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Moral Government: J. S. Mill on Ireland*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Lynn Zastoupil
Lynn Zastoupil
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota
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Extract

Despite the stature of J. S. Mill as a political philosopher and the growth of interest in Irish history, the literature on Mill's writings on Ireland is sparse. Aside from passing comments in some of the major works on Mill, the issue has been addressed by only three recent scholars who, for the most part, have not dealt directly with the relationship between Mill's political theory and his published materials on Ireland. R. D. C. Black has concentrated on economic considerations, arguing that Mill broke ranks with most of the English economists of his time because he believed that Irish conditions were different from those of England and hence that radical land reforms were necessary for economic development in Ireland. E. D. Steele has challenged this position, claiming that Mill was not so radical about Irish matters in his early years, that Mill hedged significantly on governmental interference with landed property until the rise of Fenianism in the 1860s, and that, even then, Mill's reforming zeal was guided by his concerns for saving the Union and upholding the empire. R. N. Lebow has argued that Mill's writings reflect the tensions in his own thought and in Victorian England concerning individual rights and social concerns, suggesting that Mill resolved the problem only late in his life, by deciding that the interests of society (in this case, the issue of land reform for the benefit of Irish tenants) overrode the individual property rights of the Irish landlords.

Type
Communications
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 1983 , pp. 707 - 717
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 Black, R. D. Collison, ‘The classical economists and the Irish problem’, Oxford Economic Papers, v (1953), 26–40:Google Scholar see also his Economic thought and the Irish question, 1817–1870 (London, 1960), especially pp. 31, 54, 61, and 158.Google Scholar

2 Steele, E. D., ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish question: the principles of political economy, 1848–1865’, Historical Journal, XIII (1970), 216–36;CrossRefGoogle ScholarSteele, , ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish question: reform and the integrity of the empire, 1865–1870’, Historical Journal, xiii (1970), 419–50;CrossRefGoogle Scholar see also his Irish land and British politics (New York, 1974), especially pp. 44–55.Google Scholar

3 Lebow, Richard Ned, ‘J. S. Mill and the Irish land question’, in John Stuart Mill on Ireland (Philadelphia, 1979), pp. 3–22. Mitsuo Takashima has also written on this subject in Japanese.Google Scholar

4 Robson, John M., The improvement of mankind: the social and political thought of John Stuart Mill (Toronto, 1968);Google ScholarHolthoon, F. L. van, The road to Utopia: a study of John Stuart Mill's social thought (Assen, 1971);Google ScholarSchwarz, Pedro, The new political economy of J. S. Mill (Durham, N.C., 1972);Google ScholarMaurice Cowling, Mill and liberalism (Cambridge, 1963).Google Scholar

5 For a brief discussion of the relationship between the Morning Chronicle articles and the Political economy, see Packe, M. St John, The life of John Stuart Mill (London, 1954), p. 296,Google Scholar and Mill, , Autobiography (New York, 1960), p. 165. Lebow reprints several of the Morning Chronicle articles in his collection of writings by Mill on Ireland, but does not cite any of them in his introductory essay. Black and Steele seem to have thought that these were adequately reproduced in the Political economy. It is hoped that this essay will evidence the importance of those articles for Mill's ideas about Ireland.Google Scholar

6 See Robson, Moral improvement, pt. 11, and Cowling, Mill, ch. 2, for general outlines of Mill's project for moral improvement. For a more recent discussion by Robson of Mill's notion of moral progress see his ‘Rational animals and others’, in James and John Stuart Mill: papers of the centenary conference (Toronto, 1976), pp. 143–60.Google Scholar

7 Mill, Autobiography, p. 165.

8 Mill, unheaded article on Irish affairs in Morning Chronicle, 5 Oct. 1846. These articles will be cited hereafter as MC, and without page number, since all the ones cited here are printed on page 4 of the Morning Chronicle.

9 Ibid. 19 March 1847. See also Mill's articles of 7 Oct., 3 and 5 Nov., 7 and 12 Dec. 1846.

10 Ibid. 13 Oct. 1846. This is where Black scores a major point. Mill was clearly dissatisfied with the notion that Ireland merely needed to emulate England in order to make economic progress. However, as Steele and Lebow both note, Mill's own proposal in 1846 is not as radical as Black suspected, since, as will be shown below, he could not come to accept the fixity of tenure advocated by the Repeal Association.

