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312 MILL the practical tests of truth set forth in HerschePs Discourse an Natural Philosophy with the theoretic views of induc tion propounded in Whately s Logic. But in the history of thought the great importance of the work is due not so much to its endeavour to formulate the methods of science and lay bare the first principles on which they rest as to its systematic application of scientific method to what he called the moral sciences. Mill has often been criticized as if he had pretended to teach men how to conduct their investigations and how to make discoveries in the physical sciences. His work was rather to educe from the practice of men of science the principles on which they proceed in testing and proving their speculations concerning cause and effect in the physical world, and see whether the same principles could not be applied in testing and proving speculations concerning cause and effect in the moral world. What is the effect upon human character and human happiness of given social and physical conditions climate, institutions, customs, laws 1 How can conclusions upon such points be proved 1 These were the questions in which Mill was interested, and the striking novelty of his work was its endeavour to show that propositions of cause and effect in human affairs must be proved, if they admit of proof at all, absolute or approximate, on the same principles with propositions of cause and effect in the material world. The Logic was published in 1843. In 1844 appeared his Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy. These essays were worked out and written many years before, and show Mill in his first stage as a political economist. Four out of the five essays are elaborate and powerful solutions of perplexing technical problems the distribution of the gains of international commerce, the influence of consumption on production, the definition of productive and unproductive labour, the pre cise relations between profits and wages. Though Mill appears here purely as the disciple of Rlcardo, striving after more precise statement, and reaching forward to further consequences, we can well understand in reading these essays, searching, luminous, large and bold in outline, firmly wrought in detail, how about the time when he first sketched them he began to be conscious of power as an original and independent thinker. That originality and independence became more con spicuous when he reached his second stage as a political economist, struggling forward towards the standpoint from which his systematic work was written. It would seem that in his fits of despondency one of the thoughts that sat upon him like a nightmare and marred his dreams of human improvement was the apparently inexorable character of economic laws, condemning thousands of labourers to a cramped and miserable existence, and thousands more to semi-starvation. From this oppressive feeling he found relief in the thought set forth in the opening of the second book of his Political Economy that, while the conditions of production have the necessity of physical laws, the distribution of what is produced among the various classes of producers is a matter of human arrangement, dependent upon alterable customs and institutions. There can be little doubt that this thought, whether or not in the clear shape that it afterwards assumed, was the germ of all that is most distinctive in his system of political economy. It was as far as possible from the rigidity of his method of exposition to fall into the confusion of supposing that it was for political economy to discuss the equity of different modes of distribution, or the value of other objects of human endeavour conflicting with the production of wealth ; but he put economic inquiries clearly in their proper place as leading to conclusions that were not always final and bind ing on the practical statesman, but had to be taken with other considerations as governing rational human action. Besides thus putting political economy in its just correla tion with other parts of social science and conduct, Mill widened the scope of economic inquiries by discussing the economic consequences of various ideal social arrangements, and more especially different modes of distributing produce between landlord, capitalist, and labourer. Mill certainly redeemed political economy from the reproach of being a dry science. Nobody with any interest in human improve ment can read his work with indifference. And he did this without in any way disturbing the original conception of political economy as the science of cause and effect in the production of wealth. One of his most eminent successors, the late Professor Cairnes, thus admirably summed up his work as a political economist : " As he himself used to put it, Ricardo supplied the backbone of the science ; but it is not less certain that the limbs, the joints, the muscular developments all that renders political economy a complete and organized body of knowledge have been the work of Mill." While his great systematic works were in progress, Mill wrote very little on events or books of the day. He turned aside for a few months from his Political Economy during the winter of the Irish famine (1846-47) to advocate the creation of peasant-proprietorships as a remedy for distress and disorder in Ireland. He found time also to write elaborate articles on French history and Greek history in the Edinburgh Revieiv apropos of Michelet, Guizot, and Grote, besides some less elaborate essays. The Political Economy was published in 1848. Mill could now feel that the main work he had proposed for himself was accomplished; but, though he wrote compara tively little for some years afterwards, he remained as much as ever on the alert for opportunities of useful influence, and pressed on with hardly diminished enthusiasm in his search for useful truth. Among other things, he made a more thorough study of socialist writers, with the result that, though he was not converted to any of their schemes as being immediately practicable, he began to look upon some more equal distribution of the produce of labour as a practicability of the remote future, and to dwell upon the prospect of such changes in human character as might render a stable society possible without the institution of private property. This he has called his third stage as a political economist, and he says that he was helped towards it by the lady, Mrs Taylor, who became his wife in 1851, and with whom he had lived in intimate friendship for more than twenty years before. It is generally supposed that he writes with a lover s extrava gance about this lady s powers when he compares her with Shelley and Carlyle. But a little reflexion will show that he wrote with his usual accuracy and sobriety when he described her influence on him. He expressly says that he owed none of his technical doctrine to her, that she- influenced only his ideals of life for the individual and for society ; and his language about her is really only a measure of the importance that he attached to such ideals above any systems of reasoned truth. There is very little propositional difference between Mill and his father ; but it is obvious from what he says that his inner life became very different after he threw off his father s authority. This new inner life was strengthened and enlarged by Mrs Taylor. We must remember also that Mill in his early years had been so strictly secluded from commonplace sentiment that what the general world would consider commonplace must have come to him with all the freshness of a special revelation. During the seven years of his married life Mill published

less than in any other period of his career, but four of his