John Stuart Mill For Today – Helen Pringle

Issue 2 | 26 May 2009

Helen Pringle, a Presiding Member of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, has researched and written extensively on social and political issues – human rights, political theory, freedom of speech and, most recently, pornography. She was named UNSW Lecturer of the Year 2008 and recipient of the UNSW Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence 2007. Helen Pringle addressed The Sydney Institute on Tuesday 26 May 2009 to discuss the persisting relevance of nineteenth century liberal, John Stuart Mill.

JOHN STUART MILL FOR TODAY

HELEN PRINGLE

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) is one of the main “ancestors” of modern liberalism. His work spans political theory, philosophy, political economy, and (less well-known) botany. He was the son of the political economist James Mill, and the precocity of his childhood education under James Mill and Jeremy Bentham is notorious. Mill worked as a civil servant with the East India Company, and was elected to parliament, in which capacity he supported women’s suffrage and property rights. He married Harriet Taylor in 1851, and they co-wrote many of the newspaper pieces mentioned in my paper. A footnote to Mill’s life is that he became godfather to Bertrand Russell. Mill is known as the most prominent liberal thinker of the nineteenth century, and his work has informed modern liberalism. In Australia, for example, various members of the Liberal Party formed a John Stuart Mill Society in the 1990s.

This year is the 150^th anniversary of John Stuart Mill’s classic work On Liberty. I am going to talk about what John Stuart Mill is for us today, and about what it means for us to be heirs to this great work.

However, to keep it current, I shall begin with a rugby league story. Quite some years ago, Alan Jones was fined $10,000 for criticising the referee after a game. Jones had characterised the refereeing as “Al Capone stuff”, and demanded that the League examine the match tape “if the credibility of the game is to survive”. After some genteel back and forth between Jones and the referee, Jones had summed up his view by noting, “If you hack and hack away at the tree of opportunity, you won’t fall into a bed of roses but a cesspool of barbed wire.” Jones assured the Sydney Morning Herald reporter that this was not his own work, saying that in fact, “It was a quote from John Stuart Mill and you should have been familiar with it.” The reporter in turn assured his readers that no such sentence can be found in the works of Mill, and indeed that Mill could not have said this given that he died in 1873, the year barbed wire was invented. Jones of course would have saved himself a lot of trouble if he had read his own work, as two years before this match, he had cited the passage more or less accurately, and correctly attributed it to a writer (who should have known better).

Jones had appropriated John Stuart Mill to his own purposes, had the audacity to chide others for their lack of familiarity with Mill, and refused to back down. However he is of course not alone in his failure to read those from whom he quotes. The practice was so common in Mill’s own time that it is referred to in Trollope’s 1869 novel He Knew He Was Right. The exchange in the novel reflects the attempt of many people even at that time to trade on Mill’s fame:

“Your John S. Mill is a great man,” said the minister.

“They tell me so,” said Mr Glascock. “I don’t read what he writes myself.”

This acknowledgment seemed to the minister to be almost disgraceful, and yet he himself had never read a word of Mr Mill’s writings. “He is a far-seeing man,” continued the minister. “He is one of the few Europeans who can look forward, and see how the rivers of civilization are running on. He has understood that women must at last be put upon an equality with men.”

Trollope’s Mr Spalding got at least part of Mill’s argument right, which is rather more than can be said for many modern interpreters of Mill.

John Stuart Mill makes his most regular appearances today in discussions of the freedom of speech, popping up almost as regularly as Voltaire. And Mill haunts contemporary discussions of freedom of action more generally. In terms of our understanding of the value of freedom today, the main legacy of On Liberty is taken to be the “harm principle”. By this is meant the principle that our actions should not be the subject of regulation unless they cause harm, or more exactly, harm to others. In the popular and philosophical language of our age, Mill is the godfather of the phrase “I should be free to do as I like as long as I don’t harm (or hurt) anyone else.”

Not everybody who cites the harm principle is aware that its provenance is Mill’s On Liberty. A student once pointed me to the song Burn One Down by Ben Harper, which I believe is an ode to the joys of smoking dope:

My choice is what I choose to do,

And if I’m causing no harm, it shouldn’t bother you.

Your choice is who you choose to be,

And if you’re causin’ no harm, then you’re alright with me.

If you don’t like my fire, then don’t come around.