11 Mill, MC, 26 Oct. 1846; for Mill and the National Colonization Society, see Schwarz, New Political Economy, pp. 44–5.

12 Mill, MC, 14 Oct. 1846. In the 21 October issue Mill responded to an anonymous charge that ‘his’ plan for fixity of tenure was tantamount to general spoilation by coolly disassociating himself and his plan from the Repeal Association and its scheme. For a brief discussion of O'Connell and the call for fixity of tenure, see Steele, Irish land, pp. 27–30.

13 See Connell, K. H., ‘The colonization of waste land in Ireland, 1780–1845’, Economic History Review, ser. 2,III (1950), 44–71;Google Scholar and O'Neill, T. P.,‘The Irish land question, 1830–1850’, Studies, XLIV (1955), 325–36.Google Scholar

14 The compromise was made in the 5 Nov. 1846 issue. The main body of Mill's proposal can be found in several articles, but most notably in those of 25 Nov., 22, 24 and 26 Dec. 1846.

15 Ibid. 25 Nov. 1846.

16 Ibid. 10 Oct. 1846.

17 Ibid. 5 Feb. 1847.

18 Ibid. 30 Nov. 1846. Mill consistently pointed to areas of the continent as exemplifying the beneficial effects of peasant properties, a practice he continued in the Political economy (see book II, chapters VI-IX).

19 Mill, MC, 23 Oct. 1846.

20 Ibid. 5 Feb. 1847.

21 Ibid. 17 Oct. 1846.

22 Ibid. 23 Oct. 1846.

23 Ibid. 1 Jan. 1847.

24 Mill, ‘England and Ireland’, Examiner, 13 May 1848, p. 307.

25 Mill, MC, 2 Nov. 1846.

26 Ibid. 19 Nov. 1846.

27 Ibid. 17 Oct. 1846.

28 Mill, , Considerations on representative government, in Collected works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto, 1977), vol. xix, ch. 11, 390ff.Google Scholar See also Mill, , Principles of political economy, in Collected works (Toronto, 1965), vols. ii-iii, book iv, ch. vii, section 2.Google Scholar For a general discussion of the concept of the ‘active personality’ and the Considerations, see Thompson, Dennis F., John Stuart Mill and representative government (Princeton, 1976). Cowling also has an interesting discussion of Mill's concept of moral education, or political indoctrination, as Cowling prefers to see it (Mill, ch. 2).Google Scholar

29 Mill, Considerations, ch. II, p. 395.

30 Ibid. ch. III, p. 409.

31 Ibid. p. 410.

32 This conception of the active personality bears more than a passing similarity to the notion of the Protestant work ethic which Max Weber and Christopher Hill, among others, have explicated. Mill did not share traditional British prejudices against Catholicism (see for instance in his 1826 article, ‘Ireland’, in Parliamentary history and review (London. 1826), pp. 603–27,Google Scholar in which he argued that Catholic emancipation is a necessary act of justice for Ireland, and that the real source of Irish problems resides in its low level of economic development; for passing comments on Mill and Catholic emancipation, see Hamburger, Joseph, Intellectuals inpolitics [New Haven, 1965], pp. 32, 35, 71, and 157).Google Scholar Mill's use of the concept is reminiscent of Berkeley's arguments in The querist, where it is argued that an industrious peasantry must be fostered in Ireland through governmental initiative. (For a discussion of Berkeley as a moral economist, see I. D. S. Ward, ‘George Berkeley: precursor of Keynes, or moral economist on underdevelopment?’, Journal of Political Economy, LXVII [1959], 31–40.)Google Scholar Though Mill's utilitarianism does not have the explicit religious orientation of Berkeley's, there is some reason to doubt that it contains no religious values, as Cowling argues, and as Mill's use of the concept of the active personality seems to evidence. Development of this and related political problems of Mill's theory of moral development through social engineering lies beyond the scope of this essay, but one can note in passing the political problem, outlined so well by Hill, in Society and puritanism in pre-revolutionary England (New York, 1967), of enforcing a particular economic and religious ethos on other people.Google Scholar

33 Steele, ‘Mill and the Irish question: political economy’, pp. 228ff. See the 1862 edition of the Political economy, book ii, ch. x, section 2 (Collected works, vol III, p. 331 n.), where Mill notes that the benefits of peasant proprietorships are no longer indispensable for the development of Ireland, since other prospects (mostly pastoral farming spawned by the Encumbered Estates Act) have made possible ‘a great advance in civilization without that aid’. Mill's complacency (and that of others - see note 42 below) about Irish prosperity during the 1850s is more comprehensible in light of recent scholarship on Ireland after the Famine; see, for instance, Donnelly, James, The land and people of nineteenth-century Cork (London, 1975).Google Scholar

