Autobiography
modifications amounting to an essential change of its character, a
transitional period commences, of weak convictions, paralysed
intellects, and growing laxity of principle, which cannot terminate
until a renovation has been effected in the basis of their belief
leading to the evolution of some faith, whether religious or
merely human, which they can really believe: and when things are in this
state, all thinking or writing which does not tend to promote such a
renovation, is of very little value beyond the moment. Since there was
little in the apparent condition of the public mind, indicative of any
tendency in this direction, my view of the immediate prospects of human
improvement was not sanguine. More recently a spirit of free speculation
has sprung up, giving a more encouraging prospect of the gradual mental
emancipation of England; and concurring with the renewal under better
auspices, of the movement for political freedom in the rest of Europe,
has given to the present condition of human affairs a more hopeful
aspect.[3]
Between the time of which I have now spoken, and the present, took place
the most important events of my private life. The first of these was my
marriage, in April, 1851, to the lady whose incomparable worth had made
her friendship the greatest source to me both of happiness and of
improvement, during many years in which we never expected to be in any
closer relation to one another. Ardently as I should have aspired to
this complete union of our lives at any time in the course of my
existence at which it had been practicable, I, as much as my wife, would
far rather have foregone that privilege for ever, than have owed it to
the premature death of one for whom I had the sincerest respect, and she
the strongest affection. That event, however, having taken place in
July, 1849, it was granted to me to derive from that evil my own
greatest good, by adding to the partnership of thought, feeling, and
writing which had long existed, a partnership of our entire existence.
For seven and a-half years that blessing was mine; for seven and a-half
only! I can say nothing which could describe, even in the faintest
manner, what that loss was and is. But because I know that she would
have wished it, I endeavour to make the best of what life I have left,
and to work on for her purposes with such diminished strength as can be
derived from thoughts of her, and communion with her memory.
When two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in
common; when all subjects of intellectual or moral interest are
discussed between them in daily life, and probed to much greater depths
than are usually or conveniently sounded in writings intended for
general readers; when they set out from the same principles, and arrive
at their conclusions by processes pursued jointly, it is of little
consequence in respect to the question of originality, which of them
holds the pen; the one who contributes least to the composition may
contribute more to the thought; the writings which result are the joint
product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their
respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the
other. In this wide sense, not only during the years of our married
life, but during many of the years of confidential friendship which
preceded, all my published writings were as much her work as mine; her
share in them constantly increasing as years advanced. But in certain
cases, what belongs to her can be distinguished, and specially
identified. Over and above the general influence which her mind had over
mine, the most valuable ideas and features in these joint
productions--those which have been most fruitful of important results,
and have contributed most to the success and reputation of the works
themselves--originated with her, were emanations from her mind, my part
in them being no greater than in any of the thoughts which I found in
previous writers, and made my own only by incorporating them with my own
system of thought! During the greater part of my literary life I have
performed the office in relation to her, which from a rather early
period I had considered as the most useful part that I was qualified to
take in the domain of thought, that of an interpreter of original
thinkers, and mediator between them and the public; for I had always a
humble opinion of my own powers as an original thinker, except in
abstract science (logic, metaphysics, and the theoretic principles of
political economy and politics), but thought myself much superior to
most of my contemporaries in willingness and ability to learn from
everybody; as I found hardly anyone who made such a point of examining
what was said in defence of all opinions, however new or however old, in
the conviction that even if they were errors there might be a substratum
of truth underneath them, and that in any case the discovery of what it
was that made them plausible, would be a benefit to truth. I had, in
consequence, marked this out as a sphere of usefulness in which I was
under a special obligation to make myself active; the more so, as the
acquaintance I had formed with the ideas of the Coleridgians, of the
German thinkers, and of Carlyle, all of them fiercely opposed to the
mode of thought in which I had been brought up, had convinced me that
along with much error they possessed much truth, which was veiled from
minds otherwise capable of receiving it by the transcendental and
mystical phraseology in which they were accustomed to shut it up, and
from which they neither cared, nor knew how, to disengage it; and I did
not despair of separating the truth from the error, and exposing it in
terms which would be intelligible and not repulsive to those on my own
side in philosophy. Thus prepared, it will easily be believed that when
I came into close intellectual communion with a person of the most
