The Pursuit of Certainty

16. James Mill

CHAPTER 16 James Mill It was a triumph of conviction over temperament when James Mill became associated with Bentham. For the two men could hardly have had more different dispositions or more opposed notions about the way to live. James Mill was a Northerner, a son of the Kirk, who had never known ease of any kind. His family, being both humble and ambitious, were as immune to pleasure as the strictest interpreter of the Kirk's dour views might require. And his mother, who felt she had been dragged down in the world by her marriage to a shoemaker, was determined to restore her son to what she regarded as his rightful heritage. Fortune favoured her with a son who shared her hopes. From childhood on, he endeavoured, with all the determined discipline of a hard-working Calvinist tradesman, to improve himself and to rise in the world; his chosen way up, however, was learning rather than commerce. In due course, he was licensed to preach, and took up his duties willingly enough; but for all his efforts, success as a preacher did not come. He was not given a parish, and in 1802, at the age of twenty-nine, he was driven to try his luck in London as a journalist. At first London seemed to him a land of boundless freedom and opportunity . "You get an ardour and a spirit of adventurousness, which you never can get any idea of among our own overcautious countrymen at home," he wrote back in his first letter.1 There, it seemed, the most romantic schemes were welcome, unlike Scotland, where the slightest oddity was at once repressed . It was encouraging to see how little talent there was. He attended parliament regularly, and found the ministers and most of the members, with but a few distinguished exceptions like Fox, far inferior to the orators in the 1. Alexander Bain, fames Mill (London, 1882), p. 37. 204 John Stuart Mill General Assembly of Scotland. They had nothing to say, no notion of how to say it with order and distinction, and were in fact "more like boys in an evening society at college, than senators carrying on the business of a great nation."1 With so little competition, the possibilities seemed most promising. He was ready to "labour hard and live penuriously," and once started, he was certain that "It will be devilish hard, if a man, good for anything, cannot keep himself alive here on such terms."2 Anyone who might be of use to him was carefully cultivated, and by the end of the first year, Mill had succeeded remarkably well. He was to edit as well as contribute to a new literary review, the LiteraryJournal; he also became editor of the St. James Chronicle, and a frequent contributor to other reviews. As his income seemed very substantial, he became engaged to the daughter of a well-to-do widow and married her in 1805. But the prosperity did not continue. By the end of 1806, when he was already the father of a son, John Stuart, the Literary journal ceased publication ; having before that given up the Chronicle, he was left with nothing but the income from reviews, amounting to hardly anything. He decided to stake his savings on a history of India, which was to be completed in three years, and establish him both financially and professionally. His spirits were not high, and early in 1807, he wrote sadly to his friend, Barclay, "Have you no good kirk yet in your neighbourhood, which you could give me, and free me from this life of toil and anxiety which I lead here? This London is a place in which it is far easier to spend a fortune than to make one. I know not how it is; but I toil hard, spend little, and yet am never the more forward."3 The history, which was distinguished by its contempt for almost every feature of Indian life, Hindu and Moslem, and became a manual for all the more humane and enlightened administrators of India, was not published until twelve years later. During that time Mill became the father of nine, a man very much harassed by financial difficulties, and Bentham's leading apostle. He met Bentham in 1808, and it would seem from the effusive admiration in his letters of the following year that he may already have been converted, at least to Bentham's legal theories. There is little...