In May 1873, the British establishment was shaken by a bitter row. It concerned the legacy of John Stuart Mill, who had just died. The Times had printed an obituary which was an exercise in posthumous character assassination. It was written by Abraham Hayward, a Tory lawyer and fierce critic of liberals, feminists and philosophers. Mill (who was guilty on all three counts) had been a target of Hayward’s vitriol ever since the two had faced each other in the London Debating Society half a century earlier and Mill, in the words of one observer, had “gone over Hayward as a ploughshare goes over a mouse.”
The Thunderer’s obit caused a retaliatory strike by the liberal cleric Stopford Brooke, during his Sunday sermon at St James’s. This provoked Hayward to print an even more savage attack, focusing on an incident from 1823, when the 17-year-old Mill had been arrested for the distribution of literature on contraception. More articles and pamphlets appeared, on both sides, and the controversy raged for weeks. One of the unfortunate by-products of the row was the decision by William Gladstone to withdraw his support from a committee to erect a monument to Mill’s memory, an act of cowardice for which he has been condemned by even his most eulogistic biographers. It was Gladstone who called Mill “the saint of rationalism,” which, though meant affectionately, contributed to the false picture of Mill handed down to us today: a boy crammed with facts who grew into an ascetic, dry, humourless, sexless, lofty intellectual.
The furious exchanges following Mill’s death point to the inadequacy of this caricature. Mill’s greatness does not in fact lie in the power of his intellectual endeavour: he is far from being Britain’s greatest thinker. Nor does it lie in his political skills—by traditional criteria he was a political failure. The greatness of John Stuart Mill lies in his refusal to separate thought and action. He was a man who, like his godson Bertrand Russell, went to jail for his beliefs. He said that “ideas have consequences”—but was rarely content to limit himself to the former.
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