England's Disgrace?: J.S. Mill and the Irish Question (review)

England's Disgrace? J. S. Mill and the Irish Question. By Bruce L. Kinzer. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. 292 pp. $60.00.

Toward the end of a review of ten of the thirty-three hefty volumes of the Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Stefan Collini, slightly giddy after ingesting so much undiluted Mill, offers a platform speech à la Mill praising the editors of the Collected Works. Bruce Kinzer is singled out for special commendation:

His Introduction to the present volumes maintains a standard which I shall not say has never suffered a blemish (cries of Name!), and of which modesty forbids me to give too extended or too favourable a consideration (laughter); but for command of information concerning the doings of the public men of the time, combined with sympathetic familiarity with the principles governing our great author's thought on all germane subjects, his discussion could be equaled by few and bettered by none (applause). (Collini 1999, 142)

The same high level of scholarship is very much in evidence in England's Disgrace? (Mill would probably have dispensed with the question mark.) Mill was engaged by the “Irish question” intermittently throughout his life, and one of the great merits of Kinzer's meticulous study is that it nicely merges a chronological narrative with a thematic analysis.

In the first phase, Ireland for Mill was important largely as the scene of the most spectacular aristocratic abuses in the British Isles. He deprecated Catholic Emancipation, the dominant issue in the 1820s. “It is not the power of the Protestant over the Catholic, which has made Ireland what she is: it is the power of the rich over the poor” (18). Without parliamentary reform, Catholic Emancipation would permit only a small fraction of the population to vote and hold office, and it was simply a ploy to divert attention from an indefensible distribution of political power. But despite his keen sense of the evils of English rule, Mill could not bring himself to advocate a clean break, either in the 1820s or subsequently. James Mill had no doubt that the connection should be immediately dissolved. But for his fretful, conscientious son, cutting Ireland loose would compound England's crime. Receptive to St. Simonian elitism following his “mental crisis” in 1826, Mill came to believe that the right kind of Englishman had much to teach the Irish, “a people whose national character has run wild” (36). There was little doubt who were to be the point men in the mission civilatrice: “Those Englishmen who know something of India are even now those who understand Ireland best” (57). Those who knew something of India knew that Lord Cornwallis's Permanent Settlement—an attempt to impose the English land system on India—had been a disaster for India's peasants. But at this juncture Mill was uninterested in land reform.

He had already begun work on the Principles of Political Economy when the entire Irish potato crop was devastated in 1846. The famine that followed provoked a remarkable series of forty-three leading articles from Mill in the influential Morning Chronicle. In this plunge back into political journalism, Mill tirelessly advocated, along with the reclamation of wasteland, the introduction of peasant proprietorships, “a proposal,” Kinzer observes, “that promised to both elevate the character of the Irish peasantry and reduce their dependence on parasitical landlords” (58). While Continental writers, not W. T. Thornton's Overpopulation and Its Remedy (1846), piqued Mill's interest in alternative systems of land tenure, Thornton's book was unquestionably influential; Mill clearly drew on chapter 9 for his Morning Chronicle articles.

Mill opposed emigration and outdoor relief (wage subsidies), and the proprietorships (actually land rented to tenants in perpetuity) were confined to wasteland purchased by the state. So it is hard to see what positive short-run impact his proposals would have had had they been enacted, as Lord John Russell briefly attempted to do—inspired more by...