England's Disgrace? J.S. Mill and the Irish Question by Bruce L. Kinzer (review)

humanities 451 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 workers under him did not. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, preferring the subsistence farming of the old country to incipient agri-business, forsook prairie grasslands for the forested park belt northeast of Edmonton. Missioners here laboured indefatigably, not least in providing medical services and schooling for children. Most of the women Methodists were graduates of Victoria College, University of Toronto; Edith Weekes, who pioneered a Ukrainian-English dictionary, had been awarded the gold medal in modern languages at Victoria. Throughout his treatment Emery recognizes that human beings are endlessly complex. His social history is commensurately nuanced and unfailingly sensitive to wounds and wonders that may puzzle yet perdure. Eschewing both sycophantic hagiography and contemptuous superiority concerning those whose work he assesses, he recognizes Methodist missioners to have done their best with the equipment they had, and all of this amid hardships so severe, for instance, that the clergy drop-out rate was three times higher in the west than in central Canada. Emery=s social history includes, perforce, discussions of Methodist popular religious expression. He does not attempt an exploration of the academic Methodist theology ascendant at this point in Canada=s history. That work would complement his book and fill a lacuna in Canadian intellectual history. (VICTOR SHEPHERD) Bruce L. Kinzer. England=s Disgrace? J.S. Mill and the Irish Question University of Toronto Press. x, 292. $60.00 Although John Stuart Mill never travelled to Ireland, his interest in the Irish Question spanned four decades. Despite Mill=s stature as leading public moralist and pre-eminent mind of his age, there has been no comprehensive examination of Mill=s thought about one of the most incendiary political issues of that age. This gap has been filled by Bruce Kinzer. Drawing on periodical and newspaper journalism, six editions of the Principles of Political Economy, an 1868 pamphlet called England and Ireland, as well as parliamentary speeches and correspondence, Kinzer offers a meticulous and thoroughly researched study. His aim is >to fashion a thorough and systematic analysis of Mill=s multifaceted engagement with the Irish Question.= To that end chapters are arranged chronologically, tracing Mill=s thought from the 1820s through the 1860s. Kinzer contends that Mill=s perspective at first tended to be >acutely Anglocentric= and animated by his concern both for Ireland=s moral improvement and England=s moral responsibility. Initially, forged in the Benthamite mould, Mill linked topics like Catholic emancipation and the Protestant ascendancy with aristocratic domination. Under O=Connell, xxxxxx 452 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Irish disturbance was not due to the Catholic Association, he argued, but to the fact that >there is one law for the rich, and another for the poor.= While supporting Catholic emancipation as less dangerous to the English than the alternative, he opposed the repeal of the Act of Union because England=s >deplorable misgovernment= had not prepared the Irish for the responsible exercise of political freedom. O=Connell, he thought, might be given a place in the project of political realignment that would give more power to the Radicals. (O=Connell thought that his fortunes lay elsewhere.) By 1846 the famine prompted Mill to write forty-three articles in the Morning Chronicle. Here he argued for an economic program which involved the reclamation of the wastelands and settlement of a peasant proprietary on the lands reclaimed as >a measure of social reform and moral regeneration.= Emigration, he said, was no answer to the famine partly because the Irish lacked the >individual hardihood, resource and self-reliance= necessary to thrive in a young country and partly because he believed that England bore a great moral stain for her treatment of Ireland that would not be addressed by embracing a policy of mass emigration. In the early years Mill offered economic and moral regeneration to shrink the economic muscle of the elite. Kinzer argues that when Mill ultimately calls for fixity of tenure in his 1868 pamphlet England and Ireland he is not departing from the moderation evidenced in various editions of the Principles of Political Economy between 1848...