little guided by practical
experience. But the general temper which they showed, the contempt for
slovenly, haphazard, hand-to-mouth modes of legislation, the love of
vigorous administration on broad, intelligible principles, entirely
expressed his own feeling. Finally, in India he had, as he thought,
found his ideal realised. There, with whatever shortcomings, there was
at least a strong Government; rulers who ruled; capable of doing
business; of acting systematically upon their convictions; strenuously
employed in working out an effective system; and not trammelled by
trimming their sails to catch every temporary gust of sentiment in a
half-educated community. His book, he often said, was thus virtually a
consideration of the commonplaces of British politics in the light of
his Indian experience. He wished, he says in one of his letters, to
write about India; but as soon as he began he felt that he would be
challenged to give his views upon these preliminary problems: What do
you think of liberty, of toleration, of ruling by military force, and so
forth? He resolved, therefore, to answer these questions by themselves.

I must add that this feeling was coloured by Fitzjames's personal
qualities. He could never, as I have pointed out, like Mill himself; he
pronounced him to be 'cold as ice,' a mere 'walking book,' and a man
whose reasoning powers were out of all proportion to his 'seeing
powers.' If I were writing about Mill I should think it necessary to
qualify this judgment of a man who might also be described as sensitive
to excess, and who had an even feminine tenderness. But from Fitzjames's
point of view the judgment was natural enough. The two men could never
come into cordial relations, and the ultimate reason, I think, was what
I should call Mill's want of virility. He might be called 'cold,' not as
wanting in tenderness or enthusiasm, but as representing a kind of
philosophical asceticism. Whether from his early education, his recluse
life, or his innate temperament, half the feelings which moved mankind
seemed to him simply coarse and brutal. They were altogether
detestable--not the perversions which, after all, might show a masculine
and powerful nature. Mill's view, for example, seemed to be that all the
differences between the sexes were accidental, and that women could be
turned into men by trifling changes in the law. To a man of ordinary
flesh and blood, who had grounded his opinions, not upon books, bu