It was no bad usage of the old Romans to bring down from its niche the waxen image of an eminent ancestor on the anniversary of his natal day, and to recall his memory and its lineaments, even though time and all its wear and tear should have sprinkled a little dust, or chipped a feature. Nor was the Alexandrian sage unwise who deemed himself unworthy of a birthday feast and kept its very date strictly secret, yet sacrificed to the gods and entertained his friends on the birthdays of Socrates and Plato. Nobody would have been more severely displeased than Mill at an attempt to exalt him to a level in the empyrean with those two immortal shades; yet he was of the Socratic household. He was the first guide and inspirer of a generation that has now all but passed away; and it may perhaps be counted among the sollemnia pietatis, the feasts and offices of grateful recollection, in an Easter holiday from more clamorous things, to muse for a day upon the teacher who was born on the twentieth of May a hundred years ago.

Mill was once called by Mr. Gladstone the saint of rationalism, and the designation was a happy one. The canonization of a saint in the Roman communion is preceded by the dozen or more preliminary steps of beatification; and the books tell us that the person to be beatified must be shown to have practised in a signal degree the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, and the four cardinal virtues of Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance. I think Mill would emerge in perfect safety from such an inquisition, on any rational or rationalistic interpretation of those high terms; nor need we be at all afraid that the advocatus diaboli will find fatal

flaws in any deposition that time's unkind hand may bring to light. His life was true to his professions, and was no less tolerant, liberal, unselfish, singleminded, high, and strenuous than they

were.

Nobody who claims to deal as a matter of history with the intellectual fermentation between 1840 and 1870 or a little longer, whatever value the historian may choose to set upon its products, can fail to assign a leading influence to Mill. One of the choicest spirits of our age, for example, was Henry Sidgwick, and he has told how he began his study of philosophy with the works of Mill, "who, I think, had attained the full height (1860) of that remarkable influence which he exercised over youthful thought, and perhaps I may say the thought of the country generally, for a period of some years." "No one thinker, so far as I know, has ever had anything like equal influence in the forty years or so that have elapsed since Mill's dominion began to weaken." To dilate on Mill's achievements, said Herbert Spencer, "and to insist upon the wideness of his influence over the thought of his time, and consequently over the action of his time, seems to me superfluous." Spencer was rightly chary of random compliments, yet he declared that he should value Mill's agreement more than that of any other thinker. It would be easy to collect copious testimony to this extraordinary supremacy. One may recall Taine's vivacious dialogue with some Oxford friend, actual or imaginary, in the sixties:

What have you English got that is original?-Stuart Mill.-What is Stuart Mill? A publicist; his little book on Liberty is as good as your Rousseau's Social Contract is bad, for Mill con

cludes as strongly for the independence of the individual as Rousseau for the despotism of the State.-That is not enough to make a philosopher. What else?-An economist, who goes beyond his science, and subordinates production to man, instead of subordinating man to production.-Still not enough to make a philosopher. What more? A logician. Of what school?-His own. I told you he was an original. Then who are his friends?-Locke and Comte in the front; then Hume and Newton.Is he systematic?-a speculative reformer?-Oh he has far too much mind for that. He does not pose in the majesty of a restorer of science; he does not proclaim, like your Germans, that his book is going to open a new era for the human race. He walks step by step, a little slowly, and often close to the ground across a host of instance and example. He excels in giving precision to an idea, in disentangling a principle, in recovering it from under a crowd of different cases, in refuting, in distinguishing, in arguing.-Has he arrived at any great conception of a Whole?—Yes.-Has he a personal and complete idea of nature and the human mind?-Yes.

Though the reader, if he be SO minded, may smile at this to-day, still it is a true summary of the claim then made for Mill, of the position generally assented to (by Taine himself among others), and of aims partially if not wholly achieved. Bentham founded a great school, James Mill inspired a political group, Dugald Stewart impressed a talented band with love of virtue and of truth. John Mill possessed for a time a more general ascendency than any of these. Just as Macaulay's Essays fixed literary and historical subjects for the average reader, so the writings of Mill set the problems and defined the channels for people with a taste for political thinking and thinking deeper than political. He opened all the ground, touched all the issues, posed all the questions in the spheres where the intellects of men must be

most active. It is true, Mill's fame and influence are no longer what they were. How should they be? As if perpetuity of direct power or of personal renown could fall to any philosopher's lot, outside the little group consecrated by tra

dition. Books outside of the enchanted realm of art and imagination become spent forces; men who were the driving agents of their day sink into literary names, and take a faded place in the catalogue of exhausted influences.