It is probably unwise to place too much philosophical importance on such songs without sounding like Nigel Tufnel’s explanation of his song “Lick my love pump”, in This is Spinal Tap. Ben Harper and those who enthusiastically sing along to his ditties probably don’t even know of the connection of the sentiments to the liberal thinker John Stuart Mill.

Mill called himself a liberal, but a complicating factor here was that he also professed a passionate adherence to some form of socialism. Mill apparently saw no conflict at all between his description of himself as a Liberal and his loyalty to French socialists such as Saint-Simon, d’Eichthal and even the pleasantly delirious Fourier. In the last chapter of his Autobiography, Mill claimed that his ideal went far beyond democracy and that he would class himself as a socialist.

In considering Mill’s legacy, I think it is very important to remember that Mill was not a defender of the rich or of the powerful. To give some sense of the tone of his political outlook, here is a passage from a letter to his friend John Sterling after the 1830 revolution in France:

If there were but a few dozens of persons safe (whom you & I could select) to be missionaries of the great truths in which alone there is any well-being for mankind individually or collectively, I should not care though a revolution were to exterminate every person in Great Britain & Ireland who has £500 a year. Many very amiable persons would perish, but what is the world the better for such amiable persons.

Or again, as revolution simmered in France in 1847, Mill wrote to John Austin:

In England on the contrary [to France] I often think that a violent revolution is very much needed, in order to give that general shake-up to the torpid mind of the nation which the French Revolution gave to Continental Europe. England has never had any general break-up of old associations & hence the extreme difficulty of getting any ideas into its stupid head.

So in thinking about Mill for today, I think it is very important to recall that Mill considered himself, and was considered by others, to be on the very radical side of politics. The picture of Mill as a staid Victorian just doesn’t ring true. In the rest of the talk, I want to give an example of how putting Mill in the proper perspective might actually help us to think through some dilemmas about freedom. So my point is not simply that we should read, and read carefully, the people who have formed our views, but that if we do read carefully, we might actually learn something new.

Freedom, harm and respect

For Mill, the value of freedom is an a priori, and he argues that any regulation of human conduct needs to be rigorously argued for and justified. The most well-known caveat to the reign of freedom, as I noted above, concerns actions that do “harm to others”. Mill did not specify in any great detail what he meant by “harm” – leaving the American philosopher Joel Feinberg to take up the slack with four volumes on the topic.

However, harm is not simply or necessarily pain, and perhaps the best sense of Mill’s understanding of harm is given in his phrase, “affect prejudicially the interests of others”. That is, the threshold for justifiable restrictions on freedom is reached when our actions affect prejudicially the interests of others. At that threshold, society gains possible (coercive) jurisdiction over the conduct of its members.

At the outset of On Liberty, Mill sets out very clearly what he is doing in the book:

The object of this Essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties, or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant…. The only part of the conduct of any one, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.

The central value here is the sovereignty of the individual. Making the value of freedom an a priori is a way of respecting that sovereignty. The prevention of harm is a means to that end, not a goal in itself. Mill clarifies all of this in a later chapter of On Liberty, where he explains the “simple principle” a little more:

The reason for not interfering, unless for the sake of others, with a person’s voluntary acts is consideration for his liberty. His voluntary choice is evidence that what he chooses is desirable, or at least, endurable to him, and his good is on the whole best provided for by allowing him to take his own means of pursuing it.

But it is precisely on the basis of consideration for the liberty of others that Mill argues that a person cannot voluntarily become a slave. Choosing the life of the slave would thereby defeat the very purpose of freedom. Let me now place this last passage in a fuller context in Chapter 5 of On Liberty:

In this and most other civilized countries, for example, an engagement by which a person should sell himself, or allow himself to be sold, as a slave, would be null and void; neither enforced by law nor by opinion. The ground for thus limiting his power of voluntarily disposing of his own lot in life, is apparent, and is very clearly seen in this extreme case. The reason for not interfering, unless for the sake of others, with a person’s voluntary acts, is consideration for his liberty. His voluntary choice is evidence that what he chooses is desirable, or at the least endurable, to him, and his good is on the whole best provided for by allowing him to take his own means of pursuing it. But by selling himself for a slave, he abdicates his liberty; he foregoes any future use of it, beyond that single act. He therefore defeats, in his own case, the very purpose which is the justification of allowing him to dispose of himself. He is no longer free; but is henceforth in a position which has no longer the presumption in its favor, that would be afforded by his voluntarily remaining in it. The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate his freedom [emphasis added].

For Mill, one of the implications of this analysis of slavery and freedom is that we should not mistake acquiescence in a dependent situation as free choice. To respect the sovereignty of others requires that we regard the question of their civil status, or standing, as closed and non-negotiable, even if the person(s) concerned thinks otherwise and ostensibly agrees to abdicate that standing, for example, by becoming a slave.

In the discussion of slavery in On Liberty, and at greater length elsewhere, Mill is not talking about slaves rowing Cleopatra up the Nile. He was talking about cases like that of Andrew Maclean, who was acquitted for the (attempted) murder of his de facto wife Mary Ann Watson, in 1851. The evidence in the case was as follows:

Early in the morning of the 4th of August, the persons lodging in the next room were disturbed by the cries of the prisoner’s children [Lizzy, aged eight, and the younger aged three], and their calling out, “Oh, father, let mother down.” They got up in consequence; and went into the prisoner’s room, where they found his wife hanging by the neck from the cupboard, and the prisoner was sitting upon the bed. The body of the unfortunate woman was quite suspended, and she was nearly black in the face. Upon the prisoner being told that he was a good-for-nothing villain for attempting to hang his wife, he replied that he would do it effectually the next time; and one of the witnesses answered that he would have done it effectually this time, if his wife had not been cut down. The prisoner was slightly intoxicated, it appeared, at the time of the occurrence. The prisoner, in his defence, asserted that his wife had hanged herself.

Mary Ann Watson was not called as a witness at the trial of Maclean. She had previously been examined by the magistrate, to whom she claimed that “she had spoken provokingly to him [Maclean], and also that he had hanged her only in jest”.

Mill’s perspective on the case of Mary Ann Watson and Andrew Maclean needs to be understood in the context of his position on freedom and slavery. Mill understood sexual slavery as the most powerful obstacle to widening the scope of freedom in his society. In The Subjection of Women, Mill argues that marriage as constituted is a form of “unjust power” and of slavery. He wrote, “Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.” Mill concedes that women, like Mary Ann Watson, acquiesce in the system, and that women are not “collectively rebellious to the power of men”. However, for Mill, this acquiescence is not evidence or illustration of women’s freely adopted choices. He explains:

[Women] are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose.

In such social circumstances, “consent” to slavery cannot count as the act of the sovereign or independent individual. For Mill, it is simply a measure to salvage some dignity from an intolerable situation:

… to those to whom nothing but servitude is allowed, the free choice of servitude is the only, though a most insufficient, alleviation. Its refusal completes the assimilation of the wife to the slave – and the slave under not the mildest form of slavery: for in some slave codes the slave could, under certain circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the master to sell him. But no amount of ill usage, without adultery superadded, will in England free a wife from her tormentor.

Mill also noted the marital rape exemption as a feature of sexual slavery.

These passages (and others by Mill) on slavery, or to be precise, sexual slavery, are only rarely alluded to in modern discussions of freedom in Mill, and even more rarely mentioned in discussions of freedom of speech or discussion. Most popular as well as academic users of Mill are content to lift the ringing passages on freedom from On Liberty completely out of this context. And yet the importance of this context in understanding what Mill says about freedom can also be seen in an extraordinary series of articles on cruelty and personal violence written by Mill, in most cases with Harriet Taylor. Some of these articles concern military justice, others concern the abuse of children, and yet others concern the vicious ill-treatment of servants. But most are concerned with, or make mention of, men’s brutality to their wives. In the cases at issue, such brutality was invariably brought to the attention of the police not by the targeted women, but by neighbours or bystanders.

One of the most startling of these newspaper commentaries by Mill and Taylor concerns the case of William Burn, who was brought up on a charge of cruelly beating his horse. The magistrate released Burn with a small fine on learning that he had a wife and family to support. Mill infers, without citing any evidence, that because Burn beat his horse, he also beat his wife and family, that is, his slaves:

Disgusting enough it is that animals like these [Mill is referring to Burn, not the horse] should have wives and children; and disgusting that, merely because they are of the male sex, they should have the whole existence of these dependants as much under their absolute control as slave masters in any modern slave country have that of their slaves;… But as if all this was not enough, the man is told by a magistrate, that because he has a family to ill-use, he may indulge himself in ill-using any other creatures who come in his way, and may practise on them the amiable propensities of which his family are to reap the full enjoyment.

