 Section 20, Autobiography of John Stuart Mill. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Tony Richardson. Chapter 7 Part 5 General view of the remainder of my life. Had I been defeated in the election, I should still have had no reason to regret the contact it had brought me into with large bodies of my countrymen, which not only gave me much new experience but enabled me to scatter my political opinions rather widely and by making me known in many quarters where I had never before been heard of increased the number of my readers and the presumable influence of my writings. These latter effects were of course produced in a still greater degree when as much as to my surprises as to that of anyone, I was returned to Parliament by a majority of some hundreds over my conservative competitor. I was a member of the House during the three sessions of the Parliament which passed the reform bill during which time Parliament was necessarily my main occupation except during the recess. I was a tolerably frequent speaker sometimes of prepared speeches sometimes extemporaneously but my choice of occasions was not such as I should have made if my leading object had been Parliamentary influence. When I had gained the ear of the House, which I did by successful speech on Mr. Gladstone's reform bill, the idea I proceeded on was that when anything was likely to be well done or sufficiently well done by other people, there was no necessity for me to meddle with it. As I therefore in general reserved myself for work which no others were likely to do. A great proportion of my appearances were on points on which the bulk of the Liberal Party even the advanced portion of it either were of a different opinion from mine or were comparatively indifferent. Several of my speeches, especially one against the motion of the abolition of capital punishment and another in favor of resuming the right of seizing enemies goods in neutral vessels were opposed to what then was and probably still is regarded as the advanced Liberal opinion. My advocacy of women's suffrage and of personal representation were at the time looked upon by many as whims of my own. But the great progress since made by those opinions and especially the response made by almost all parts of the kingdom to demand for women's suffrage fully justified the timeliness of those movements and have made what was undertaken as a moral and social duty a personal success. Another duty which was particularly incumbent on me as one of the Metropolitan members was the attempt to obtain municipal government for the metropolis but on that subject the indifference of the House of Commons was such that I found hardly any help or support within its walls. On the subject however I was the organ of an active and intelligent body of persons outside whom and not with me the scheme originated and who carried on all the agitations on the subject and drew up the bills. My part was to bring in bills already prepared and to sustain the discussion of them during the short time they were allowed to remain before the House. After having taken an active part in the work of a committee presided over by Mr. Eyrton which set through the greater part of the session of 1866 to take evidence on the subject. The very different position in which the question now stands in 1870 may just to be attributed to the preparation which went on during those years and which produced but little visible effect at the time but all questions on which there are strong private interests on one side and only the public good on the other have a similar period of incubation to go through. The same idea that the use of my being in Parliament was to do work which others were not able or not willing to do made me think it my duty to come to the front in defense of advanced liberalism on occasions when the obliquity to be encountered was such as most of the advanced liberals in the House preferred not to incur. My first vote in the House was in support of an amendment in favor of Ireland moved by an Irish member and for which only five English and Scotch votes were given including my own. The other four were Mr. Bright, Mr. McLaren, Mr. T. B. Potter and Mr. Hadfield and the second speech I delivered was on the bill to prolong the suspension of the habeas corpus in Ireland and announcing on this occasion the English mode of governing Ireland I did no more than the general opinion of England now admits to have been just but the anger against Finianism was then in all its freshness any attack on what Finians attack was looked upon as an apology for them and I was so unfavorably received by the House that more than one of my friends advised me and my own judgment agreed with the advice to wait before speaking again for the favorable opportunity that would be given by the first great debate on the reform bill. During this silence many flattered themselves that I had turned out a failure and that they should not be troubled with me anymore perhaps their uncomplimentary comments made by force of reaction have helped to make my speech on the reform bill the success it was my position in the House was further improved by a speech in which I insisted on the duty of paying off the national debt before our cold supplies are exhausted and by an ironical reply to some of the Tory leaders who had quoted against me certain passages of my writings and called me to account for others especially for one of my considerations on representative government which said that the Conservative Party was by the law of its composition the stupidest party they gained nothing by drawing attention to the passage which up to that time had not excited any notice but the sobriquet of the quote-unquote stupid party stuck to them for a considerable time afterwards having now no longer any apprehension of not being listened to I can find myself as I have sent thought too much to occasions on which my services seemed especially needed and abstained more than enough from speaking on the great party questions with the exception of Irish questions and those which concern the working classes a single speech on Mr. Desiree's reform bill was nearly all that I contributed to the great decisive debates of the last two of my three sessions I have, however, much satisfaction in looking back to the part I took on the two classes of subjects just mentioned with regard to the working classes the chief topic of my speech on Mr. Gladstone's reform bill was the assertion of their claims to the suffrage a little later after the resignation of Lord Russell's ministry and the succession of a Tory government came the attempt of the working classes to hold a meeting in Hyde Park their exclusion by the police and the breaking down of the park railing by the crowd though Mr. Belies and his leaders of the working men had retired under protest before this took place a scuffle ensued in which many innocent persons were maltreated by the police and the exasperation of the working men was extreme they showed a determination to make another attempt at a meeting in the park to which many of them would probably have come armed the government made military preparations to resist the attempt and something very serious seemed impending at this crisis I really believed that I was the means of preventing much mischief I had in my place in parliament taken the side of the working men and strongly censured the conduct of the government I was invited with several other radical members to a conference with the leading members of the council of the reform league and the task fell chiefly upon myself of persuading them to give up the Hyde Park project and hold their meeting elsewhere it was not Mr. Belies and Colonel Dixon who needed persuading on the contrary it was evident that these gentlemen had already exerted their influence in the same direction thus far without success it was the working men who held out so bent were they on their original scheme that I was obliged to have recourse to Legrand Moynes and I told them that a proceeding which would certainly produce a collision with the military could only be justifiable on two conditions if the position of affairs had become such that the revolution was desirable and if they thought themselves able to accomplish one to this argument after considerable discussion they at last yielded and I was able to inform Mr. Walpole that their intention was given up I shall never forget the depth of his relief or the warmth of his expressions of gratitude after the working men had conceded so much to me I felt bound to comply with their request that I should attend and speak at their meeting at the Agricultural Hall the only meeting called by the Reform League which I ever attended I had always declined being a member of the League on the avowed ground that I did not agree in its program of manhood suffrage and the ballot from the ballot I dissented entirely and I could not consent to horse the flag of manhood suffrage even on the assurance that the exclusion of women was not intended to be implied since if one goes beyond what can be immediately carried and professes to take one's stand on a principle one should go the whole length of the principle I have entered this particularly into this matter because my conduct on this occasion gave great displeasure to the Tory and Tory Liberal press who have charged me ever since with having shown myself in the trials of public life in temperate and passionate I do not know what they expected from me but they had reason to be thankful to me if they knew from what I had and all probability preserved them and I do not believe it could have been done at that particular juncture by anyone else no other person I believe had at that moment the necessary influence for restraining the working classes except Mr Gladstone and Mr Bright neither of whom was available Mr Gladstone for obvious reasons Mr Bright because he was out of town when sometime later the Tory government brought in a bill to prevent public meetings in the parks I not only spoke strongly in opposition to it but formed one of a number of advanced Liberals who aided by the very late period of this session succeeded in defeating the bill by what is called talking it out it has not since been renewed on Irish affairs also I felt bound to take a decided part I was one of the foremost in the deputation of members of parliament who prevailed on Lord Derby to spare the life of the condemned Phinean insurgent General Burke the church question was so vigorously handled by the leaders of the party in the session of 1868 as to require no more from me than an emphatic adhesion but the land question was by no means in so advanced a position the superstitions of land lordism had up to that time been little challenged especially in Parliament and the backward state of the question so far as concerned the Parliamentary mind was evidenced by the extremely mild measure brought in by Lord Russell's government in 1866 which nevertheless could not be carried on that bill I delivered one of my most careful speeches in which I attempted to lay down some of the principles of the subject in a manner calculated less to stimulate friends than to conciliate and convince opponents the engrossing subject of Parliamentary reform prevented either this bill or one of a similar character brought about by Lord Derby's government from being carried through they never got beyond the second reading meanwhile the signs of Irish disaffection had become much more decided the demand of complete separation between the two countries had assumed a menacing aspect and there were few who did not feel if there was still any chance of reconciling