been shown to be the result, not of exchange alone, but also of moral, religious, and family ideas and sentiments, and the whole history of the nation. The distribution effected by exchange itself demonstrably varies at different stages of social progress, and is by no means in accordance with the doctrines of à priori political economy. Every successive stage-the hunting, the pastoral, the agricultural, the commercial stages, for example—has an economy which is indissolubly connected with the physical, intellectual, moral, and civil development; and the economical condition of English society at this day is the outcome of the entire movement which has evolved the political constitution, the structure of the family, the forms of religion, the learned professions, the arts and sciences, the state of agriculture, manufactures and commerce. The philosophical method of political economy must be one which expounds this evolution.

XV.

JOHN STUART MILL.*

(The Academy, June 5, 1875.)

THE Volume which completes the series of Mr. Mill's Dissertations and Discussions, illustrates a passage in his Autobiography, in which he describes his own as 'a mind which was always pressing forward, equally ready to learn either from his own thoughts or from those of others.' History affords scarcely another example of a philosopher so ready to review his positions, to abandon them if untenable, and to take lessons from his own. disciples, as the discussion, for instance, of Mr. Thornton's book on Labour shows Mr. Mill to have been. On the other hand, the volume adds links to a chain of evidence against another judgment pronounced by Mr. Mill on his own intellect, in a passage of his Autobiography which speaks of his natural powers as not above par but rather below it, and of his eminence being due, among other fortunate circumstances, to his early training.' His early training had undoubtedly a remarkable effect on his intellectual career-though in our judgment a very different one from that attributed to it by himself; and certainly without reference to it, neither his system of philosophy nor his mental calibre can be properly estimated. It ought to be taken into particular account in connexion with some phases of his economics exhibited in the volume before us; but the question with respect to its influence has a much wider importance. It is a special instance of the great general question concerning not only the causes which produce great minds and direct their energies, but also those which govern the general course of This article appeared as a review of Volume IV. of Mr. Mill's Dissertations and Discussions.

philosophy and thought, since Mr. Mill's works had no small share in determining the ideas held in his time by a great part of the civilized world on some of the principal subjects of both theoretical speculation and practical opinion. For it will not be disputed that he was looked up to in several countries as the writer of chief authority on logic, political economy, and politics, and one of the first on psychology and morals. Latterly, however-not to speak of the passing influence of a political reaction on his popularity-it has been generally admitted that his methods in mental and social philosophy were inadequate; and his political economy is now censured, especially in Germany, for inconsistency and insufficient breadth of conception. 'His ground-plan,' says Dr. Roscher in his History of German Political Economy, 'is a mere theory of the tendencies of undisturbed individual interest, yet he frequently admits the existence of practical exceptions to the theoretical rules thus arrived at, and the presence of other forces and motives.' Other writers, English, Germans, and Americans, have expressed astonishment that he could ever have adopted the doctrine of the wages-fund, which two of the dissertations in the present volume show that he finally discarded. The inquiry follows, Are the defects of his system to be traced to his own mind, or to his education ?

One thing is plain in the matter. Education can nurture, develop, and direct the application of great mental powers; it can also misdirect, and even cramp and distort, but cannot create them. And no man without great and varied powers could have produced such works as Mr. Mill's System of Logic, Principles of Political Economy, Examination of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy, and the four volumes of Dissertations and Discussions; not to speak of minor works, such as his essays on Utilitarianism and Liberty. One of his Dissertations shows that even a poetical fibre-one rarely found in the logician or the economist-was not absent from his mental constitution; and more than one of them refutes Dr. Roscher's criticism that 'his was not an historical mind,' if by that is meant that he lacked the genius for historical inquiry; though it must be confessed that the historical method is rarely applied in his philosophy. Add to this, that thirty-six of the best years of his

life were spent in a public office in which he displayed administrative powers of the first order, and discharged his official duties not only with efficiency, but such ease and despatch, that he found time to distinguish himself among the foremost writers in several departments of intellectual speculation; and that he afterwards took a considerable place as a debater in Parliament. The man who did all these things also exhibited in private society remarkable conversational powers, quickness of apprehension and reply, a facility of allusion and anecdote, with a vein of gentle humour, and such felicity and force of expression that even when his conversation was grave, the present writer was often reminded of Steele's description of Sir Andrew Freeport that 'the perspicuity of his discourse gave the same pleasure that wit would in another man.'

If, however, Mr. Mill's early training' does not account for his intellectual eminence, it assuredly went far to form his philosophy; but a great deal more than the peculiar mental discipline to which his father subjected him must be included in that early training. We must include the fundamental conceptions, and the method of inquiry, of the leading intellects of the age from which he received his education. It was an age in which Bentham was justly regarded as the first social philosopher -Ricardo less justly as the highest authority in political economy, in spite of the protest of Malthus against his abstractions and precipitate generalization; Mr. Mill's father, James Mill, as the most eminent political thinker and writer of the time, and one of its chief lights in psychology; and John Austin as facile princeps in jurisprudence. No leaders of thought ever reposed more unbounded confidence in their own systems than did this famous band. They seemed to themselves to hold in their hands the key's to every problem in the science of man. In psychology the master-key was the association of ideas; in morals it was utility ascertained by a balance of pleasures and pains; in political philosophy it was utility combined with representative government; in political economy it was pecuniary self-interest together with the principle of population; in jurisprudence it was a particular definition of law and classifi cation of rights. All these methods the younger Mill applied

with a power never surpassed, and in addition he in good part created a system of logic which may be corrected and improved, but will ever hold a place among the chief works of the human mind. It was the fault of his age and of his education if the doctrine of evolution found no place in his psychology or his social science; if the historical method was taken up in his Political Economy, as it was in the Preliminary Remarks of his treatise, only to be laid aside; and if corrections from observation and fact of the inferences from à priori reasoning appear, both in that treatise and in the present volume of his Dissertations and Discussions, only in the form of practical exceptions to abstract theory, or of 'applications' of economic science, when the fault really lay in the original conception of the science itself. It was not possible to weld the abstractions of Ricardo and the actual forces governing economic phenomena into a consistent and scientific system; or to furnish an adequate theory of the origin and growth of human ideas without investigation of the entire history of human society. But if any one individual is especially to be blamed for the shortcomings of his system, it is not John, but James Mill. No training ever was more carefully adapted at once to crush all originality and to inspire excessive confidence in the methods adopted, than that which the younger Mill received from his father. It should, too, be borne in mind that the à priori political economy had its chief charm for John Mill, not in the simplicity and symmetry which recommended it to narrower and shallower minds, but in the complete individual liberty which it supposes. How far he was from trusting to individual interest to secure the best economy in all cases, is sufficiently shown in the remarks in the first dissertation in the present volume (on Endowments) with respect to free trade in general, and to the doctrine that education should be left to demand and supply, in particular.

The action of demand and supply in another economic aspect, namely on value, is discussed with conspicuous ability in the second dissertation, on Mr. Thornton's book. The theory of a wages-fund, the proportion of which to the number of labourers in the country determines the price of labour, is there rejected; and it should be observed that this doctrine was not