Mill argues that “real consideration for the wife and children would have spoken a very different language to the magistrate”. And he argues that a different language would have elicited a very different punishment on Burn from the small fine that he paid.

Domestic atrocities, ruffians and moral medicine

In a pamphlet on the 1853 Fitzroy Bill, Mill and Harriet Taylor argued that a culture of impunity applied to what they called domestic atrocity, and that punishments meted out for personal violence to the ruffians responsible were gravely insufficient. The argument of Mill and Taylor was that flogging is the appropriate punishment for the “crimes of brutality” involved in domestic atrocity:

For these [crimes] nothing will be effectual but to retaliate upon the culprit some portion of the physical suffering which he has inflicted…. Overwhelming as are the objections to corporal punishment except in cases of personal outrage, it is peculiarly fitted for such cases. The repulsiveness to standers by, and the degradation to the culprit, which make corporal maltreatment so justly odious as a punishment, would cease to adhere to it, if it were exclusively reserved as a retribution to those guilty of personal violence. It is probably the only punishment which they would feel. Those who presume on their consciousness of animal strength to brutally ill treat those who are physically weaker, would be made to know what it is to be in the hands of a physical strength as much greater than their own, as theirs than that of the subjects of their tyrant. It is the moral medicine needed for the domineering arrogance of brute power.

Mill and Taylor argue that such an enactment of corporal punishment “would do more for the improvement of morality, and the relief of suffering, than any Act of Parliament passed in this century, not excepting, perhaps, the Act for the abolition of slavery”. In these and similar passages, Mill takes the view that the law, and particularly criminal law, is an instrument of moral education, and is that which exercises the most powerful influence on the character of citizens. What is even more striking is that Mill thought that this use of the criminal law in order “to repress one of the most odious forms of human wickedness” is not open to discussion. As his pamphlet on the Fitzroy bill makes clear:

Not only is education by the course of justice the most efficacious, in its own province, of all kinds of popular education, but it is also one on which there needs to be no difference of opinion. Churches and political parties may quarrel about the teaching of doctrines, but not about the punishment of crimes. There is diversity of opinion about what is morally good, but there ought to be none about what is atrociously wicked. Whatever else may be included in the education of the people, the very first essential of it is to unbrutalise them; and to this end, all kinds of personal brutality should be seen and felt to be things which the law is determined to put down.

Mill’s picture of the law as moral teacher includes the makers and administrators of the law: citizens, legislators, judges, juries. This openly interventionist and coercive role of the law, whip in hand, commended by Mill is quite at odds with the general picture painted of his work by most modern interpreters, who generally like what they see of Mill’s efforts in calling for a retreat of the state from regulating the realm of actions. Mill’s vision of the criminal law in regard to acts of personal violence was what would be now considered, on most showings, to be draconian.

According to Mill, the lenient punishment meted out for brutality shown to “the slaves called wives” is in contrast to the severity of punishment for property offences. In one of his newspaper articles on cruelty, Mill told the story of Alexander Smith, who was flogged for illegally pawning a gold watch. Mill characterises this apparent disparity in punishment as between offences of property and personal violence as itself a crime, “the crime more especially of legislators and of the superior courts”. Mill argued:

They, it seems, have yet to learn that there is a thing infinitely more important than property – the freedom and sacredness of human personality; that there is an immeasurable distance in point of moral enormity between any the gravest offence which concerns property only, and an act of insulting and degrading violence perpetrated against a human being. Mankind could go on very well, have gone on in time past (as well as they have ever yet gone on), with property very insecure. But subject to blows, or the fear of blows, they can be no other than soulless, terror-stricken slaves, without virtue, without courage, without peace, with nothing they dare call their own.

To sum up here. What is at stake for Mill in human affairs is “the freedom and sacredness of human personality”, and in his view government has a legitimately extensive role in its protection through the criminal law. As Mill argues in regard to the case of Mary Ann Parsons, “The ordinary protection of law is protection to those who can help themselves – who can in general keep themselves out of harm’s way or, at least, who can tell their own story.” However, more than the ordinary protection of law is required for those who cannot tell their own story, who stand “trembling” in the courts, unable “to speak the truth with sufficient plainness to procure a conviction, or to adhere to it when it has been spoken in the first instance”. According to Mill, protecting the sovereignty of the individual through respecting the freedom of human personality might require acting in a way against the expressed choices of a specific person: “The principle of freedom cannot require that [s]he should be free not to be free.”