Ireland to the British connection it could only be by the adoption of much more thorough reforms in the territorial and social relations of the country than had been contemplated the time seemed to me to have come when it would be useful to speak out my whole mind and the result was my pamphlet England and Ireland which was written in the winter of 1867 and published shortly before the commencement of the session of 1868 the leading features of the pamphlet were on the one hand an argument to show the undesirableness for Ireland as well as England of separation between the countries and on the other a proposal for settling the land question by giving to the existing tenants a permanent tenure at a fixed rent to be assessed after due inquiry by the state the pamphlet was not popular except in Ireland as I did not expect it to be but if no measure short of that which I proposed would do full justice to Ireland or afford a prospect of conciliating the mass of the Irish people the duty of proposing it was imperative while if on the other hand there was any intermediate course which had a claim to a trial I knew that to propose something which would be called extreme was the true way not to impede or facilitate a more moderate experiment it is most improbable that a measure conceding so much of the tenancy as Mr Gladstone's Irish land bill would have been proposed by government or could have been carried through parliament unless the British public had been led to perceive that a case might be made and perhaps a party formed for a measure considerably stronger it is the character of the British people or at least of the higher and middle classes who pass muster for the British people that to induce them to approve of any change it is necessary that they should look upon it as a middle course they think every proposal extremely violent unless they hear of some other proposal going still farther upon which their antipathy to extreme views may discharge itself so it proved in the present instance my proposal was condemned but any scheme for Irish land reform short of mind came to be thought moderate by comparison I may observe that the attacks made on my plan usually gave a very incorrect idea of its nature it was usually discussed as a proposal that the state should buy up the land and become the universal landlord though in fact it only offered to each individual landlord this as an alternative if he liked better to sell his estate than to retain it on the new conditions and I fully anticipated that most landlords would continue to prefer the position of land owners to that of government annuitance and would retain their existing relation to their tenants often on more indulgent terms than the full rents on which the compensation to be given them by government would have been based this and many other explanations I gave in a speech on Ireland in the debate on Mr. McGuire's resolution early in the session of 1868 a corrected report of this speech together with my speech on Mr. Fortescue's bill has been published not by me but by my permission in Ireland another public duty of a most serious kind it was my lot to have to perform both in and out of parliament during these years a disturbance in Jamaica provoked in the first instance by injustice and exaggerated by rage and panic to the premeditated rebellion had been the motive or excuse for taking hundreds of innocent lives by military violence or by sentence of what were called court-martial continuing for weeks after the brief disturbance had been put down with many added atrocities of destruction such as property logging women as well as men and a general display of the brutal recklessness which usually prevails when firing sword or let loose the perpetrators of those deeds were defended and applauded in England by the same kind of people who had so long upheld Negro slavery and it seemed at first as if the British nation incurred the disgrace of letting pass without even a protest excesses of authority as revolting as any of those for which when perpetuated by the estimates of other governments Englishmen can hardly find terms sufficient to express their abhorrence after a short time however an indignant feeling was roused and voluntary association formed itself under the name of Jamaica committee to take such deliberation and action as the case might admit of and adhesions poured in from all parts of the country I was abroad at the time but I sent in my name to the committee as soon as I heard of it and took an active part in the proceedings from the time of my return it was much more at stake than only justice to the Negroes imperative as was that consideration the question was what are the British dependencies and eventually perhaps Great Britain itself were to be under the government of law or of military license what are the lives and persons of British subjects are at the mercy of any two or three officers however raw and inexperienced or reckless and brutal whom a panic-stricken governor or other functionary may assume the right to constitute into a so-called court martial this question could only be decided by an appeal to the tribunals and such an appeal the committee determined to make their determination led to a change in the chairmanship of the committee as the chairman Mr. Charles Buxton thought it not unjust indeed but inexpedient to prosecute Governor Irie and his principal subordinates in the criminal court but a numerously attended general meeting of the association having decided this point against him Mr. Buxton withdrew from the committee though continuing to work in the cause and I was quite unexpectedly on my own part proposed and elected chairman it came in consequence my duty to represent the committee in the House of Commons sometimes by putting questions to the government sometimes as the recipient of the questions more or less provocative addressed by individual members to myself but especially as speaker in the important debate originated in the session of 1866 by Mr. Buxton and the speech I then delivered is that which I should probably select as the best of my speeches in Parliament for more than two years we carried on the combat trying every avenue legally open to us to the courts of criminal justice a bench of magistrates in one of the most touric counties in England dismissed our case we were more successful before the magistrates at Bow Street which gave an opportunity to the Lord Chief Justice of the Queens bench Sir Alexander Cockburn for delivering his celebrated charge which settled the law of the question in favor of liberty as far as it is in the power of a judge's charge to settle it there however our success ended for the old Bailey grand jury by throwing out our bill prevented the case from coming to trial it was clear that to bring English functionaries to the bar of a criminal court for abuses of power committed against Negroes and mulattoes was not a popular proceeding with the English middle classes we had however redeemed so far as lay in us the character of our country by showing that there was at any rate a body of persons determined to use all the means which the law afforded to obtain justice for the injured we had elicited from the highest criminal judge in the nation an authoritative declaration that the law was what we maintained it to be and we had given an emphatic warning to those who might be tempted to similar guilt hereafter that though they might escape the actual sentence of a criminal tribunal they were not safe against being put to some trouble and expense in order to avoid it colonial governors and other persons in authority will have a considerable motive to stop short of such extremities in future end of section 20 recording by Tony Richardson section 21 autobiography of John Stuart Mill this is the LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information if you volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Tony Richardson chapter 7 part 6 view of the remainder of my life as a matter of curiosity I kept some specimens of the abusive letters almost all of them anonymous which I received while these proceedings were going on they are evidence of the sympathy felt with the brutalities in Jamaica by the brutal part of the population at home they graduated from coarse jokes, verbal and pictorial up to threats of assassination among other matters of importance in which I took an active part but which excited little interest in the public to deserve particular mention of other independent liberals in defeating an extradition bill introduced at the very end of the session of 1866 and by which though surrender avowedly for political offenses was not authorized political refugees if charged by foreign government with acts which are necessarily incident to all attempts at insurrection which have been surrendered to be dealt with by the criminal courts of the government against which they had rebelled thus making the British government an accomplice in the vengeance of foreign despotisms the defeat of this proposal led to the appointment of a select committee in which I was included to examine and report on the whole subject of extradition treaties and the result was that in the extradition act which passed through parliament after I had ceased to be a member opportunity is given to anyone whose extradition is demanded of being heard before an English court of justice to prove that the offense with which he is charged is readily political because of European freedom has thus been saved from a serious misfortune and our own country from a great equity. The other subject to be mentioned is the fight kept up by a body of advanced liberals in the session of 1868 on the bribery bill of Mr. Disraeli's government in which I took a very active part I had taken counsel with several of those who had applied their minds most carefully to the details of the subject as well as bestowed much thought of my own for the purpose of framing such amendments and additional clauses as might make the bill really effective against the numerous modes of corruption direct and indirect which might otherwise as there was much reasoning to fear be increased instead of diminished by the reform act of the reform act of the reform act we also aim that in grafting on the bill measures for diminishing the mischievous burden of what are called the legitimate expenses of elections among our many amendments was that of Mr. Fawcett for making the returning officers expenses a charge on the rates instead of on the candidates another was the prohibition of paid canvases and the limitation of paid agents 2-1 for each candidate a third was the extension of the precautions and penalties against bribery to municipal elections which are well known to be not only a preparatory school for bribery at parliamentary elections but habitual cover for it the conservative government however when once they had carried the leading provision of their bill for which I voted and spoke the transfer of the jurisdiction in election from the House of Commons to the judges made a determined resistance to all other improvements and after one of our most important proposals that of Mr. Fawcett had actually obtained a majority they summoned the strength of their party and threw out the clause in a subsequent stage the liberal party in the House was greatly dishonored by the conduct of many of its members in giving no help whatever to this attempt to secure the necessary conditions for an honest representation of the people with their large majority in the House they could have carried all the amendments or better ones if they had better to propose but it was late in the session members were eager to set about their preparations for the impending general election and while some such as Sir Robert and Struther honorably remained at their post though rival candidates were already hand-bassing their constituency a much greater number placed their electioneering interests before their public duty many liberals are looked with indifference on legislation against bribery thinking that it merely diverted public interest from the ballot which they considered very mistakenly as I expect it will turn out to be a sufficient only remedy from these causes our fight though kept up with great vigor for several nights was wholly unsuccessful and the practices which we sought to run more difficult prevailed more widely than ever in the first general election held under the new electoral law in the general debates on Mr. Disraelis reform bill my participation was limited to the one speech already mentioned but I made the bill an occasion for bringing the two great improvements which remain to be made in representative government formally before the house and the nation one of them was personal or as it is called with equal propriety proportional representation I brought this under the consideration of the house by an expository and argumentative speech on Mr. Hare's plan and subsequently I was active in support of the very imperfect substitute for that plan which in a small number of constituencies parliament was induced to adopt this poor makeshift had scarcely any recommendation except that it was a partial recognition of the evil which it did so little to remedy as such however it was attacked by the same fallacies and required to be defended on the same principles as a really good measure and its adoption in a few parliamentary elections as well as the subsequent introduction of what is called the cumulative vote in the elections for the London School Board have had the good effect of converting the equal claim of all electors to a proportional share in the representation from a subject of merely speculative discussion into a question of practical politics much sooner than would otherwise have been the case this assertion of my opinions on personal representation cannot be credited with any considerable or visible amount of practical result it was otherwise with the other motion which I made in the form of an amendment to the reform bill and which was by far the most important perhaps the only really important public service I performed in the capacity of a member of parliament to strike out the words which were understood to limit the electoral franchise to males and thereby to admit to the suffrage all women who as householders or otherwise possessed the qualification required of male electors for women not to make their claim to the suffrage at the time when the elected franchise was being largely extended would have been to abdure the claim altogether and the movement on the subject was begun in 1866 when I presented a petition for the suffrage signed by a considerable number of distinguished women but it was as yet uncertain whether the proposal would obtain more than a few stray votes in the house and when after a debate in which the speakers on the countryside were conspicuous by their feebleness the votes recorded in favor of the motion amounted to 73 made up by pairs and tellers to above 80 the surprise was general and the encouragement great the greater two because one of those who voted for the motion was Mr. Bright a fact could only be attributed to the impressions made on him by the debate as he had previously made no secret of his non-concurrents in the proposal the time appeared to my daughter Ms. Helen Taylor to have come for forming a society for the extension of the suffrage of women the existence of the society is due to my daughter's initiative its constitution was planned entirely by her and she was the soul of the movement during the first years though delicate health and super abundant occupation made her decline to be a member of the executive committee many distinguished members of parliament professors and others and some of the most imminent women of whom the country can boast became members of the society a large proportion either directly or indirectly through my daughter's influence she having written the greater number and all the best of the letters by which adhesions was obtained even when those letters bore my signature in two remarkable instances those of Miss Nightingale and Miss Mary Carpenter the reluctance of those ladies had at first felt to come forward for it was not on their past difference of opinion was overcome by appeals written by my daughter though signed by me associations for the same object were formed in various local centers Manchester, Edinburgh Birmingham, Bristol and Glasgow and others which have done much valuable work for the cause all the societies take the title of branches of the National Society for Women's Suffrage but each has its own governing body and acts in complete independence of the others I believe I've mentioned all that is worth remembering of my proceedings in the house but their enumeration in complete would give but an inadequate idea of my occupations during that period and especially of my time taken up by correspondence for many years before my election to Parliament I had been continually receiving letters from strangers mostly addressed to me as a writer on philosophy and either propounding difficulties or communicating thoughts on subjects connected with logic or political economy in common I suppose with all who are known as political economists I was a recipient of all the shallow theories and absurd proposals by which people are perpetually endeavouring to show the way to universal wealth and happiness by some artful reorganization of the currency when there were signs of sufficient intelligence in the writers to make it worthwhile attempting to put them right I took the trouble to point out their errors until the growth of my correspondence made it necessary to dismiss such persons with very brief answers many however of the communications I received were more worthy of attention than these and in some oversights of detail were pointed out in my writings which I was thus unable to correct correspondence of this sort naturally multiplied with the multiplication of the subjects on which I wrote especially those of a metaphysical character but when I became a member of Parliament I began to receive letters on private conferences on every imaginable subject that related to any kind of public affairs however remote from my knowledge or pursuits it was not my constituents in Westminster who laid this burden on me they kept with remarkable fidelity to the understanding on which I had consented to serve I received indeed now and then an application from some ingenuous youth to procure for him a small governmental appointment but these were few and how simple and ignorant the writers were was shown by the fact that the applications came in about equally whichever party was in power my invariable answer was that it was contrary to the principles on which I was elected to ask favors of any government but on the whole any part of the country gave me less trouble than my own constituents the general mass of correspondence however swelled into an oppressive burden at the time and henceforth a great proportion of all my letters including many which found their way into the newspapers were not written by me but by my daughter at first merely from her willingness to help in disposing of a mass of letters greater than I could get through without assistance but afterwards because I thought the letter she wrote superior to mine and more so in proportion to the difficulty and importance of the occasion even those which I wrote myself were generally much improved by her as is also the case with all the more recent of my prepared speeches of which and of some of my published writings not a few passages and those the most successful were hers while I remained in parliament my work as an author was unavoidably limited to the recess during that time I wrote besides the pamphlet on Ireland already mentioned the essay on Plato published in the Edinburgh review and reprinted in the third volume of dissertations and discussions and the address which conformably to custom I delivered to the University of St Andrews whose students had done me the honor of electing me to the office of rector in this discourse I gave expression to many thoughts and opinions which had been accumulating in me through life respecting the various studies which belong to a liberal education their uses and influences and the mode in which they should be pursued to render their influences most beneficial the position taken up vindicating the high educational value alike of the old classic and new scientific studies on even stronger grounds urged by most of their advocates and insisting that it is only the stupid inefficiency of the usual teaching which makes those studies be regarded as competitors instead of allies was I think calculated not only to aid and stimulate the improvement which was happily commenced in the national institutions for higher education but to diffuse just the ideas than we often find even in highly educated men on the conditions of the highest mental cultivation during this period also I commenced and completed soon after I had left parliament the performance of a duty to philosophy and to the memory of my father by preparing and publishing an edition of the analysis of the phenomena of the human mind with notes bringing up the doctrines of that admirable book to the latest improvements in science and in speculation this was a joint undertaking the psychological notes being furnished in about equal proportions by Mr. Bain and myself while Mr. Grote supplied some valuable contributions on points in the history of philosophy which were evidently raised and Dr. Andrew Fend later supplied the deficiencies in the book which had been occasioned by the imperfect philological knowledge of the time when it was written having been originally published at a time when the current of metaphysical speculation ran in a quite opposite direction to the psychology of experience and association the analysis had not obtained the amount of immediate success which it deserved though it had been made a deep impression on many individual minds and had largely contributed through those minds to create that more favorable atmosphere for an association psychology of which we now have the benefit admirably adapted for a class book of the experience of metaphysics it only required to be enriched and in some cases corrected by the results of more recent labors in the same school of thought to stand as it now does in company with Mr. Bain's treatises at the head of the systematic works on analytic psychology in the autumn of 1868 the parliament which passed the reform act was dissolved and at the new election for Westminster I was thrown out not to my surprise nor I believe to that of my principal supporters though in the few days preceding the election they had become more sanguine than before that I should not have been elected at all would not have required any explanation what excites curiosity is that I should have been elected the first time or having been elected then should have been defeated afterwards but the efforts made to defeat me were far greater on the second occasion than on the first for one thing the Tory government was now struggling for existence and success in any contest was of more importance to them then too all persons of Tory feelings were far more embittered against me