assion for justice which made him
strive so long and so tenaciously to bring to judgment a public
official, whom he conceived to be a great criminal, was worthy of one of
the stoutest patriots in our seventeenth-century history. The same moral
thoroughness stirred the same indignation in him on a more recent
occasion, when he declared it 'a permanent disgrace to the Government
that the iniquitous sentence on the gas-stokers was not remitted as soon
as passed.'

* * * * *

Much of his most striking quality was owing to the exceptional degree in
which he was alive to the constant tendency of society to lose some
excellence of aim, to relapse at some point from the standard of truth
and right which had been reached by long previous effort, to fall back
in height of moral ideal. He was keenly sensible that it is only by
persistent striving after improvement in our conceptions of duty, and
improvement in the external means for realising them, that even the
acquisitions of past generations are retained. He knew the intense
difficulty of making life better by ever so little. Hence at once the
exaltation of his own ideas of truth and right, and his eagerness to
conciliate anything like virtuous social feeling, in whatever
intellectual or political association he found it. Hence also the
vehemence of his passion for the unfettered and unchecked development of
new ideas on all subjects, of originality in moral and social points of
view; because repression, whether by public opinion or in any other way,
may be the means of untold waste of gifts that might have conferred on
mankind unspeakable benefits. The discipline and vigour of his
understanding made him the least indulgent of judges to anything like
charlatanry, and effectually prevented his unwillingness to let the
smallest good element be lost, from degenerating into that weak kind of
universalism which nullifies some otherwise good men.

* * * * *

Some great men seize upon us by the force of an imposing and majestic
authority; their thoughts impress the imagination, their words are
winged, they are as prophets bearing high testimony that cannot be
gainsaid. Bossuet, for instance, or Pascal. Others, and of these Mr.
Mill was one, acquire disciples not by a commanding authority, but by a
moderate and impersonal kind of persuasion. He appeals not to our sense
of greatness and power in a teacher, which is noble,