I’ll finish with one last story. Late one night on a London street in 1869, Patrick Macgovern knocked down his wife. The assault was witnessed by William Smith, a policeman, who struck Macgovern with his truncheon in an attempt to protect the woman. For this action, Constable Smith was brought before the magistrate Ralph Augustus Benson, who sentenced him to a month in prison with hard labour for what Benson called an “unprovoked, brutal and unjustifiable” assault. Smith was dismissed from the police force, and was not reinstated despite protests made on his behalf.

This story involves a fairly standard incident of what we call domestic violence, or what Mill would call domestic atrocity. What makes it atypical was the action of Constable Smith in coming to the aid of Eliza Macgovern. What also makes it atypical, then as now, is that it came to public attention at all, and that it was the subject of a newspaper report. As Mill noted, “for every such case that excites notice, hundreds, most of them as bad, pass off in the police reports entirely unobserved; and for one that finds its way, even for that brief instant, into light, we may be assured that not hundreds but thousands are constantly going on the safety of complete obscurity.”

The newspaper report on William Smith came to the attention of Mill, who was one of those who petitioned the Attorney-General Sir Robert Collier to have Constable Smith reinstated in the police force. Mill wrote of this case, “I am not a partisan of the police, on the contrary, I greatly distrust them and think that magistrates rely too much on their evidence and often treat instances of bribery, perjury and other highly criminal conduct on their part with most undue lenity.” Mill’s concern in writing was how the case would influence men’s judgment on what it was wise, just and prudent to do to women. He asked:

Can there be a worse lesson to the police or to the public, than that when so many are retained in the force after flagrant misconduct one poor man against whom there is no other charge is dismissed for a little excess of zeal in protecting a woman against gross ill treatment? Policemen will think twice before they will interfere again to protect men’s wives, or any other woman against brutality when they find that any hurt they inflict on a brute of this description is declared from the seat of justice to be not only “brutal & unjustifiable” but “unprovoked”, knocking down a woman in the street being no provocation to a bystander, even to an appointed and paid preserver of the peace – that in short a woman is a creature whom it is safe to knock down but most dangerous to defend from being knocked down by another man.

I want to finish with this incident as a way of refocussing our understanding and interpretation of On Liberty. As I said above, On Liberty is usually interpreted as a statement of negative liberty, that is, the idea that I can choose to be the person I want to be if I am free from the intervention of government or society. Mill was certainly suspicious of the state, and was certainly as he says, “no partisan of the police”. But he countenanced a far-reaching and coercive role for the state and the law in enhancing the equal standing of women and men.

What I would like to suggest in closing is that the argument of On Liberty is founded on a primary concern with the status of persons and the sacredness of the human personality, rather than with setting the limits of government in terms of the harm principle.

What I am saying is that the arguments about freedom in On Liberty should best be understood as founded on the sovereignty principle, rather than the harm principle. And I am suggesting that just as Mill is best understood in those terms, many of our predicaments today would also be better understood in terms of defending the sacredness of the human personality, rather than in simply guarding against harm to others.

Endnotes

Roy Masters, “For all our names’ sakes”, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April 1991, 78.

Alan Jones, “A reminder for Mr K: A cesspool awaits”, Sun Herald, 19 February 1989, 52, and Alan Jones, “Old foes face new rules in the main event”, Sun Herald, 14 May 1989, 46. The quoted sentence is found in George Orwell, “Notes on the Way” (1940), in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, vol ii (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), 15-18.

Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right (1869), ed. P.D. Edwards (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1974), vol ii, chap lv, 46.

See Helen Pringle, “Defending Voltaire to Death”, OnLine Opinion, 6 September 2005, at http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=222.

For a recent nuanced discussion of Mill’s shifting loyalties, see Georgios Varouxakis, “French Radicalism through the Eyes of John Stuart Mill”, History of European Ideas, 30 (2004), 433-461.

Mill to John Sterling, 20-22 October 1831, Collected Works [CW], xii, 84.

Mill to John Austin, 13 April 1847, CW, xiii, 713. Similar characterisations of England and the English upper classes can be found throughout Mill’s works, at every stage of his adult life. Mill’s article “The Word ‘Destructive'” is characteristically passionate: Globe and Traveller, 6 January 1835, in Newspaper Writings, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, CW, xxiv, 760-763,

Joel Feinberg, The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law, 4 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987-1990).

On Liberty, CW, xviii, chap 1.

On Liberty, CW, xviii, chap 5.

On Liberty, CW, xviii, chap 5.

The editors of Mill’s Collected Works refer to the charge against McLean as one of murder, but I think this is an error.

The Times, 23 August 1851, 7, and report as quoted in Mill, “Wife Murder”, Morning Chronicle, 28 August 1851, CW, xxv, 1185. In The Times of7 August 1851, 7, Andrew M’Lean is recorded as saying, “This woman I am living with is not my wife, although she lives with me as such. Her name is Mary Ann Watson. She swears her name is M’Lean. She swore nothing but what was a parcel of lies. There was nobody saw me lay a false hand on the woman, nor heard me. I never saw a rope in the room that night.”

Mill, The Subjection of Women, CW, xxi, chap 4, 323.

Mill, The Subjection of Women, CW, xxi, chap 1, 271-272.

The Subjection of Women, chap ii, 285-286.

“The Acquittal of Captain Johnstone”, Morning Chronicle, 10 February 1846, CW, xxiv, 865-866, and “The Case of Private Matthewson”, Morning Chronicle, 6 October 1846, CW, xxiv, 882-885.

“The Case of Anne Bird”, Morning Chronicle, 13 March 1850, CW, xxv, 1153-1157, and “Punishment of Children”, Sunday Times, 2 June 1850 (on Edward Keanealy’s son), CW, xxv, 1176-1178.

“The Case of Mary Ann Parsons”, Daily News, 5 February 1850, CW, xxv, 1151-1153, and Morning Chronicle, 26 March 1850, CW, xxv, 1164-1167.

See Mill’s comments in “The Suicide of Sarah Brown”, Morning Chronicle, 28 October 1846, CW, xxiv, 919, or “The Law of Assault”, Morning Chronicle, 31 May 1850, CW, xxv,1175.

“The Case of William Burn”, Morning Chronicle, 17 November 1846, CW, xxiv, 954. Burn appears to have been still whipping his horses in 1851, when he was fined and sentenced to two months hard labour on that charge. There is no mention of his family in the report of this 1851 charge: The Times, 5 December 1851, 7.

I should note briefly here that these terms – atrocity and ruffians – don’t have the force for us that they did for Mill. For example, I characterise students’ spelling mistakes as atrocious, whereas for Mill, “atrocity” refers to a horrible or heinous wickedness. Clarendon had called the regicides atrocious, in the similar sense of savage enormity, or writers would refer to the atrocity of Christ’s passion. Again, I might call my son’s friends a bunch of ruffians, but I mean they are scallywags, not that they are low and brutal characters, cutthroat villains, or swaggering bullies, in the sense that Mill used “ruffian”.

“Remarks on Mr. Fitzroy’s Bill for the More Effectual Prevention of Assaults on Women and Children” (1853), CW, xxi, 105. In this context, see Joan Erskine, “If It Quacks like a Duck:  Recharacterizing Domestic Violence as Criminal Coercion”, Brooklyn Law Review, 65, 4 (Winter, 1999), 1207-1232.

“Remarks on Mr. Fitzroy’s Bill”, CW, xxi, 106.

“Remarks on Mr. Fitzroy’s Bill”, CW, xxi, 107-108.

“Corporal Punishment”, Daily News, 14 July 1848, CW, xxv, 1140.

“The Case of Mary Ann Parsons”, CW, xxv, 1167.

“The Law of Assault”, CW, xxv,1175.

“The Case of Anne Bird”, CW, xxv, 1156.

Mill to Sir Robert Collier, 11 January 1870, CW, xvii, 1677-1678, and Mill to Frank Harrison Hill, 11 January 1870, CW, xvii, 1679. Mill notes in the letter to Collier that he is writing on the same matter to the solicitor-general Sir John Coleridge, and to the former recorder of the City of London Russell Gurney. Mill’s editors also print an MS draft of an undated letter to the Daily News editors enclosing £5 “as the commencement of a subscription for the benefit of the police constable William Smith”: CW, xxiii, 1221-1222.