Project Gutenberg #34901
On Liberty
John Stuart Mill
1859Mill's compact defense of individual liberty, prepared chapter by chapter from Project Gutenberg HTML.
Project Gutenberg #34901 Public domain in the United States Cover source Local typographic cover created for MojiMori from public-domain source metadata
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Yet Liberty was planned by Mill and his wife in concert. Perhaps a slight visionariness of speculation was no less the attribute of Mrs. Mill than an absence of rigid logical principles. Be this as it may, she undoubtedly checked the half-recognised leanings[Pg xxi] of her husband in the direction of Coleridge and Carlyle. Whether this was an instance of her steadying influence,[5] or whether it added one more unassimilated element to Mill's diverse intellectual sustenance, may be wisely left an open question. We cannot, however, be wrong in attributing to her the parentage of one book of Mill, The Subjection of Women. It is true that Mill had before learnt that men and women ought to be equal in legal, political, social, and domestic relations. This was a point on which he had already fallen foul of his father's essay on Government. But Mrs. Taylor had actually written on this very point, and the warmth and fervour of Mill's denunciations of women's servitude were unmistakably caught from his wife's view of the practical disabilities entailed by the feminine position.