Mill returned to England in July 1821.He took up his old studies,taught his brothers and sisters,read Condillac and a history of the French revolution,of which,in spite of his previous stay in France,he had known very little,and decided that it would be,transcendent glory,to be 'a Girondist in an English convention.'Meanwhile,a profession had to be chosen.He was intended for the bar,and began to study Roman law under John Austin.He set to work upon Bentham,and the reading of Dumont's Traitde Lislation formed an epoch in his life.His botanical studies had fostered his early taste for classification,already awaked by his early logical studies.He was now delighted to find that human actions might be classified as well as plants,and,moreover,classified by the principle of utility,that is to say,by reference to a guiding rule for all known conduct.'Utility'took its place as 'the keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary parts of his knowledge and beliefs.'(12)He had now a philosophy and even,'in one of the best senses of the word,a religion,the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal outward purpose of a life.'The very moderation of the creed was among its claims.Mill was not roused,like Shelley,to an enthusiastic vision of an abrupt regeneration of man.His religion was strictly scientific;it recognised the necessity of slow elaboration,but offered a sufficiently wide vista of continuous improvement to be promoted by unremitting labour.He now enlarged his philosophical reading;he studied Locke,Helvius,and Hartley,Berkeley,and Hume's Essays,besides Reid,Dugald Stewart,and Brown's essay upon Cause and Effect.These studies were carried on while he was reading his father's analysis in manuscript,and no doubt discussing with his father the points raised by the argument.The last book which he mentions as affecting his early development is 'Philip Beauchamp's 'treatise upon the utility of religion.The 'searching character of its analysis,'he says,produced a great effect upon him,of which some results will appear hereafter.
II.EARLY PROPAGANDISM
In 1822--at the age,that is,of sixteen --Mill began to compose,argumentative,essays,which were apparently crude enough,but which were profitable exercises.Already,too,he was beginning to take a position in the Utilitarian circle.John Austin (1790-1859),his tutor,a man of lofty,if over-fastidious character,encouraged the boy by his kind interest.Another important friend was George Grote,who,as I have said,had already become a writer in the cause.To both these men,his seniors by sixteen and twelve years respectively,a boy of sixteen or seventeen would naturally look up with respectful admiration.With Grote,as with John Austin,he held much 'sympathetic communion,'but his first ally among men whom he could feel to be contemporaries was Austin's younger brother Charles.He was a man who gave the impression,according to Mill,of 'boundless strength,'with talents and will which seemed capable of 'dominating the world.'Instead of being,like his brother John,incapacitated for life by over-refinement,he made a fortune at the bar;and his energy was,after a time,entirely diverted from the Utilitarian propaganda For the present,however,he was defending the true faith in an uncongenial atmosphere.He was,says Mill,the 'really influential mind among these intellectual gladiators'--the young Cambridge orators.
James Mill,as I have said,had been encouraged by hearing that the cause of Utilitarianism was being upheld even in one of the universities,which he took to be the natural centres of obscurantism.John Mill visited Austin at Cambridge in 1822,and the boy of sixteen greatly impressed the undergraduates by his conversational power The elder Mill was urged to send his son to Trinity College.He would no doubt have feared to expose the youth to such contagion.(13)John Mill himself long held the universities to be mere institutions for supporting the established creed.'We regard the system of these institutions,'he said in 1836,'as administered for two centuries past,with sentiments little short of utter abhorrence.'(14)It is idle to ask whether closer contact with the average English youth would or would not have been beneficial,but the sentiment marks the degree in which Mill was an alien among men of his own class in English society.Meanwhile,he formed,in the winter of 1822-23,a little society of his own.He called it the Utilitarian Society,adopting the title which had been cursorily used by Bentham(15)from Galt's Annals of the Parish.He mentions among its members,which never amounted to ten,William Eyton Tooke,son of Thomas Tooke,the economist,who died young;William Ellis (1800-1881),known,says Mill,for his 'apostolic exertions for the improvement of education,'chiefly in the direction of promoting the study of political economy in schools;George John Graham,afterwards an official in the Bankruptcy Court;and Graham's special friend,John Arthur Roebuck (1801-1879),who was to become one of the most thoroughgoing Radicals of the following period,though in later years the faithful Abdiel became an Ishmael,and finally a Tory.With these youths,all apparently Mill's seniors by a few years,he discussed the principles of the sect,and became,as he says,a sort of leader.'He tried hard to enlist recruits,and soon became an effective combatant in the actual warfare of the time.The society was broken up in 1826.
