In the essay on Education Mill describes the conditions most conducive to creating good men and, more particularly, good citizens. Civic or “political education,” he says, is “the key-stone of the arch; the strength of the whole depends upon it” (Mill 1992, 193). Mill was fond of quoting Helvetius’s dictum l’éducation peut tout (“education makes everything possible”). And certainly no other political thinker, save perhaps Plato and Thomas Jefferson, set greater store by education than did James Mill. As we discuss in Section 6, by “education” Mill meant not only domestic education or formal schooling, but all the influences that go into forming one’s character and outlook, including the influence of social and political instituions.