The philosophic teacher's fame, like the statesman's or the soldier's-like the great navigator's, inventor's, or discoverer's-ê color d'erba, is like the grass, whose varying hue

Doth come and go-by that same sun destroyed

From whose warm ray its vigor first it drew.

New needs emerge. Proportions change. Fresh strata are uncovered. Theories once charged with potency evaporate. So a later generation must play umpire. How should Mill be better off than Grotius or Montesquieu, Descartes or Locke, or Jean Jacques, or any of the others who in their day shook the world, or lighted up some single stage of the world's dim journey? As is well put for our present case, a work great in itself and of exclusive authorship is not the only way in which original power manifests itself. "A multitude of small impressions," says Bain, the most sinewy of Mill's allies, "may have the accumulated effect of a mighty whole. Who shall sum up Mill's collective influence as an instructor in politics, ethics, logic, and metaphysics? No calculus can integrate the innumerable little pulses of knowledge and of thought that he has made to vibrate in the minds of his generation."

The amazing story of his education is well known from his own account of it.

In after years he told Miss Caroline Fox, whose "Journals" are the most attractive of all the surviving memorials of Mill, "that his father made him study ecclesiastical history before he was ten. This method of early intense application he would not recommend to others; in most cases it would not answer, and where it does, the buoyancy of youth is entirely superseded by the maturity of manhood, and action is very likely to be merged in reflection. 'I never was a boy,' he said, 'never played at cricket; it is better to let Nature have her own way.'" He has told us what were his father's moral inculcationsjustice, temperance (to which he gave a very extended application), veracity, perseverance, readiness to encounter pain and especially labor; regard for the public good; estimation of persons according to their merits, and of things according to their intrinsic usefulness; a life of exertion in contradiction to one of self-indulgent ease and sloth. But James Mill, when all was said, "thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of satisfied curiosity had gone by." He would sometimes say that if life were made what it might be by good government and good education, it would be worth having, but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm even of that possibility. Passionate emotions he regarded as a form of madness, and the intense was a byword of scornful disapprobation. In spite of training his son grew to be very different. John Mill's opinions on subjects where emotion was possible or appropriate were suffused by feeling; and admiration, anger, contempt often found intense enough expression. Nor did a hint ever escape him about life being "a poor thing at best." All pointed the other way. "Happiness," he once wrote, "is not a life of rapture; but moments of such in an existence made up of few and transitory pains, many and

various pleasures, with a decided predominance of the active over the passive, and having as the foundation of the whole not to expect from life more than it is capable of bestowing." Even friendly philosophers have denounced this as a rash and off-hand formula, and they may be right; for anything that I know, analysis might kill it. Meanwhile it touches at least three vital points in a reasonable standard for a life well laid out. Mill had his moments of discouragement, but they never lasted long and never arrested effort.

He realized how great an expenditure of the reformer's head and heart, to use his own phrase, went in vain attempts to make the political dry bones live. With cheerful stoicism he accepted this law of human things. "When the end comes," he wrote to a friend in pensive vein, "the whole of life will appear but as a day, and the only question of any moment to us then will be, Has that day been wasted? Wasted it has not been by those who have been, for however short a time, a source of happiness and of moral good even to the narrowest circle. But there is only one plain rule of life eternally binding, and independent of all variation of creeds, embracing equally the greatest moralities and the smallest; it is this. Try thyself unweariedly till thou findest the highest thing thou art capable of doing, faculties and circumstances being both duly considered, and then do it." This responsibility for life and gifts was once put by Mr. Gladstone as a threefold disposition to resist the tyranny of self; to recognize the rule of duty; to maintain the supremacy of the higher over the lower parts of our nature. Mill had none of Mr. Gladstone's faith in an over-ruling Providence; but in a famous passage he set out his conviction that social feeling in men themselves might do as well: