is legally a murderer
when you evidently mean only he has lost his head and gone too far under
exceedingly trying circumstances. The Jamaica Committee did not admit of
any such distinction. To them Governor Eyre appeared to be morally as
well as legally guilty of murder. Fitzjames appears to have felt that
the attempt to proceed further would look like a vindictive persecution;
and he ceased after this to take part in the case. He congratulated
himself upon this withdrawal when further proceedings (in 1868) led to
abortive results.

One result was a coolness between my brother and J. S. Mill, who was
displeased by his want of sufficient zeal in the matter. They had been
on friendly terms, and I remember once visiting Mill at Blackheath in my
brother's company. There was never, I think, any cordial relation
between them. Fitzjames was a disciple of Mill in philosophical matters,
and in some ways even, as I hold, pushed Mill's views to excess. He
complains more than once at this time that Carlyle was unjust to the
Utilitarian views, which, in his opinion, represented the true line of
advance. But Carlyle was far more agreeable to him personally. The
reason was, I take it, that Carlyle had what Mill had not, an unusual
allowance of the quality described as 'human nature.' Mill undoubtedly
was a man of even feminine tenderness in his way; but in political and
moral matters he represented the tendency to be content with the
abstractions of the unpractical man. He seemed to Fitzjames at least to
dwell in a region where the great passions and forces which really stir
mankind are neglected or treated as mere accidental disturbances of the
right theory. Mill seemed to him not so much cold-blooded as bloodless,
wanting in the fire and force of the full-grown male animal, and
comparable to a superlatively crammed senior wrangler, whose body has
been stunted by his brains. Fitzjames could only make a real friend of a
man in whom he could recognise the capacity for masculine emotions as
well as logical acuteness, and rightly or wrongly Mill appeared to him
to be too much of a calculating machine and too little of a human being.
This will appear more clearly hereafter.

XI. INDIAN APPOINTMENT

In the meantime Fitzjames was obtaining, as usual, some occasional
spurts of practice at the bar, while the steady gale still refused to
blow. He had an influx of parliamentary business, which, for whatever
reason, did not last long. He h