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an account of Roman government. At twelve he was introduced to logic in Aristotle's Organon and the Latin scholastic manuals on the subject. The last year under his father's direct supervision, his thirteenth, was devoted to political economy; the son's notes later served the elder Mill in his Elements of Political Economy. He furthered his education by a period of studies with his father's friends, reading law with Austin and economics with Ricardo, and completed it by himself with Bentham's treatise on legislation, which he felt gave him

"a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy . . . a religion" and made a

"different being of him."

Although Mill never actually severed relations with his father, he experienced, at the age of twenty, a "crisis" in his mental history. It occurred to him to pose the question: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" He reported that "an irrepressible selfconsciousness distinctly answered, 'No,' " and he was overcome by a depression which lasted for several years. The first break in his

"gloom" came while reading Marmontel's Memoires: "I . . . came to the passage which relates his father's death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them

-would supply the place of all that they had lost." He was moved to tears by the scene, and from this moment his "burden grew lighter."

From the time he was seventeen, Mill supported himself by working for the East India Company, where his father was an official. Although he began nominally as a clerk, he was soon promoted to assistant-examiner, and for twenty years, from his father's death in 1836, until the Company's activities were taken over by the British Government, he had charge of the relations with the Indian states, which gave him wide practical experience in the problems of government. In addition to his regular employment, he took part in many activities tending to prepare public opinion for legislative reform. He, his father, and their friends formed the group known as "philosophical radicals,'' which made a major contribution to the debates leading to the Reform Bill of 1832. Mill was active in exposing what he considered departures from sound Appendix B 369

principle in parliament and the courts of justice. He wrote often for the newspapers friendly to the "radical" cause, helped to found and edit the Westminster Review as a "radical" organ, and participated in several reading and debating societies, devoted to the discussion of the contemporary intellectual and social problems.

These activities did not prevent him from pursuing his own intellectual interests. He edited Bentham's Rationale of Judicial Evidence. He studied logic and science with the aim of reconciling syllogistic logic with the methods of inductive science, and published his System of Logic ( 1843) . At the same time he pushed his inquiries in the field of economics. These first took the form of Essays on Some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy and were

]ater given systematic treatment in the Principles of Political Economy ( 1848 ) .

The development and productivity of these years he attributed to his relationship with Mrs. Harriet Taylor, who became his wife in 1851. Mill had known her for twenty years, since shortly after his "crisis," and he could never praise too highly her influence upon his work. Although he published less during the seven years of his married life than at any other period of his career, he thought out and partly wrote many of his important works, including the essay On Liberty ( 1859), the Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, which later led to the Representative Government ( 1861 ) , and Utilitarianism ( 1863 ) . He attributed to her especially his understanding of the human side of the abstract reforms he advocated. After her death he stated: