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             THE
         CONTEMPORARY
            REVIEW

  VOLUME XXXVI. NOVEMBER, 1879




CONTENTS.


  NOVEMBER, 1879.
                                                                    PAGE
  On Freedom. By Professor Max Muller                                369

  Mr. Gladstone: Two Studies suggested by his "Gleanings of Past
    Years." I. By a Liberal.--II. By a Conservative                  398

  The Ancien Regime and the Revolution in France. By Professor
    von Sybel                                                        432

  What is the Actual Condition of Ireland? By Edward Stanley
    Robertson                                                        451

  The Deluge: Its Traditions in Ancient Nations. By Francois
    Lenormant                                                        465

  Suspended Animation. By Richard A. Proctor                         501

  John Stuart Mill's Philosophy Tested. IV.--Utilitarianism.
    By Professor W. Stanley Jevons                                   521




ON FREEDOM.[1]


Not more than twenty years have passed since John Stuart Mill sent forth
his plea for Liberty.[2]

If there is one among the leaders of thought in England who, by the
elevation of his character and the calm composure of his mind, deserved
the so often misplaced title of Serene Highness, it was, I think, John
Stuart Mill.

But in his Essay "On Liberty," Mill for once becomes passionate. In
presenting his Bill of Rights, in stepping forward as the champion of
individual liberty, a new spirit seems to have taken possession of him.
He speaks like a martyr, or the defender of martyrs. The individual
human soul, with its unfathomable endowments, and its capacity of
growing to something undreamt of in our philosophy, becomes in his eyes
a sacred thing, and every encroachment on its world-wide domain is
treated as sacrilege. Society, the arch-enemy of the rights of
individuality, is represented like an evil spirit, whom it behoves every
true man to resist with might and main, and whose demands, as they
cannot be altogether ignored, must be reduced at all hazards to the
lowest level.

I doubt whether any of the principles for which Mill pleaded so warmly
and strenuously in his Essay "On Liberty" would at the present day be
challenged or resisted, even by the most illiberal of philosophers, or
the most conservative of politicians. Mill's demands sound very humble
to _our_ ears. They amount to no more than this, "that the individual is
not accountable to society for his actions so far as they concern the
interests of no person but himself, and that he may be subjected to
social or legal punishments for such actions only as are prejudicial to
the interests of others."

Is there any one here present who doubts the justice of that principle,
or who would wish to reduce the freedom of the individual to a smaller
measure? Whatever social tyranny may have existed twenty years ago, when
it wrung that fiery protest from the lips of John Stuart Mill, can we
imagine a state of society, not totally Utopian, in which the individual
man need be less ashamed of his social fetters, in which he could more
freely utter all his honest convictions, more boldly propound all his
theories, more fearlessly agitate for their speedy realization; in
which, in fact, each man can be so entirely himself as the society of
England, such as it now is, such as generations of hard-thinking and
hard-working Englishmen have made it, and left it as the most sacred
inheritance to their sons and daughters?

Look through the whole of history, not excepting the brightest days of
republican freedom at Athens and Rome, and I know you will not find one
single period in which the measure of Liberty accorded to each
individual was larger than it is at present, at least in England. And if
you wish to realize the full blessings of the time in which we live,
compare Mill's plea for Liberty with another written not much more than
two hundred years ago, and by a thinker not inferior either in power or
boldness to Mill himself. According to Hobbes, the only freedom which an
individual in his ideal state has a right to claim is what he calls
"freedom of thought," and that freedom of thought consists in our being