eminent faculties, whose genius, as it grew and unfolded itself in
thought, continually struck out truths far in advance of me, but in
which I could not, as I had done in those others, detect any mixture of
error, the greatest part of my mental growth consisted in the
assimilation of those truths, and the most valuable part of my
intellectual work was in building the bridges and clearing the paths
which connected them with my general system of thought.[4]
The first of my books in which her share was conspicious was the
_Principles of Political Economy_. The _System of Logic_ owed little to
her except in the minuter matters of composition, in which respect my
writings, both great and small, have largely benefited by her accurate
and clear-sighted criticism.[5] The chapter of the _Political Economy_
which has had a greater influence on opinion than all the rest, that on
'the Probable Future of the Labouring Classes,' is entirely due to her;
in the first draft of the book, that chapter did not exist. She pointed
out the need of such a chapter, and the extreme imperfection of the book
without it; she was the cause of my writing it; and the more general
part of the chapter, the statement and discussion of the two opposite
theories respecting the proper condition of the labouring classes, was
wholly an exposition of her thoughts, often in words taken from her own
lips. The purely scientific part of the _Political Economy_ I did not
learn from her; but it was chiefly her influence that gave to the book
that general tone by which it is distinguished from all previous
expositions of Political Economy that had any pretension to being
scientific, and which has made it so useful in conciliating minds which
those previous expositions had repelled. This tone consisted chiefly in
making the proper distinction between the laws of the Production of
Wealth--which are laws of nature, dependent on the properties of
objects--and the modes of its Distribution, which, subject to certain
conditions, depend on human will. The commom run of political economists
confuse these together, under the designation of economic laws, which
they deem incapable of being defeated or modified by human effort;
ascribing the same necessity to things dependent on the unchangeable
conditions of our earthly existence, and to those which, being but the
necessary consequences of particular social arrangements, are merely
co-extensive with these; given certain institutions and customs, wages,
profits, and rent will be determined by certain causes; but this class
of political economists drop the indispensable presupposition, and argue
that these causes must, by an inherent necessity, against which no human
means can avail, determine the shares which fall, in the division of the
produce, to labourers, capitalists, and landlords. The _Principles of
Political Economy_ yielded to none of its predecessors in aiming at the
scientific appreciation of the action of these causes, under the
conditions which they presuppose; but it set the example of not treating
those conditions as final. The economic generalizations which depend not
on necessaties of nature but on those combined with the existing
arrangements of society, it deals with only as provisional, and as
liable to be much altered by the progress of social improvement. I had
indeed partially learnt this view of things from the thoughts awakened
in me by the speculations of the St. Simonians; but it was made a living
principle pervading and animating the book by my wife's promptings. This
example illustrates well the general character of what she contributed
to my writings. What was abstract and purely scientific was generally
mine; the properly human element came from her: in all that concerned
the application of philosophy to the exigencies of human society and
progress, I was her pupil, alike in boldness of speculation and
cautiousness of practical judgment. For, on the one hand, she was much
more courageous and far-sighted than without her I should have been, in
anticipation of an order of things to come, in which many of the limited
generalizations now so often confounded with universal principles will
cease to be applicable. Those parts of my writings, and especially of
the _Political Economy_, which contemplate possibilities in the future
such as, when affirmed by Socialists, have in general been fiercely
denied by political economists, would, but for her, either have been
absent, or the suggestions would have been made much more timidly and in
a more qualified form. But while she thus rendered me bolder in
speculation on human affairs, her practical turn of mind, and her almost
unerring estimate of practical obstacles, repressed in me all tendencies
that were really visionary. Her mind invested all ideas in a concrete
shape, and formed to itself a conception of how they would actually
work: and her knowledge of the existing feelings and conduct of mankind
was so seldom at fault, that the weak point in any unworkable suggestion
seldom escapes her.[6]
During the two years which immediately preceded the cessation of my
official life, my wife and I were working together at the "Liberty."
I had first planned and written it as a short essay in 1854. It was in
mounting the steps of the Capitol, in January, 1855, that the thought
first arose of converting it into a volume. None of my writings have
been either so carefully composed, or so sedulously corrected as this.
After it had been written as usual twice over, we kept it by us,
bringing it out from time to time, and going through it _de novo_,
reading, weighing, and criticizing every sentence. Its final revision
was to have been a work of the winter of 1858-9, the first after my
retirement, which we had arranged to pass in the south of Europe. That
hope and every other were frustrated by the most unexpected and bitter