I.Political Change
The last years of Mill's life correspond to the period in which Utilitarianism reached,in certain respects,its highest pitch of influence.The little band who acknowledged him as their chief leader,and as the authorised lieutenant of Bentham,considered themselves to be in the van of progress.Though differing on many points from each other,and regarded with aversion or distrust by the recognised party leaders,they were in their most militant and confident state of mind.They were systematically reticent as to their religious views:they left to popular orators the public advocacy of their favourite political measures;and the credit of finally passing such of those measures as were adopted fell chiefly to the hands of the great political leaders.
The Utilitarians are ignored in the orthodox Whig legend.In the preface to his collected works,Sydney Smith runs over the usual list of changes which had followed,and,as he seems to think,had in great part resulted from,the establishment of the Edinburgh Review .Smith himself,and Jeffrey and Horner and,above all,'the gigantic Brougham,'had blown the blast which brought down the towers of Jericho.Sir G.O.Trevelyan,in his Life of Macaulay ,describes the advent of the Whigs to office in a similar sense.'Agitators and incendiaries,'he says,'retired into the background,as will always be the case when the country is in earnest:and statesmen who had much to lose,and were not afraid to risk it,stepped quietly and firmly to the front.The men and the sons of the men who had so long endured exclusion from office,embittered by unpopularity,at length reaped their reward.'1The Radical version of the history is different.The great men,it said,who had left the cause to be supported by agitators so long as the defence was dangerous and profitless,stepped forward now that it was clearly winning,and received both the reward and the credit.Mill and Place could not find words to express their contempt for the trimming,shuffling Whigs.They were probably unjust enough in detail;but they had a strong case in some respects.The Utilitarians represented that part of the reforming party which had a definite and a reasoned creed.
They tried to give logic where the popular agitators were content with declamation,and represented absolute convictions when the Whig reformers were content with tentative and hesitating compromises.They had some grounds for considering themselves to be the 'steel of the lance';The men who formulated and deliberately defended the principles which were beginning to conquer the world.
The Utilitarians,I have said,became a political force in the concluding years of the great war struggle.The catastrophe of the revolution had unchained a whole whirlwind of antagonisms.The original issues had passed out of sight;and great social,industrial,and political changes were in progress which made the nation that emerged from the war a very different body from the nation that had entered it nearly a generation before,it is not surprising that at first very erroneous estimates were made of the new position when peace at last returned.
The Radicals,who had watched on one side the growth of debt and pauperism,and,on the other hand,the profits made by stockjobbers,landlords,and manufacturers,ascribed all the terrible sufferings to the selfish designs of the upper classes.When the war ended they hoped that the evils would diminish,while the pretext for misgovernment would be removed.A bitter disappointment followed.The war was followed by widespread misery.Plenty meant ruin to agriculturists,and commercial 'gluts'resulting in manufacturers'warehouses crammed with unsaleable goods.The discontent caused by misery had been encountered during the war by patriotic fervour.It was not a time for redressing evils,when the existence of the nation was at stake.Now that the misery continued,and the excuse for delaying redress had been removed,a demand arose for parliamentary reform.Unfortunately discontent led also to sporadic riotings,to breaking of machinery and burning of ricks.The Tory government saw in these disturbances a renewal of the old Jacobin spirit,and had visions --apparently quite groundless --of widespread conspiracies and secret societies ready to produce a ruin of all social order.It had recourse to the old repressive measures,the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act,the passage of the 'Six Acts,'and the prosecution of popular agitators.
Many observers fancied that the choice lay between a servile insurrection and the establishment of arbitrary power.