Connor Craig session 5 – John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill “On the Negro Question” Fraser’s Magazine (1850)

John Stuart Mill was a Member of Parliament for the Liberal Party in the second half of the 19^th century. He was progressive and believed in individual liberties. This essay was written by him in 1850 to the editor of Fraser’s Magazine Town and Country, a conservative literary journal published in London. His writing was in response to an article published by Thomas Carlyle in 1849 about how, despite Carlyle’s claims, it was not acceptable to keep black people who were previously enslaved as indentured servants, meaning they were contracted to work without any guarantee of pay.

In this piece, Mill wishes to dispute the beliefs of Carlyle and argues that slave owners kept slaves purely for their own gain, claiming that “the motive on the part of the slave-owners was the love of gold; or, to speak more truly, of vulgar and puerile ostentation”. He goes on to berate aristocrats who believe it to be a “scandal” that former slaves should now enjoy their existence on little work, so wishes to keep them as servants. The essay critiques Carlyle’s theory that working is a moral, God-given obligation and draws irony from the example that the black servants work for whites who do not work at all. He discusses the ‘worth’ of work and the outcome of it, by claiming that “when justice and reason shall be the rule of human affairs” then we will question the worth of the labour necessary to procure luxuries. He claims that “human beings cannot rise to the finer attributes of life” with a life filled with labour, which could suggest he believes people should have a better work/life balance and not live to work.

Mills suggests that everybody should have to work but it should be distributed fairly and writes that if a man does not work, he should not eat. To further this point, he uses a term used by Carlyle that white people should also have the “divine right” to labour, by doing so he shows how Carlyle’s claims are one-sided and racist. He also makes an argument that slaves made white people better off, whereas white people made black people endure suffering, saying that buried black people in Jamacia could have “done better without Colonel Fortescue (White), than Colonel Fortescue could have done without them”.

He uses an analogy of two trees growing at different rates due to different circumstances and compares this with humans of different skin colour, stating that humans “have infinitely more operation in impairing the growth of one another” in a claim that white people are not scientifically any superior to black people, but believe themselves to be because they impaired the growth of blacks.

John Stuart Mill Biography:

He was educated at home and had read the likes of Plato and Aristotle by the age of twelve. He became a utilitarian at the age of seventeen. He believed in women having the right to vote. Himself and rumoured lover Harriet Taylor became socially isolated after their denial of sexual relations were not believed by their friends. He founded the London Review and the Westminster Review and used them to support politicians who shared his views. He believed in proportional representation and his now wife, Harriet Taylor, changed his views on a secret ballot, making him against one. He wrote many books on philosophy and economics. He won a seat in the house of commons and campaigned for women’s suffrage. His opposition to colonialism in the West Indies was unpopular and lost him his seat in 1868. He was not necessarily a fan of universal suffrage because he thought the enfranchisement of men would therefore happen before upper-class women got their right to vote.