individually than on the previous occasion many who had at first been either favourable or indifferent were vehemently opposed to my re-election as I had shown in my political writings that I was aware of the weak points in democratic opinions some conservatives it seems had not been without hopes of finding me an opponent of democracy as I was able to see the conservative side of the question they presumed that like them I could not see any other side yet if they had really read my writings they would have known that after giving full weight that appeared to me well grounded in the arguments against democracy I unhesitatingly decided in its favour while recommending that it should be accompanied by such institutions as were consistent with its principle and calculated to ward off its inconveniences one of the chief of these remedies being proportional representation on which scarcely of the conservatives gave me any support some Tory expectations appeared to have been founded on the approbation I had expressed of plural voting under certain conditions and it has been surmised that the suggestion of this sort made in one of the resolutions which Mr. Disraeli introduced into the house preparatory to his reform bill a suggestion which meeting with no favour he did not press may have been occasioned by what I had written on the point but if so it was forgotten that I had made it an express condition that the privilege of that plurality of votes should be annexed to education not to property and even so had approved of it only on the supposition of universal suffrage how utterly inadmissible such plural voting would be under the suffrage given by the present reform act is proved to any who could otherwise doubt it by the very small weight which the working classes are found to possess in elections even under the law which gives no more votes to any one elector than to any other while I thus was far more obnoxious to the Tory interests and to many conservative Liberals than I had formally been the course I pursued in parliament had by no means been such as to make Liberals generally at all enthusiastic in my support it has already been mentioned how large a proportion of my prominent appearances had been on questions on which I had differed from most of the liberal party or about which they cared little and how few occasions there had been on which the line I took was such as could lead them to attach any great value to me as an organ of their opinions I had more overdone things which had excited many minds a personal prejudice against me many were offended by what they called the persecution of Mr. Eyrie and still greater offense was taken at my sending a subscription to the election expenses of Mr. Bredlaw having refused to be at any expense for my own election and having had my offices defrayed by others I felt under a peculiar obligation to subscribe in my turn where funds were deficient for candidates whose election was desirable I accordingly sent subscriptions to nearly all the working class candidates and among others to Mr. Bredlaw he had the support of the working classes having heard him speak I knew him to be a man of ability and he had proved that he was the reverse of a demagogue by placing himself in strong opposition to the prevailing opinion of the democratic party on two such important subjects as Malthusianism and personal representation many of this sort who while sharing the democratic feelings of the working classes had political questions for themselves and had courage to assert their individual convictions against popular opposition were needed as it seemed to me in Parliament and I did not think that Mr. Bredlaw's anti-religious opinions even though he had been intemperate in the expression of them ought to exclude him in subscribing however to the election I did what would have been highly imprudent if I had been at liberty to consider only the interest of my own reelection and as might be expected the utmost possible use both fair and unfair was made of this act of mind to stir up the electors of Westminster against me to these various causes this use of the usual pecuniary and other influences on the side of my Tory competitor while none were used on my side it is to be ascribed that I failed at my second election after having succeeded at the first No sooner was the result of the election known than I received three or four invitations to become a candidate for other constituencies chiefly counties but even if success could have been expected and this without expense I was not disposed to deny myself the relief of returning to private life I had no cause to feel humiliated at my rejection by the electors and if I had the feeling would have been far outweighed by the numerous expressions of regret which I received from all sorts of persons and places and in a most marked degree from those members of the Liberal Party in Parliament with whom I had been accustomed to act since that time little has occurred which there is need to commemorate in this place I returned to my old pursuits and to the enjoyment of a country life in the south of Europe alternating twice a year with the residents of some weeks or months in the neighborhood of London I have written various articles and periodicals chiefly and my friend Mr. Mosley's fortnightly review have made a small number of speeches on public occasions especially at the meetings of the Women's Suffrage Society have published this Subjection of Women written some years before with some additions by my daughter and myself and have commenced the preparation of matter for future books of which it will be time to speak more particularly if I live to finish them here therefore for the present this memoir may close end of section 21 recording by Tony Richardson is the end of the autobiography of John Stuart Mill