34 This is the tone of ch. xvi of the Considerations. Here Mill insisted that Ireland was being absorbed into British culture, and would have been so long ago, if not for the fact that‘ until of late years, they [the Irish] had been so atrociously governed, that all their best feelings combined with their bad ones in rousing bitter resentment against the Saxon rule’ (pp. 550–1). Nonetheless, Mill remained bitter about the massive depopulation of Ireland, though he accepted the fact that Ireland was progressing because of the combined effects of the depopulation and the Encumbered Estates Act. Mill's sentiments on the massive emigration from Ireland in the wake of the Famine are best summed up in the following sentence from the final edition of the Political economy: ‘When the inhabitants of a country quit the country en masse because its Government will not make it a place fit for them to live in, the Government is judged and condemned’ (book 11, ch. x, section 1). We can sum up Mill's sentiments concerning Ireland between the Famine and the Fenians as follows: massive emigration was wrong and a discredit to English government; however, it occurred, and Ireland began to prosper as it adopted the British scheme of farming; this in turn promised moral progress in the form of absorbtion into British civilization, if the bitter feelings aroused by past misgovernment could be sufficiently soothed.

35 Mill, , ‘England and Ireland’ (6th edn, London, 1881), p. 25.Google Scholar

36 Mill, , letter to John Pringle Nichol, 21 Dec. 1837, Collected works, vol. xii, 365.Google Scholar

37 Mill, ‘England and Ireland’ (6th edn), p. 25.

38 Ibid. p. 36. Mill, however, was always willing to concede separation as an alternative to continued misgovernment by the English, contrary to Steele's assertion about the unequivocal nature of Mill's stance against separation (Steele, ‘Mill and the Irish question:political economy’, p. 217). See his 1848 ‘England and Ireland’, where he stated that ‘separation is better than bad government’ (p. 307), and his letter of 16 Nov. 1867 to John Henry Bridges, where he notes that the Fenians’ all seem to want total separation & a republic, and total separation is what I think we must make up our minds to do if after having done full justice to the Irish in church & land matters & done all we can do for their educational & economical interests we find that their aversion to union with us remains unabated’ (Collected works, vol. xvi, 1328–9). One suspects that in 1868 the possibility seemed more real to Mill than it did in 1848, when the Young Irelander's cabbage rebellion fizzled out rather mutely.

39 Mill, MC, 27 Nov. 1846, and 17 Oct. 1846; see also Mill's letter of 3 Feb. 1848 to Aubrey de Vere, where he states that‘ England is not entitled to throw the first stone at Ireland’ because it bears responsibility for the sufferings of Ireland (Collected works, vol. xiii, 730). It is this steadfast conviction that England had misgoverned Ireland and must correct this failure with good government which must have made Mill such an appealing figure to Irish radicals such as Charles Gavan Duffy, who began corresponding with Mill in the 1850s, and the Tenant League, which asked Mill in 1851 to stand for parliament for an Irish constituency.

40 Mill, MC, 10 Oct. 1846.

41 Mill, ‘England and Ireland’ (6th edn), p. 13.

42 It is commonplace to blame Mill alone for failing to see through the chimera of quiet and prosperity in the 1850s in Ireland. However, even Mill's Irish source for Fenian goals and Irish affairs, the economist J. E. Cairnes, was writing as late as 1864 that Ireland needed no significant governmental interference because it was progressing just fine in economic matters (Cairnes, ‘Ireland’, Edinburgh Review, cxix [Jan. 1864], 279–304). Mill called this an ‘excellent’ article (Mill to Cairnes, 22 Feb. 1864, Collected works, vol. xv, 920).

43 See Mill's speech of 12 March 1868 in the Commons, where he notes that since 1829 ‘moral progress in reconciling Ireland to our Government, and to the Union with us, has not been made, and does not seem likely soon to be made, unless we change our policy’. Mill hoped that parliament would make the radical changes which he suggested because discontent in Ireland would get worse if they did not effect some such radical change (Hansards Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, 190, 1516–32); for a discussion of this proposal by Mill, see Steele, ‘Mill and the Irish question: reform.’

44 Mill, ‘England and Ireland (1848), p. 307.