John Stuart Mill | Page 2

will add that the
obligation was not exclusively on one side. Bentham was not then, as
he was afterwards, surrounded by persons who courted his society, and
were ever ready to volunteer their services, and, to a man of his
secluded habits, it was no little advantage to have near him such a man
as Mr. Mill, to whose advice and aid he habitually had recourse in all
business transactions with the outward world of a troublesome or
irksome nature. Such as the connection was, it was not of Mr. Mill's
seeking." On the same unquestionable authority we learn, that "Mr.
Mill never in his life was in debt, and his income, whatever it might be,
always covered his expenses." It is clear, that, from near the
commencement of the present century, James Mill and Bentham lived
for many years on terms of great intimacy, in which the poorer man
was thoroughly independent, although it suited the other to make a fair

return for the services rendered to him. A very characteristic letter is
extant, dated 1814, in which James Mill proposes that the relations
between him and his "dear friend and master" shall be to some extent
altered, but only in order that their common objects may be the more
fully served. "In reflecting," he says, "upon the duty which we owe to
our principles,--to that system of important truths of which you have
the immortal honor to be the author, but of which I am a most faithful
and fervent disciple, and hitherto, I have fancied, my master's favorite
disciple,--I have considered that there was nobody at all so likely to be
your real successor as myself. Of talents it would be easy to find many
superior. But, in the first place, I hardly know of anybody who has so
completely taken up the principles, and is so thoroughly of the same
way of thinking with yourself. In the next place, there are very few who
have so much of the necessary previous discipline, my antecedent years
having been wholly occupied in acquiring it. And, in the last place, I
am pretty sure you cannot think of any other person whose whole life
will be devoted to the propagation of the system." "There was during
the last few years of Bentham's life," said James Mill's son, "less
frequency and cordiality of intercourse than in former years, chiefly
because Bentham had acquired newer, and to him more agreeable
intimacies, but Mr. Mill's feeling never altered towards him, nor did he
ever fail, publicly or privately, in giving due honor to Bentham's name
and acknowledgment of the intellectual debt he owed to him."
Those extracts are made, not only in justice to the memory of James
Mill, but as a help towards understanding the influences by which his
son was surrounded from his earliest years. James Mill was living in a
house at Pentonville when this son was born, and partly because of the
peculiar abilities that the boy displayed from the first, partly because he
could not afford to procure for him elsewhere such teaching as he was
able himself to give him, he took his education entirely into his own
hands. With what interest--even jealous interest, it would
seem--Bentham watched that education, appears from a pleasant little
letter addressed to him by the elder Mill in 1812. "I am not going to
die," he wrote, "notwithstanding your zeal to come in for a legacy.
However, if I were to die any time before this poor boy is a man, one of
the things that would pinch me most sorely would be the being obliged
to leave his mind unmade to the degree of excellence of which I hope

to make it. But another thing is, that the only prospect which would
lessen that pain would be the leaving him in your hands. I therefore
take your offer quite seriously, and stipulate merely that it shall be
made as soon as possible; and then we may perhaps leave him a
successor worthy of both of us." It was a bold hope, but one destined to
be fully realized. At the time of its utterance, the "poor boy" was barely
more than six years old. The intellectual powers of which he gave such
early proof were carefully, but apparently not excessively, cultivated.
Mrs. Grote, in her lately-published "Personal Life of George Grote,"
has described him as he appeared in 1817, the year in which her
husband made the acquaintance of his father. "John Stuart Mill, then a
boy of about twelve years old,"--he was really only eleven,--"was
studying, with his father as sole preceptor, under the paternal roof.
Unquestionably forward for his years, and already possessed of a
competent knowledge of Greek and Latin, as well as of some
subordinate though solid