It was this emotional appeal of Carlyle which made him such a powerful force among thoughtful men and women, and especially among those whom experience had made acquainted with the worst effects of the industrial revolution. His hero-worship gave no little encouragement to the more brutal sort of Toryism, and there are still many English people who believe
that the history of a nation is only the biography of its great men. But his insistence upon the direct responsibility of the social organization for the happiness of every one within it was in the line of a reaction against crude individualism, which by 1850 was strongly marked outside Tory philanthropy. Mrs. Gaskell's Mary Barton, a novel which dealt sympathetically with industrial unrest, was published in 1848. Harriet Martineau, identified with Whiggery and the Manchester School, wrote in 1849 of the state of the wage-earners: "A social idea or system which compels such a state of things as this must be, in so far, worn out. In ours, it is clear that some renovation is wanted, and must be found."[[287]] In 1850 the Christian Socialist movement in the Church of England produced the Tracts on Christian Socialism and Charles Kingsley's novel Alton Locke. Dickens published his Hard Times in 1854, and constantly attacked the system of laissez faire in the columns of Household Words. Ruskin, with less political instinct, pleaded as passionately for beauty in common life as for ethical principles in art, and, like his master Carlyle, clothed his economic sermons in a style which put the cold reasoning of individualism to shame. Even Disraeli, who combined unusual moral levity with an unusual capacity for discovering the set of social currents, gave utterance to similar opinions in Sybil and other novels. By the time that the working men were enfranchised in 1867, the Parliamentary work of Lord Shaftesbury was being accompanied by a general movement in society. Negative Liberalism, the removal of restrictions upon the individual, had obviously produced little direct good among the poorer people. It was time that humane and generous impulses in the direction of positive assistance had their way. The difference between the new Liberalism and the old was the difference between emancipation and toleration, between leaving alone and setting free.
The influence of John Stuart Mill was not so much in the direction of definite changes in society as in the direction of
an alteration of mental processes by which such changes became possible. Liberal thinkers like Paine and Bentham had assailed the human mind from without, clamouring about its gates with completely fashioned ideas, which they endeavoured to thrust into it by a sort of intellectual assault. They had no doubts of their own rightness or of the duty of others to agree with them. Mill, chiefly through his acquaintance with the evolutionary ideas of Comte, was of a more tolerant disposition, and preferred to adopt the method of getting to understand how his adversary's error had arisen, and of persuading him, as it were, to retrace his steps, and by choosing another road, arrive at a sounder conclusion. His book on Logic was an attempt to alter the prevailing system of intuitional philosophy, by which he believed that prejudices and the dictates of interest were assumed to be absolute truths, and to substitute for it a system in which every idea might be thoroughly examined and tested before it was adopted. In other words, he proposed to do with the conceptions of philosophy what Bentham proposed to do with institutions, to accept none, except on their merits. He thus hoped to produce, not definitely new ideas, but a condition of mind to which new ideas would not be repugnant. This method of undermining his adversary's position was his method in politics as in general philosophy.
Mill was the son of a Utilitarian, and was himself a disciple of Bentham. But he never accepted the Benthamite theory without qualification. He knew that men were actuated by other motives, good and bad, than self-interest. He did not believe that by setting all men free to pursue their own interest the majority would achieve happiness. He did not believe that it was enough in politics to enfranchise every person of twenty-one years of age, or that a democracy might not be guilty of as abominable tyranny as a despot or an oligarchy. He held most of the Benthamite principles, as forming the best working philosophy, but he never supposed that they would not require safeguards against abuse, or would inevitably produce the desired result. Bentham said, "This individual is actuated by this
motive; apply this remedy to his condition, and he will develop himself to this point." Mill said, "This individual seems to be actuated by various motives, of which this seems to be the most important, his history and the experience of other individuals suggests that if this remedy is applied to his condition he will tend to develop himself to this point. I will therefore make the experiment." Bentham was always confident and dogmatic. Mill was never more than patient and hopeful.
Mill in effect combined the qualities of the historical and the critical schools of thought. His was not the vigorous hammering method of previous Liberals, but a cold, illuminating, and suggestive examination, which gave full credit to the existing institution, even while it displayed its defects. He asked, "How has it grown?" as earnestly as "How does it work?" and he lamented the indifference of his predecessors to history. "No one can calculate what struggles, which the cause of improvement has yet to undergo, might have been spared if the philosophers of the eighteenth century had done anything like justice to the past."[[288]] Every institution is to be studied historically, though it must be justified empirically. If it is bad in use, it must be reformed or abolished, but the change must be made along the line of past growth. What he said of the position of women he applied to every other problem. "The least that can be demanded is, that the question should not be considered as prejudged by existing fact and existing opinion, but open to discussion on its merits, as a question of justice and expediency; the decision on this, as on any of the other social arrangements of mankind, depending on what an enlightened estimate of tendencies and consequences may show to be most advantageous to humanity in general.... Through all the progressive period of human history, the condition of women has been approaching nearer to equality with men. This does not of itself prove that the assimilation must go on to complete equality, but it assuredly affords some presumption that such is the case."[[289]] This double view, combining the Radical view of Bentham with the historical
view of Burke, enabled Mill to see his subject, as it were, stereoscopically and in true relation with its surroundings. He was not influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution. But his own work produced a very similar effect. It made men accustomed to the idea of continuous alteration, of future as well as past growth.
Mill was thus the most prominent thinker of a time in which old systems of thought were being undermined. Natural science and the higher criticism were breaking up the foundations of authority in religion, and Mill's general method of dealing with habits of thought, no less than the direct plea for free thinking and free speaking contained in his treatise on Liberty, gave a wider scope to honest scepticism. He expressed approval of some of the new Socialistic projects. He was in favour of compulsory education, of the regulation of hours of labour, of Trade Unionism and co-operation, and he looked forward to a time "when the division of the produce of labour, instead of depending, as in so great a degree it now does, on the accident of birth, will be made in concert on an acknowledged principle of justice." The social problem of the future, he said, would be "how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action with a common ownership of the new material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour."[[290]] His most original contribution to politics was his appeal for absolute equality of freedom for men and women, which was the first effective attempt to remove the class brand from women, and to abolish the aristocracy of sex. But his most valuable work, as has already been suggested, was not so much to sow new political ideas in the minds of his followers as to plough them for the reception of such ideas. He did not so much start them along new paths as set them to inquire whether they were right in remaining in the old, and whether there was any real danger in leaving them. As solvents of prejudice, Mill's works have not been surpassed by any. He promoted, not change, but the readiness to change; not Liberal measures, but
Liberal-mindedness. Thus persuaded to refrain from hasty judgments upon opinions, and to accept every new idea upon its merits, the rising generation applied itself to the working of the improved political machine.