pretension
to being scientific, and which has made it so useful to conciliating
minds which those previous expositions had repelled.

* * * * *

What was abstract and purely scientific was generally mine; the
properly human element came from her: in all that concerned the
application of philosophy to the exigencies of human society and
progress, I was her pupil, alike in boldness of speculation and
cautiousness of practical judgment. For, on the one hand, I was much
more courageous and farsighted than without her I should have been,
in anticipation of an order of things to come, in which many of the
limited generalizations now so often confounded with universal
principles will cease to be applicable. Those parts of my writings,
and especially of the "Political Economy," which contemplate
possibilities in the future such as, when affirmed by socialists,
have in general been fiercely denied by political economists, would,
but for her, either have been absent, or the suggestions would have
been made much more timidly and in a more qualified form. But while
she thus rendered me bolder in speculation on human affairs, her
practical turn of mind, and her almost unerring estimate of
practical obstacles, repressed in me all tendencies that were really
visionary.

Her mind invested all ideas in a concrete shape, and formed itself a
conception of how they would actually work: and her knowledge of the
existing feelings and conduct of mankind was so seldom at fault,
that the weak point in any unworkable suggestion seldom escaped her.

* * * * *

During the two years which immediately preceded the cessation of my
official life, my wife and I were working together at the "Liberty."
I had first planned and written it as a short essay in Eighteen
Hundred Fifty-four. None of my writings have been either so
carefully composed, or so sedulously corrected as this. After it had
been written as usual, twice over, we kept it by us, bringing it out
from time to time, and going through it "de novo," reading, weighing
and criticizing every sentence. Its final revision was to have been
a work of the winter of Eighteen Hundred Fifty-eight and Fifty-nine,
the first after my retirement, which we had arranged to pass in the
South of Euro