My Friend Napier Told Me An Amusing Little Story About John
Mill When He Was In The East India Company's Administration.
Mr. Macvey Napier, my friend's elder brother, was the senior
clerk.
On John Mill's retirement, his co-officials
subscribed to present him with a silver standish. Such was
the general sense of Mill's modest estimate of his own
deserts, and of his aversion to all acknowledgment of them,
that Mr. Napier, though it fell to his lot, begged others to
join in the ceremony of presentation. All declined; the
inkstand was left upon Mill's table when he himself was out
of the room.
Years after the time of which I am writing, when Mill stood
for Westminster, I had the good fortune to be on the platform
at St. James's Hall, next but one to him, when he made his
first speech to the electors. He was completely unknown to
the public, and, though I worshipped the man, I had never
seen him, nor had an idea what he looked like. To satisfy my
curiosity I tried to get a portrait of him at the
photographic shop in Regent Street.
'I want a photograph of Mr. Mill.'
'Mill? Mill?' repeated the shopman, 'Oh yes, sir, I know - a
great sporting gent,' and he produced the portrait of a
sportsman in top boots and a hunting cap.
Very different from this was the figure I then saw. The hall
and the platform were crowded. Where was the principal
personage? Presently, quite alone, up the side steps, and
unobserved, came a thin but tallish man in black, with a tail
coat, and, almost unrecognised, took the vacant front seat.
He might have been, so far as dress went, a clerk in a
counting-house, or an undertaker. But the face was no
ordinary one. The wide brow, the sharp nose of the Burke
type, the compressed lips and strong chin, were suggestive of
intellect and of suppressed emotion. There was no applause,
for nothing was known to the crowd, even of his opinions,
beyond the fact that he was the Liberal candidate for
Westminster. He spoke with perfect ease to himself, never
faltering for the right word, which seemed to be always at
his command. If interrupted by questions, as he constantly
was, his answers could not have been amended had he written
them. His voice was not strong, and there were frequent
calls from the far end to 'speak up, speak up; we can't hear
you.' He did not raise his pitch a note. They might as well
have tried to bully an automaton. He was doing his best, and
he could do no more. Then, when, instead of the usual
adulations, instead of declamatory appeals to the passions of
a large and a mixed assembly, he gave them to understand, in
very plain language, that even socialists are not infallible,
- that extreme and violent opinions, begotten of ignorance,
do not constitute the highest political wisdom; then there
were murmurs of dissent and disapproval.
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