The Boy Who Taught Latin at Eight

At eight, John Stuart Mill started Latin, the geometry of Euclid and algebra, and began to teach the younger children of the family.

A name borrowed from a novel

In the winter of 1822 to 1823, Mill formed a society and gave it the name “Utilitarian.” He did not invent the word. He found it in John Galt’s novel Annals of the Parish, where a Scottish minister warns his flock not to become utilitarians. The minister’s complaint was about “the newfangled doctrine of utility.” Mill seized on the word out of “a boy’s fondness for a name and a banner.” The society never reached ten members.

The banner was built on a Latin word, utilitas, picked out of a novel by a teenager.

The question at twenty

In autumn 1826, he asked himself whether he would be happy if all his goals in life were realized. The answer was no. Three details are worth knowing:

• He compared the crisis to the conversion of the Methodists.
• In an early draft of his Autobiography, he described himself as operating like a machine. He later deleted the remark.
• Why he reached the dead end in 1826 is never made clear in the Autobiography.

Help came from two sources. A passage in Marmontel’s memoirs about the death of a father prompted the tears that began his recovery. Then came Wordsworth, whose poetry convinced him he had emerged. It took about two years to find a way out. Byron only deepened the gloom, because his state of mind resembled Mill’s own.

The life that followed

• Desk job. He worked at the East India Company from age seventeen in 1823 until 1858. That was thirty-five years.
• Harriet. He met Harriet Taylor in 1830. They married on 21 April 1851. On marriage, he made a declaration repudiating the rights Victorian law gave him over her. In 1848, her first husband refused to let him dedicate the Principles of Political Economy to her. The dedication was inserted into special copies that they gave to friends.
• Avignon. After she died there in 1858, he bought a small house next to the cemetery where she was buried. He is buried beside her.
• Parliament. He sat from 1865 to 1868. He won despite refusing to canvass the voters.

Why Utilitarianism lasted

Bentham counted pleasures. Mill held that some pleasures are worth more than others: better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. The book also argued that justice has a utilitarian basis, since an injustice is a violation of rights, and society should protect a right only when doing so promotes the general happiness.

Debaters know the pairing: judge an act by its results, as Mill did, or by the duty it obeys, as Kant did.

The book that applied it

Mill took the same test into the home. He wrote The Subjection of Women in 1860 and 1861. It was first published in 1869, shortly after his three-year term in Parliament, where his main activity had been aimed at the vote for women. He developed its ideas jointly with Harriet. Her 1851 essay The Enfranchisement of Women covered much of the same ground.

His thesis is that the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and one of the chief hindrances to human improvement. It should be replaced by a principle of equality. His arguments run as follows:

• No test. The arrangement rests on theory alone. It was never tested against alternatives to see which produced the best results. Its mere existence is no presumption in its favor.
• Law of the strong. Subordination was not adopted deliberately. It is a primitive state of slavery lingering on, a law of the strongest that has lasted.
• No natural fitness. He attacks the claim that women are naturally worse at some things and should be discouraged or forbidden from doing them.
• Marriage. Wives were bound by law to obey their husbands and had to hand over property and earnings. He compares the marriage laws to slavery: “there remain no legal slaves, save the mistress of every house.”
• Willing slaves. Where women accept subordination, men have made them willing slaves. Not only service is demanded, but enslavement of their feelings and beliefs.
• Waste. Inequality limited human development, because half of humanity could not contribute to society outside the home.

The case rests on the general happiness. Nothing should be ruled out because it is merely “wrong” by custom or because no one has done it. He did not only theorize. As an MP, he campaigned for women’s rights, and he became president of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage.

What Latin did for him

• Reading. He began Latin at eight. Over the next few years he added Virgil, Horace, Phaedrus, Livy and Sallust. By twelve he had read nearly all the major Greek and Latin classics.
• Teaching. He was made schoolmaster to the younger children at eight. He had to explain what he had just learned.
• Noticing words. One word in one novel became the name of a movement.
• Defending classics. The students of St Andrews elected him Rector, and he held the office from 1865 to 1868. His inaugural address on 1 February 1867 ran to 23,000 words, the longest rectorial address ever delivered, and apparently lasted three hours. He excluded none of the cultivating studies. He pleaded for classics alongside mathematics, logic, ethics, experimental science and physiology.

In Mill’s own account, his cure was poetry, not argument. A Latin education that reads Virgil and Horace alongside Livy keeps both in view.

Read him

Mill’s Autobiography and The Subjection of Women are free to read at Project Gutenberg.

Utilis. Utilitas. A Latin student already knows the word he built a theory on.