ns for the people, and sold at the price of railway
novels. Foreigners from all countries read his books as attentively as
his most eager English disciples, and sought his opinion as to their own
questions with as much reverence as if he had been a native oracle. An
eminent American who came over on an official mission which brought him
into contact with most of the leading statesmen throughout Europe, said
to the present writer:--'The man who impressed me most of them all was
Stuart Mill; you placed before him the facts on which you sought his
opinion. He took them, gave you the different ways in which they might
fairly be looked at, balanced the opposing considerations, and then
handed you a final judgment in which nothing was left out. His mind
worked like a splendid piece of machinery; you supply it with raw
material, and it turns you out a perfectly finished product.' Of such a
man England has good reason to be very proud.

He was stamped in many respects with specially English quality. He is
the latest chief of a distinctively English school of philosophy, in
which, as has been said, the names of Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, and
Bentham (and Mr. Mill would have added James Mill) mark the line of
succession--the school whose method subordinates imagination to
observation, and whose doctrine lays the foundations of knowledge in
experience, and the tests of conduct in utility. Yet, for all this, one
of his most remarkable characteristics was less English than French; his
constant admission of an ideal and imaginative element in social
speculation, and a glowing persuasion that the effort and wisdom and
ingenuity of men are capable, if free opportunity be given by social
arrangements, of raising human destiny to a pitch that is at present
beyond our powers of conception. Perhaps the sum of all his distinction
lies in this union of stern science with infinite aspiration, of
rigorous sense of what is real and practicable with bright and luminous
hope. He told one who was speaking of Condorcet's Life of Turgot, that
in his younger days whenever he was inclined to be discouraged, he was
in the habit of turning to this book, and that he never did so without
recovering possession of himself. To the same friend, who had printed
something comparing Mr. Mill's repulse at Westminster with the dismissal
of the great minister of Lewis the Sixteenth, he wrote:--'I never
received so gratifying a compliment as the comparison of me to Tur