sometimes, perhaps, a little impatient of the Politics of Idea.
During the session of 1868, I attended a meeting of a few representative Liberals of all classes, brought together to decide on some course of agitation with regard to Ireland. Mr. Mill was there, so were Professor Fawcett, Mr. Thomas Hughes, Lord Amberley, and other members of Parliament; Mr. Frederick Harrison, with some of his Positivist colleagues, and several representative working men. Mr. Bright was unable to attend. A certain course of action being recommended, Mr. Mill expressed his own approval of it, but emphatically declared that he considered Mr. Bright's judgment was entitled to be regarded as authoritative, and that should Mr. Bright recommend the meeting not to go on, the scheme had better be given up. Mr. Bright subsequently discouraged the scheme, and it was, on Mr. Mill's recommendation, at once abandoned. I mention this fact to illustrate the loyalty which Mr. Mill, with all his tendency to political eccentricity, usually displays toward the men whom he regards as the leaders of the party.
Mill and Bright are alike warm admirers of Gladstone and believers in him. Indeed one sometimes feels ashamed to doubt for a moment the steadfastness of a man in whom Bright and Mill put so full a faith.
Certainly the English Liberal has reason to congratulate himself, and feel proud when he remembers what sort of men his party's leaders used to be, and sees what men they are to-day. It will not do to study too closely the private characters of the chiefs of any political band in the House of Commons, from the days of Bolingbroke to those of Fox. The man who was not a sinecurist or a peculator was pretty sure to be a profligate or a gambler. Not a few eminent men were sinecurists, peculators, profligates, and gamblers. The political purity of the English Liberal leaders to-day is absolutely without the faintest shade of suspicion—it never even occurs to any one to suspect them, while their private lives, it may be said without indelicacy, are in pure and perfect accord with the noble principles they profess. Not often has there been a political triumvirate of greater men; of better men, never.