isation of the land, he seems to have been
always in favour of peasant proprietorship, and of co-operation as
distinguished from State socialism. Individualism, in fact, in one of
its senses, for like other popular phrases it tends to gather various
shades of meaning, was really the characteristic of the utilitarian
school. Thus in philosophy they were 'nominalists,' believing that the
ultimate realities are separate things, and that abstract words are mere
signs calling up arbitrary groups of things. Politically, they are
inclined to regard society as an 'aggregate,' instead of an 'organism.'
The ultimate units are the individual men, and a nation or a church a
mere name for a multitude combined by some external pressure into a
collective mass of separate atoms.[120] This is the foundation of Mill's
political theories, and explains the real congeniality of the let-alone
doctrines to his philosophy. It gives, too, the key-note of the book
upon 'Liberty,' which Fitzjames took for his point of assault. Mill had
been profoundly impressed by Tocqueville, and, indeed, by an order of
reflections common to many intelligent observers. What are to be the
relations between democracy and intellectual culture? Many distinguished
writers have expressed their forebodings as to the future. Society is in
danger of being vulgarised. We are to be ground down to uniform and
insignificant atoms by the social mill. The utilitarians had helped the
lower classes to wrest the scourge from the hands of their oppressors.
Now the oppressed had the scourge in their own hands; how would they
apply it? Coercion looked very ugly in the hands of a small privileged
class; but when coercion could be applied by the masses would they see
the ugliness of it? Would they not use the same machinery in order to
crush the rich and the exalted, and take in the next place to crushing
each other? Shall we not have a dead level of commonplace and suffer, to
use the popular phrase, from a 'tyranny of the majority,' more universal
and more degrading than the old tyranny of the minority? This was the
danger upon which Mill dwelt in his later works. In his 'Liberty' he
suggests the remedy. It is nothing less than the recognition of a new
moral principle. Mankind, he said, individually or collectively, are
justified in interference with others only by the need of
'self-protection.' We may rightfully prevent a man from hurting his
neighbour, but not from hurting himself. I