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The Prophet of MODERN Constitutional Liberalism
John Stuart Mill is the father of modern liberalism. His best remembered work, On
Liberty, published in 1859, changed the course of the liberal tradition. What is less well
known is that his ideas have profoundly influenced the American constitutional rights
tradition of the latter half of the twentieth century. Mill’s “harm principle” inspired the
constitutional right to privacy recognized in Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade and
other cases. His defense of freedom of expression influenced Justices Holmes, Brandeis,
Douglas, Brennan and others, and led to greatly expanded freedom of speech in the
twentieth century. Finally, Mill was an ardent feminist whose last important work, The
Subjection of Women, was a full-scale and, for its time, radical defense of complete
gender equality. The Prophet of Modern Constitutional Liberalism is a book for lawyers
who want to understand the intellectual origins of modern constitutional rights. It is
also a book for political philosophers interested in the constitutional implications of
Mill’s conception of freedom.
John Lawrence Hill is the R. Bruce Townsend Professor of Law at Indiana University’s
Robert H. McKinney School of Law in Indianapolis, where he teaches constitutional
law and legal philosophy classes. He holds a J.D. and a Ph.D. in philosophy, both from
Georgetown University. He has published several books in law, ethics and philosophy.
The Prophet of Modern
Constitutional Liberalism
john Stuart Mill and

the Supreme Court
JOHN LAWRENCE HILL

Indiana University
University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
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of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108485296
doi: 10.1017/9781108755993
© John Lawrence Hill 2020
This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
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First published 2020
Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hill, John L. (John Lawrence), 1960- author.
Title: The Prophet of Modern Constitutional Liberalism : John Stuart Mill
and the Supreme Court / John Lawrence Hill, Indiana University.
Other titles: John Stuart Mill and the Supreme Court
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge
University Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019043917 | ISBN 9781108485296 (hardback) | ISBN
9781108719452 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Civil rights--United States. | Civil rights--Philosophy. |
Mill, John Stuart, 1806-1873--Influence.
Classification: LCC KF4749 .H55 2020 | DDC 342.7308/5--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019043917
isbn 978-1-108-48529-6 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in
this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is,
or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
To my family
Contents
Introduction page 1
Part I Mill and His Place in the Liberal Tradition
1 Mill’s Life, Work and Character 7
2 Liberalism before Mill 27
3 Inventing Modern Liberalism 38
Part ii Mill and the Constitution
4 Constitutional Liberties before Mill 57
5 The Intellectual Origins of the Right to Privacy 77
6 Mill and Modern Freedom of Expression 100
7 A New Equality 120
Index 137
Introduction
The cemetery Saint Veran in Avignon, France, is a twenty-minute walk outside

the walls of the old city, a short distance from the palace of the fourteenth-
century popes and the river Rhone. Toward the back of the cemetery, inauspiciously
nestled among the markers and mausoleums, stands a sepulcher of flawless white
Carrara marble – the only one in sight without a trace of religious symbolism. It
was here that John Stuart Mill buried his wife of seven years, Harriet Taylor Mill,
after she succumbed to what Mill called “the family disease” – tuberculosis – in
November 1858.1 There is an old legend that the cottage Mill purchased after her
death overlooked the cemetery and that Mill could look upon Harriet’s grave from
his window.2 The legend is, as the cemetery caretaker described to me, “finely
formed, but not fully true.” The cottage was actually about a ten-minute walk from
the cemetery. Nevertheless, Mill furnished it with the furniture from the room
in the Hotel d’ Europe where they had spent their last night together, and where
Harriet had died.3 For the remainder of his life, Mill split his time between London
and Avignon, visiting her grave several times a day before joining her again in 1873.
Mill published On Liberty, the single most influential work of liberal political
theory, three months after Harriet’s death, in February 1859. This was the same
year in which Tocqueville died and Darwin published his Origin of the Species. In
the United States, the North and South were headed precipitously toward armed
conflict. Two years earlier, in 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney of the US Supreme
Court had delivered his disastrous Dred Scott opinion, the very first Supreme Court
1 John Stuart Mill, “Autobiography,” in Autobiography and Literary Essays as part of Collected Works
of John Stuart Mill (hereinafter CW), ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1978), vol. 1:240.
2 Gertrude Himmelfarb, Editor’s Introduction to On Liberty (Harmondsworth: Penguin edition,
1974), 24.
3 Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill, A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
245–48 (describing the circumstances surrounding, and after, Harriet’s death).
1
2 Introduction
decision to recognize a constitutional right protected by the Bill of Rights. The right
recognized, however, was the property right of slaveholders to own and transport
slaves to the “free” territories in the United States. This decision led to the Civil War
and to the subsequent adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution
in 1868. The Fourteenth Amendment, in turn, inaugurated a new era of individual
rights protections – protections which, a century later, came to take the form of the
liberalism Mill had outlined in On Liberty and other works.
John Stuart Mill’s place in the liberal tradition has been the subject of a vast
literature a great deal of which views him as a classical liberal. He was not. Mill
was the true prophet – and architect – of modern progressive liberalism. While he
retained some of the assumptions of earlier classical liberals – particularly their
distrust of government and their anti-paternalism – Mill offered an entirely new
defense of liberalism. Where classical liberals had thought about liberty as a “nega-
tive” value – the absence of coercion or constraint by government – Mill connected
liberty to the more “positive” values of autonomy, self-development and what we
might call “self-individuation.” Self-individuation itself required the discovery,
development and expression of one’s true self, including one’s character, opinions,
beliefs and plan of life.
This new conception of liberty would inevitably influence the way we think
about what rights we have, how freedom can be infringed and how our Constitution
should protect our basic liberties. His concept of freedom consists of three basic
and interrelated ideas each of which has become central to our American consti-
tutional tradition beginning, for the most part, in the 1960s. First, there must be
a private sphere in which the individual is free to develop their own tastes, opin-
ions, character and plan of life. Second, the individual has to be free to express his
ideas, beliefs and convictions – not simply for the sake of others, but for the sake of
his own self-actualization. Third, there must be equality – not simply the formal
equality before the law defended by classical liberals and modern conservatives but,
rather, as he put it in his Autobiography, an “equal freedom of development for all
individualities.” 4
Mill’s three principles – privacy, free expression and equality of condition –
are the three notes in the chord of our modern constitutional rights tradition.
The case announcing the right to privacy, Griswold v. Connecticut, was decided
in 1965, just a little over a century after Mill defended his “harm principle” in
On Liberty. Griswold, of course, led to Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion,
Lawrence v. Texas, announcing a right of sexual autonomy to LGBT individu-
als and Obergefell v. Hodges, establishing a constitutional right to gay marriage.
Mill is mentioned in some of these opinions: in one case, he is virtually plagia-
rized in an important concurring opinion on abortion rights by Justice Douglas,
4 Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:260.

Introduction 3
occasionally he is directly quoted in a majority opinion, but much more frequently

he is mentioned in the dissents, when a Justice wants to point out that the source
of the principle adopted comes not from the constitution but from a nineteenth-
century political thinker.5
Mill is probably best remembered among constitutional lawyers for his influ-
ence on our free speech jurisprudence. His intellectual impact on Justices Holmes,
Brandeis and Douglas, in particular, is clearly discernible in their opinions and
other writings. In fact, Holmes met Mill personally as a young man while on a visit
to London in 1866. Holmes’ and Brandeis’ development of the “clear and present
danger” test after World War I, the subsequent expansion of the First Amendment
right to speak and publish things traditionally prohibited as “offensive” and the
extension of freedom of speech principles to putatively false speech, as in defama-
tion, all find their origin and clearest defense in Mill.
Mill’s influence on modern equal protection jurisprudence is more submerged,
refracted through the writings of so many more recent writers on racism and femi-
nism. Yet he was the first to introduce a more substantive conception of equality
into the liberal tradition. His writings on slavery and the American Civil War are
less well-remembered today, yet when the Civil War broke out and public opinion
in England was clearly on the side of the South, Mill defended the North in a series
of newspaper writings and speeches that made him extremely unpopular in his own
country. When his old friend, Thomas Carlyle, whose conservatism had soured
with age into a reactionary anti-humanitarianism, published his “Discourse on the
Negro Question,” suggesting that the newly freed slaves in Jamaica were much bet-
ter off under the yoke, Mill penned an impassioned rejoinder calling Carlyle’s piece
“a true work of the devil.”6 And when Lincoln was assassinated, Mill compared him
to the greatest martyr to philosophy, observing that “the death of Lincoln, like that
of Socrates, is a worthy end to a noble life, and puts the seal of universal remem-
brance upon his worth.”7
Mill’s feminism, moreover, was legendary. As a Member of Parliament, his
speeches in defense of women’s suffrage and to abolish such discriminatory provi-
sions as the Married Women’s Property Act were so radical for his time that he was
frequently laughed at not simply by the Conservatives, but by members of his own
Liberal Party. His last published book, The Subjection of Women, is the earliest and,
still today, the best defense of liberal feminism. Yet for all this – and in contrast to
the Supreme Court’s privacy and freedom of speech jurisprudence – Mill is men-
tioned nowhere in the Equal Protection context. Yet, as we will see, many of his
5 See, for example, Chief Justice Roberts dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 US —, 135
S. Ct. 2584 (2015) discussed in Chapter 4.
6 Mill, “The Negro Question,” CW, 21:95.
7 Mill to Cairnes (May 28, 1865), CW, 16:1057.
4 Introduction
most incisive and pragmatic points in The Subjection of Women anticipate, in detail,
Supreme Court decisions in the context of gender.
Crucially, Mill insisted that it is not simply government which constitutes a poten-
tial threat to liberty, but society as well. Informal social forces – tradition, custom,
habit, age-old prejudices and the “tyranny of the majority” (a term Mill so profitably
borrowed from Tocqueville) – infringe individual freedom by cutting the individual
off from sources of self-discovery and self-development. This move was pivotal, even
fateful, for liberalism because it set up the central tension in modern liberalism: Since
freedom requires limits on government power but also requires that government
have sufficient power to counteract the sources of private power, modern progressive
liberalism inevitably involves a balancing act between less government and more –
both in the name of freedom. What distinguishes Mill from twentieth-century
progressives is that, in his practical conclusions, he typically erred on the side of
less government whereas they normally err on the side of more.
It is genuinely ironic that many contemporary lawyers are, at best, only vaguely
aware of the name, John Stuart Mill. It is still more ironic that many judges and
even most Justices of the Supreme Court should have carried on Mill’s mission,
often unwittingly, casting his ideas into the form of constitutional rights without a
clear sense of their origin. But this should not surprise us. Judges and lawyers are
“practical men,” not philosophers. Though trained in the common law, they some-
times mistake for real tradition what John Maynard Keynes called “the voices in the
air” that come from the theorists of a previous generation.8 Whether they know it or
not, it is Mill’s voice which they so frequently have been channeling.
In his classic work on the history of liberal thought, L. T. Hobhouse wrote that
the essence of liberalism is “the belief that society can safely be founded on the self-
directing power of human personality.”9 Mill’s work epitomizes this belief – indeed,
this faith. Though it is seldom recognized today, no other political thinker has had
as profound an influence on our recent constitutional rights tradition. If there is
anyone worthy of the title “the prophet of American constitutional liberalism,” it is
an Englishman, John Stuart Mill.
8 “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usu-
ally the slaves of some defunct economist [or philosopher.} Madmen in authority, who hear voices in
the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.” John Maynard
Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: MacMillan, 1936), 383.
9 L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (1911), 66.
part i
Mill and His Place in the Liberal Tradition

1
Mill’s Life, Work and Character
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that
stupid people are generally Conservative.1
Early Years and Education

John Stuart Mill was born in London on May 20, 1806.2 He was born into one of the
most influential intellectual circles of all time. His father, James Mill, was a close
friend and collaborator with Jeremy Bentham, the apostle of utilitarianism. Bentham
was already famous, having published his An Introduction to the Principles of Morals
and Legislation, the groundwork for utilitarianism, during the 1780s. James Mill him-
self would later gain fame for writing important books on economics, the theory of
mind and a history of India. Their intimate circle included such luminaries as the
economist, David Ricardo, who had been a neighbor of the Mills, and John Austin,
the first important legal positivist in the Anglo-American tradition.
There can be no other way to think of the circle into which Mill was born than as
an assemblage of great minds thoroughly committed to overthrowing the old moral
and political order. Bentham, the elder Mill and the others were not, of course, radi-
cal in the contemporary sense. They were classical liberals who defended property
1 Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York: Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd,
1954), 454.
2 This sketch is drawn principally from Mill’s autobiography, John Stuart Mill, “Autobiography,” in
Autobiography and Literary Essays as part of Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (CW), ed. John M.
Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), vol. 1:1–290 and from the following sources:
Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections (London: Longman &
Company, 1882); Michael St. John Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill (New York: Capricorn Books,
1970); Nicholas Capaldi, John Stuart Mill: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004); F. A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Friendship and Subsequent Marriage
(New York: A. M. Kelley, 1951); Alan Ryan, J. S. Mill (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
7
8 Mill and His Place in the Liberal Tradition
rights, free markets and a broadened democratic franchise. But their views evolved
from very different premises than the classical liberals of the previous century –
John Locke and Adam Smith, in particular. They were thoroughly secular in their
outlook, rejecting Locke’s Christianity and Smith’s deism. They grounded the case
for liberty not on natural rights or social contract ideas, which predominated in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or later Smith’s “invisible hand” theory, with
its lingering intimation of a benevolent Providence. Instead, they believed it was
human happiness – the utilitarian principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest
number” – which should govern social and political reform.
James Mill, had decided to make of his son an archetype of enlightened intel-
lectuality – a utilitarian, a reformer and, as the elder Mill wrote to Bentham,
“a successor worthy of us.”3 Today we would say that his father home-schooled Mill
with a vengeance. The elder Mill was of Scottish Presbyterian stock and, though
he rejected early in life the substance of that religion, he retained to the end the
highly disciplined emotional austerity of his Calvinist forebears. Mill described
his father as utterly dispassionate, rational, a Stoic. He tells us that James Mill
regarded the expression of every passionate emotion “a form of madness.” He
regarded human life as “a poor thing at best” and often said that he “never knew
a happy old man.”4
In the first draft of his autobiography, Mill wrote candidly of his father’s “baneful”
influence on the emotional lives of his children. “My father’s children neither loved
him with any warmth of affection,” Mill remembered, “nor [did] anyone else.” In a
later draft he toned this down, saying simply that while he did not love his father, he
was always devoted to him.5 His comments about his mother are even less flattering,
if that is possible. She was the beautiful and vivacious daughter of a wealthy widow
when James Mill married her, but she was uneducated. Though she bore him nine
children, he seems to have regarded her with chilly contempt. Mill himself thought
her a shallow drudge who was guilty by omission of curing his father’s, or her chil-
dren’s, emotional distance.
That rarity in England, a really warm-hearted mother, would … have made my
father a totally different being and … would have made the children loving and
being loved. But my mother, with the very best intentions, only knew how to pass
her life in drudging for them. Whatever she could do for them, she did, and they
liked her because she was kind to them, but to make herself loved, looked up to or
even obeyed, required qualities which she unfortunately did not possess.6
3 Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait,
1838–43), 10:473, which is cited in a separately published autobiography of Mill. John Stuart Mill,
Autobiography (Jack Stillinger, ed., 1969), xi.
4 Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:49, 51.
5 Ibid., 1:53.
6 Ibid., 612.
Mill’s Life, Work and Character 9
Mill tells us that his father shielded him from the association of other children so
that they could get on with the business of his education. And so they did. He began
to read ancient Greek at the age of three, beginning with Aesop’s fables. He read
Xenophon, Herodotus and some of Plato’s dialogues – again, in the original Greek –
by the age of seven. He also began reading broadly in history and commenced learn-
ing algebra, geometry and Latin by eight. At this point, Mill’s father appointed him
schoolmaster to his younger siblings. As the oldest of nine, Mill took the brunt of
his father’s pedagogical zeal. A slip in the Latin lesson and he would be sent to bed
without dinner. Everything he argued or wrote was torn up and thrown back to him
to refine and perfect. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I grew up in the absence of
love and in the presence of fear.”7
With or without love, Mill’s education continued at an almost unbelievable pace.
By ten, he could read Plato’s dialogues fluently in the original Greek and at twelve;
he began the study of logic and political economy. A year later he was busy prepar-
ing paragraph summaries of his father’s Elements of Political Economy which was
used as a text in British universities for several decades. When Mill was fourteen,
he spent a year in France as a guest of Bentham’s brother, Sir Samuel Bentham.
There he learned French, read French literature, hiked in the Pyrenees and took
university-level classes in logic, philosophy of science and chemistry, among others.
He met the economist, Jean-Baptiste Say and saw Saint-Simon, whose socialism
and progressive conception of history would later influence him. This period set the
stage for his lifelong love of the French who, in contrast to the English, did not find
in every other individual “an enemy or a bore.”8
Mill’s education was broad and “liberal,” in the classical sense, but accom-
plished under the auspices of a stern secularism.9 James Mill had studied
Divinity at Edinburgh University and was licensed as a pastor upon graduation,
but soon lost his faith. He held Butler’s Analogy in high regard, though for exactly
the opposite reason intended by its author. Where Butler defended orthodox
Christianity from deism by showing that every argument deists leveled against
Christianity could be leveled against deism itself, the elder Mill accepted the
thrust of Butler’s argument but broadened its target – rejecting both Christianity
and deism together. Mill called his father a modern-day Lucretius – a materialist
and an agnostic who imparted these instincts to his son:
It would have been wholly inconsistent with my father’s ideas of duty, to allow me
to acquire impressions contrary to his convictions and feelings respecting religion:
and he impressed upon me from the first that the manner in which the world came
7 Ibid. Or as a recent commentator put it, “Mill’s education was ‘the most liberal and the least liberal
education possible. The world’s greatest liberal was indoctrinated with liberalism.’” Stephen Priest,
The British Empiricists (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 174.
9 Ibid., 41–43 (discussing Mill’s agnosticism).
into existence was a subject on which nothing was known: that the question “Who
made me?” cannot be answered because we have no experience or authentic infor-
mation from which to answer it. … I am one of those very few examples in this
country of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it. I looked
upon the modern exactly as I had the ancient religion as something which in no
way concerned me.10
Mill’s attitude toward the spiritual was complex. Although he was dismissive of
orthodox Christianity, he was not a true atheist. He resisted reductive forms of mate-
rialism and, by the end of his life, came around to the view that, if a supremely good
God existed, which he thought possible, He could not be all-powerful. There was
simply too much pain and evil in the world for God to be both perfectly good and
omnipotent.
When Mill was fifteen, he was finally permitted to read Bentham – an event which
produced in him a reaction far more than philosophical. The “greatest happiness prin-
ciple,” a term Bentham had borrowed from Joseph Priestley, promised a new kind of
morality. Indeed, it promised a new kind of world – one in which the ultimate touch-
stone of “good” and “bad” could be reduced to collective human happiness which,
for Bentham, was nothing other than the totality of the pleasurable sensations that
might be had by all sentient creatures. Mill’s existence now assumed a kind of quasi-
spiritual quest that encompassed all humanity. He decided immediately upon reading
Bentham that the goal of his life was to be “a reformer of the world.”11
The pace of his youthful career only picked up from this point. Between the
ages of sixteen and nineteen, he founded a debating club, which he named “the
Utilitarian Society.” (He later claimed to be the first to use the term “utilitarian” in
its philosophical sense.12) Even his youthful anti-authoritarianism was appropriately
directed toward good, progressive causes. Though it was hushed up at the time, it
came out at the end of Mill’s life that he had spent a night in jail at the age of sixteen
for distributing birth control literature in the East End.13
He also became a regular contributor to the Westminster Review, a Benthamite
journal of political and social criticism, and for about eighteen months became
Bentham’s personal secretary and editor. Among other tasks, it was the young Mill’s
job to gather, collate and massage into coherent essays a multitude of scraps of paper
with thoughts and references, which Bentham customarily pinned to the curtain
behind his desk. His education, Mill later said, gave him a quarter-century head
start on his peers – and then took its toll.
At twenty, Mill suffered what can only be described as a nervous breakdown. The
event was precipitated by a simple question he posed to himself one day:
10 Ibid., 45.
11 Ibid., 137.
12 John Stuart Mill, “Utilitarianism,” in Essays on Ethics, Religion and Society, CW, 10:209, n.
13 Packe, Life of Mill, 57–58.
“Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in insti-
tutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be realized at this
very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And an irrepressible
self-consciousness distinctly answered “no.” At this, my heart sank within me; the
whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. … I seemed to have
nothing left to live for.14
He spent the next six months in a semi-dissociated haze, robotically going through
his day-to-day routine with little sense of commitment, let alone enjoyment. He
concluded that the “habit of analysis,” which his father had so carefully cultivated
in him had “a tendency to wear away the feelings.” His capacity for stripping every-
thing down and analyzing it into a virtual nothingness left him with a “perpetual
worm at the root both of the passions and the virtues.”15 Mill’s profound sense of psy-
chological dislocation only deepened when a friend pointed out that others viewed
Mill as a “made man” (i.e., a manufactured personality).16 Both his recovery and his
very sense of self-identity required a radical act of self-assertion – an act, character-
istically, which could only unfold for him on the plane of ideas.
Romanticism and Mill’s “Transition”

It was in the fall of 1828, still laboring under the lingering effects of his “mental
crisis” when Mill, now twenty-two, discovered the poetry of the romantics. At first,
he read Byron but, predictably, this only deepened his depression. The bucolic sim-
plicity of Wordsworth, on the other hand, lifted him from his malaise, producing in
him a joyful coterie of “sympathetic and imaginative pleasures” detached from all
worldly strife. The “Intimations of Immortality” was one of his favorites. Even when
the tone was melancholy, no one but Wordsworth could express with such sonorous
sweetness Mill’s own yearning for a lost innocence:
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell’d in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been at yore;—
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

15 Ibid., 141.
16 Ibid., 163.
Mill followed his discovery of Wordsworth with the poetry and philosophy of
Coleridge, the symphonies of Weber and the “anti-self-consciousness theory of
Carlyle” – all influences which served to counterbalance the old “habit of analysis.”
Romanticism, in sum, offered Mill a spiritual respite from his father’s and
Bentham’s arid utilitarianism. Whereas utilitarianism was utterly rational, collectiv-
istic and reductionist, romanticism was an eclectic and expansive philosophy. The
romantics exalted nature over convention, originality over tradition, imagination
over reason and the aesthetic over the ethical. They valued authentic emotions and
placed the highest value on individuality. Often intermingled with the idealism of
such thinkers as Kant, Fichte and Hegel, it represented for nineteenth-century intel-
lectuals a middle way between traditional Christianity and what many regarded as
the barren rationalism of eighteenth-century philosophy. It was a surrogate for reli-
gion, a spiritual salve for an increasingly skeptical society. In lieu of God, it offered
Spirit; in place of the immortal soul, the authentic self. If there is truth to be found
in life, it was not to be had in the brute facticity of the external world and certainly
not in the commands of some distant lawgiver. Rather, truth could only be realized
in the recesses of the individual self and, in particular, in the life of the authentic
genius who lives passionately according to his own plan of existence.
Mill was far too analytical a thinker to accept much of the philosophical sub-
stance of romanticism, but the romantic spirit rekindled his joy for life. He began
to sense what he called the “many-sidedness” of truth (a term he used again in
his defense of freedom of expression). Yes, there was truth in utilitarianism, but in
light of his nervous breakdown, he began to suspect that happiness could not be so
straightforwardly pursued. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” he wrote in the
Autobiography, “and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness,
but some end external to it, as the purpose of life.”17 In fact, the pursuit of hap-
piness might be considerably more circuitous than the utilitarians had suspected
since a life of pleasure without struggle might cease to be pleasurable altogether.18
Utilitarianism might tell us what to aim for, but we cannot aim for it directly. And
even if the metaphysics of romanticism was a hopeless jumble, its quest for indi-
vidual authenticity and self-development became the central animating principle of
Mill’s political and social thought.
Romanticism and idealism led Mill more deeply into the waters of Continental
political thought. He began reading the French socialists, St. Simon, Auguste
Comte and Pierre-Josef Proudhon, who famously declared, “property is theft.”
These influences obviously crashed against his father’s and Bentham’s classical
17 Ibid., 147.
18 “I felt that the flaw in my life,” Mill wrote, “must be a flaw in life itself; that the question was,
whether, if the reformers of society and government could succeed in their objects, and every person
in the community were free and in a state of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer
kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleasures.” Ibid., 149.
liberal commitments to free markets and property rights. But Mill found bits of
truth on all sides. He began to be wary of any kind of dogmatism. At one point, he
fancied himself a “mystic” but his friend, writer and philosopher, Thomas Carlyle,
ten years Mill’s senior, knew him better than Mill knew himself. He assured Mill
that he was no mystic. On reflection, Mill agreed but suggested in response that
perhaps his mission in life was “to translate the mysticism of others into the lan-
guage of argument.”19
This period in his twenties, which Mill referred to as his “transition,” involved a
conscious act of self-creation, a self-remaking of the “made man.” He tells us that
he meticulously evaluated every new influence – every new pattern of thought –
turning it round in his mind, massaging those pieces that passed the test into the
evolving firmament of what he wished to preserve from the past, modifying or dis-
carding the rest.20 He later reduced his experience in an essay written in 1832 “On
Genius,” in which he argued that genius was not limited to the artist or the discov-
erer of great truths: it is available to anyone who is willing to rethink for themselves
the truths previously discovered by others.21 This was a process of intellectual and,
ultimately, moral self-transformation – a process that would later figure promi-
nently in Mill’s conception of liberty.
“The Most Valuable Friendship of My Life”

If his nervous breakdown and subsequent intellectual transition was the first impor-
tant defining event in his life, then meeting Harriet Taylor was the second. Mill
was twenty-four and Taylor a year younger when they met. Mill was shy, sensitive,
analytical and physically awkward (he had trouble even tying his shoes as a youth).
Harriet was, by all accounts, a remarkable woman – vivacious, poetic and intui-
tive, a willowy beauty with deep-set eyes and a fiery wit. In turns, she was grace-
ful and fierce, intense and kind – Carlyle called her “a living romantic heroine.”
Unfortunately for both, however, she was also married, the mother of two with a
third child soon on the way. Her husband, John Taylor, was an amiable and pros-
perous wholesale druggist eleven years her senior. He was easy-going and of good
liberal opinions – but she grew bored with him.
19 John Stuart Mill, “The Letters, 1812–1837,” in The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812–1848, CW,
12:219, Mill to Carlyle (March 2, 1834).
20 “I never, in the course of my transition, was content to remain, for ever so short a time, confused and
unsettled. When I had taken in any new idea, I could not rest till I had adjusted its relation to my
old opinions and ascertained exactly how far its effect ought to extend in modifying or superseding
them.” Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:163, 165.
21 John Stuart Mill, “On Genius,” in Autobiography and Literary Essays, CW, 1:327.
Harriet seems to have imagined herself a romantic idealist whose prospects had
been corseted by the fetters of married life. She and Mill met through the Unitarian
preacher, W. J. Fox, who was popular among London’s fashionably liberal intel-
ligentsia. Fox had become the legal guardian of two teenage sisters, Eliza and Sally
Flowers. Though Fox was married, he soon commenced a scandalous relationship
with Eliza, whom Mill may have at first fancied. Perhaps in an effort to put Mill off
the track, Fox introduced him to Eliza’s closest friend, Harriet, with whom Mill was
soon smitten. Carlyle characteristically described Fox’s bohemian circle as “a flight
of really wretched-looking ‘friends of the species.’”22
If the details of Mill’s and Harriet’s arrangement seem bizarre by contemporary
standards, they scandalized Victorian London of the early 1830s. Mill was at first
certain that Harriet would sue for divorce. The two had even considered running
off to Australia. Mr. Taylor was convinced that Harriet would eventually repent
the relationship. He sent her to Paris with the children for a six-month cooling-
off period, but Mill followed her there. It soon became clear that Harriet had her
own compromise in mind: she could only remain loyal to each man by renouncing
sexual relations with both. Harriet wrote to Mill, “Yes – these circumstances do
require greater strength than any other – the greatest – that which you have & which
if you had not I should never have loved you.”23 Mill reluctantly obliged, as did her
husband after some feeble protests. The Taylors’ marriage continued on these chilly
terms for the next twenty years. Harriet managed their house and raised their chil-
dren, but accompanied Mill publicly to concerts and lectures and vacationed with
him in Europe. Mill was even permitted to dine with her two nights a week at her
residence while John Taylor supped at his club.24
During this period, Mill terminated one friendship after another at even the gen-
tlest suggestion that he and Harriet treat their public relationship with a modicum
of discretion.25 When James Mill pressed his son about the affair, Mill responded
that he had no other feelings about Harriet than he would have toward an equally
22 In a letter to his father, Carlyle wrote, “They “struggle not in favor of duty being done but against
duty of any kind being required. … Most of these people are very indignant at marriage and the like,
and frequently indeed, are obliged to divorce their own wives, or be divorced; for although this world
is already blooming (or is one day to do it) in everlasting ‘happiness of the greatest number, these
peoples’ own houses (I always find) are little hells of improvidence, discord and unreason.” Carlyle
initially exempted Mill from this criticism even though Mill soon began to be seen publicly with the
married Mrs. Taylor. Thomas Carlyle to Dr. John Carlyle (July 28, 1834), excerpted in Hayek, John
Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, 82.
23 Ibid., 60.
24 Capaldi, Mill: A Biography, 107–8.
25 Mill’s icy treatment of his childhood friend, John Roebuck, was particularly harsh. Capaldi, Mill:
A Biography, 111; Packe, Life of Mill, 152–53. But his treatment of his mother was even worse. As Alan
Ryan put it, his mother “was distressed and bewildered by the violence with which her favorite son
turned on her.” Mill “was so completely in the wrong that it is painful to read the correspondence…”
Ryan, J. S. Mill, 12.
able man. After his father died when Mill was 28, he would not permit his family,
with whom he still lived, even to speak about Harriet in his presence. Mill’s self-
centeredness concerning their relationship is genuinely remarkable. Rather than
recognizing the pain he must have caused Taylor, he complained in a letter to
Carlyle that he was too self-critical for his own good: “I will and must … master it,
or surely it will master me.”26 It is ironic that one of the most influential moral phi-
losophers of the modern era could dismiss as a bout of excessive self-analysis what
most anyone else would have suspected as the sting of conscience.
That said, there is general consensus among Mill’s biographers that his and
Harriet’s twenty-year relationship before marriage remained chaste, and that it
may have remained so even after marriage.27 Mill’s autobiography leaves only the
vaguest suggestion otherwise.28 Mill’s friend, Alexander Bain, who had helped
edit his System of Logic, insinuated that Mill simply had a weak libido.29 An alter-
native explanation is that Mill and Harriet entertained a genuinely gnostic view
of sex. Their early letters to each other resonate with the idea that intellectual
liberation requires physical renunciation. “[G]ratification of the passion in the
highest form,” Mill wrote in one note, requires “restraining it in the lowest.” They
condemned bourgeois marriage, along with any restrictions on divorce, as an
invention of the “sexualists.” If only marriage “had as its goal the true happiness
and development of both individuals, rather than their lower physical gratifica-
tion,” Mill wrote, “there would never have been any reason why law or opinion
should have set any limits to the most unbounded freedom of uniting and separat-
ing.”30 Mill declared in a pointed diary entry from 1854, “I am anxious to leave on
record at least in this place my deliberate opinion that any great improvement in
human life is not to be looked for so long as the animal instinct of sex occupies
the absurdly disproportionate place it [now] does.”31 So, it may well be that Mill
remained celibate for his entire life.
Mill wrote these words three years into his marriage. He and Harriet had been
married on Easter Monday, 1851, two years after John Taylor died. They were now
in their mid-forties. Their friendship had endured for twenty years though the two
had by now largely withdrawn from social engagements. Characteristically, Mill
26 Capaldi, Mill: A Biography, 107.

27 “It seems likely,” Ryan observes, “that [Harriet] did not care for the sexual intimacies of married
life, and was happier with the role of ‘Seelenfreundin,’ than that of middle-class wife.” Ryan,
J. S. Mill, 49; author note: seelenfreundin, rough translation soul mate.
28 He wrote that, after years of a “partnership of thought, feeling and writing” marriage brought them
into “a partnership of our entire existence.” Mill, Autobiography, 1:247.
29 Bain, Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections; Capaldi, Mill: A Biography, 380, n. 90.
30 Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, 68.
31 John Stuart Mill, “Diary, 1854,” in Journals and Debating Speeches Part II (1827), CW, 27:664 (entry
of March 26, 1854).
used the occasion of their marriage to pen a formal letter of protest denouncing the
“odious powers” the law gave husbands over wives and declared “that I absolutely
disclaim and repudiate all pretensions to have acquired any rights whatever” over
the woman he would marry.32
Mill’s relations with his family only deteriorated after the marriage.
The fault was almost wholly Mill’s. He had not invited either his mother or his
remaining siblings to the ceremony; most were informed of the event by others after
it took place. Worse, he rebuffed their subsequent attempts to smooth things over.
Two of his sisters, Clara and Mary, tried to visit Mill and Harriet at their new home
in Blackheath Park, deliberately chosen for its obscure location outside London.
Mill refused to see them. A volley of letters followed from the sisters, written more
from hurt than from disapprobation. He brushed each of them off in turn as “imper-
tinent,” “vulgar” and “insolent.”
Mill’s brother George, twenty years Mill’s junior, wrote to Mill from shock and
hurt, after hearing of the marriage. George was by now dying of tuberculosis in
Madeira. Mill cut him off in a series of stiff letters. George committed suicide
about a year later. Mill’s mother attempted to visit him at the East India House,
where he worked, but he had her turned away. More than two years later, as she
was dying of liver cancer, she wrote again in the kindest of terms – “your Marriage
gave us all pleasure as you had chosen a Wife who was capable of entering into
all your pursuits and appreciate your good qualities…” Mill visited her only once
during her final illness and went abroad for an extended vacation before she died.
In his last letter to her, he asked to be relieved as executor of her will.33
Mill’s and Harriet’s marriage lasted only seven and a half years. Both suffered
throughout from the tuberculosis which ultimately took their lives. Mill called it
his “family disease” as it had already taken his father and several siblings. In fact, it
is quite possible that Mill infected Harriet, as he suffered from the condition long
before she did. But in her case, it developed much more quickly and took its ultimate
toll while the two were travelling in Avignon, France, in November 1858. Mill wrote
a frenzied letter from the Hotel d’Europe, where they were staying, to a doctor in
Nice, offering one thousand pounds if he would come immediately, but Harriet suc-
cumbed before he arrived.
Scholars and commentators have speculated endlessly about the nature of
Mill’s and Harriet’s relationship and her relative influence upon his work. Mill’s
exaggerations of Harriet’s qualities and influence upon him are notorious: “Her
mind … was a perfect instrument, piercing to the heart and marrow of the mat-
ter. … To be admitted into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of these
qualities could not but have a most beneficial influence on my development. …
32 Packe, Life of Mill, 348.

33 Ibid., 351–57.
The benefit I received was far greater than any which I could hope to give. … What
I owe, even intellectually, to her is, almost infinite. … I have acquired more from
her teaching than from all other sources taken together. … Were I but capable of
interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are
buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is every
likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all
but unrivaled wisdom.”34
Perhaps these were the over-idealized expressions of a highly sublimated love,
deepened by his profound grief at her loss. Harriet certainly had not had Mill’s edu-
cation and background. While she was well-read – particularly in literature, poetry
and the philosophy of the romantic and socialist writers – her understanding of
philosophy was limited and what she knew of economics she learned from Mill. Her
forte, in general, was not primarily analytic.
Yet we should not underestimate Harriet’s influence on Mill either – an
influence both intellectual and emotional. As a young woman, she had written
essays which anticipate some of the themes of On Liberty and the Subjection of
Women.35 Line by line she edited with him On Liberty and his Autobiography.
She insisted that Mill include in the second edition of the Principles of Political
Economy a chapter on “the Probable Future of the Labouring Classes” – a chapter
which Mill later thought made the book most distinctive and which scholars
think lends the book a socialistic cast. Over the course of their life together,
Harriet pulled Mill in the direction of more radical causes, of socialism and of
more fully libertarian views of the right to marry and divorce.36 She drew out in
him a more visceral sense of the plight of the downtrodden and the weak, and
she helped him transform relatively abstract observations about the role of social
institutions on gender into an impassioned feminism. Yet the most palpable of
her influences may be found in the pages of On Liberty which Mill insisted was
more their joint project than any of his other works.37 Not only is this his greatest
and most remembered book, it sparkles with the most vividly evocative and con-
cretely powerful prose of all his works. If this alone were her influence, it would
be substantial.
34 Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:195, 197. Harriet had actually toned down many of Mill’s original com-
ments in an earlier draft of the Autobiography which provided, as Ryan notes “an account of her
talents which nobody but her second husband has ever thought remotely credible.” Ryan, J. S. Mill,
14–15.
35 Ibid., 125–27; see also Jo Ellen Jacobs, The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2002), 195–251 (for a sympathetic account of Harriet’s intellectual and moral influ-
ence on Mill).
36 As Mill admitted, were it not for Harriet, he “might have become a less thorough radical and demo-
crat than I am.” Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:259.
37 Ibid., 257.
Mill’s Private Side

Mill’s relationship with Harriet, with his family and with those closest to him sheds
fascinating light on Mill’s character. Almost all who knew him describe him as a
gentleman of the most refined moral sensibilities. Gladstone called him “the saint
of rationalism.” Yet, in the sphere that was perhaps his most underdeveloped, his
romantic experiences, he could be genuinely self-centered to all but the object of
his love, Harriet, to whom he remained uxoriously attached.
In other matters, Mill was scrupulously honest, assiduously principled and
remarkably courageous. While running for Parliament, he was confronted with a
comment he had made in one of his writings that most people in the working class
were liars. When asked if he had written this by a gathering of working class voters,
he responded, “I did.” The crowd erupted in applause, apparently in appreciation
for his candor.38 While in office, he received almost weekly death threats, which he
seems to have largely shrugged off.39 He supported himself and Harriet on his own
income after they married, refusing to take a penny from the substantial estate left
by her late husband.40
Mill generously supported many friends and intellectuals who had fallen on hard
times.41 Herbert Spencer, the prophet of social Darwinism, had come to Mill’s atten-
tion after he had attacked Mill’s System of Logic. When Spencer found himself
penniless, he came to Mill for assistance. Mill helped secure him a job at the East
India Company and later supported him directly. More generally, he brought a com-
bination of moral integrity and passion to bear in political and social matters where
it was often most needed.
There were, to be sure, tensions in his worldview which affected his opinions of
others. Though he was, theoretically, a democrat and an egalitarian, he exhibited
an almost Brahministic aversion to contact with the untouchables of the lower
classes. The expressions he used to describe them – “the mass,” the “uncultivated
herd,” “unintellectual society,” those of “a very common order” – bear this out.
This aversion was occasionally comingled with a messianic sense of duty reminis-
cent of Bentham:
To a person of any but a very common order of thought and feeling, much society,
unless he has personal objects to serve by it, must be supremely unattractive: and
most people in the present day, of any really high class of intellect, make their
contact with it so slight, and at such long intervals, as to be almost considered as
retiring from it altogether. Those persons of any mental superiority who do other-
wise are, almost without exception, greatly deteriorated by it. Not to mention loss
38 Ibid., 274.
39 Ibid., 282.
40 Capaldi, Mill: A Biography, 228–29 (Mill wrote a letter disavowing any right to her property).
41 Packe, Life of Mill, 484. For example, Mill long supported Herbert Spencer. Ibid., 453.
of time, the tone of their feelings is lowered. … A person of high intellect should
never go into unintellectual society unless he can enter it as an apostle. …42
Nor were strangers exempt from Mill’s condescension. In a letter to Harriet, he

smugly sized up a fellow Englishman, a man named Pope, whom Mill met while
traveling in France in 1855:
He turned out a pleasant person to meet, as, though he does not seem to me to have
any talent, he is better informed than common Englishmen – knows a good deal of
French history, for example, especially that of the Revolution – and seems to have
already got to, or seems to be quite ready to receive, all our opinions. I tried him
on religion, where I found him quite what we think right, on politics – on which
he was somewhat more than a radical – on the equality of women which he seems
not to have quite dared to think of himself but seemed to adopt it at once – and to
be ready for all reasonable socialism – he boggled a little at limiting the power of
bequest which I was glad of as it showed that the other agreements were not merely
following a lead taken. He was therefore worth talking to and I think he will have
taken away a great many ideas from me.43
The worst excesses are found in his heady private correspondence with Harriet. He
frequently distinguished himself and Harriet from others in almost ontological terms:
But will the morality which suits the highest natures, in this matter, be also best
for all inferior natures? My conviction is that it will, but this can be only a happy
accident. All of the difficulties of morality, in any of its brands, grow out of the
conflict which continually arises between the highest morality & even the best
popular morality which the degree of development achieved by average human
nature, will allow to exist.44
These flourishes can perhaps be excused in light of their youth, Mill’s utter dearth
of romantic experience and the romantic cult of genius, which seem to have contrib-
uted to the hothouse spirit emblematic of some of their exchanges. Nevertheless, the
claim by one of his most famous defenders that Mill was utterly without vanity can-
not be entirely sustained.45 A more objective assessment would be that, while Mill
regularly downplayed his own considerable abilities – he once said that any average
42 Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:235. Bentham had referred to himself as “the Luther of jurisprudence.”
When Lord Shelburne asked Bentham what could be done to save the nation, Bentham answered,
“take my book and follow me.” John Lawrence Hill, After the Natural Law (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 2016), 218.
44 Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, 60.
45 Isaiah Berlin, who wrote extensively on Mill, described him as “clear-headed, candid, highly articu-
late, intensely serious, and without any trace of fear, vanity or humor.” Isaiah Berlin, “John Stuart
Mill and the Ends of Life,” Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 177. But
Alan Ryan’s description – that Mill possessed “an extraordinary combination of arrogance and self-
deprecation” – appears more apt. Ryan, J. S. Mill, 127.
boy or girl could have done what he did given the same education – he frequently
offered scathing reviews of lesser minds with whom he disagreed. Conservatives
were “the stupid party.” Any politician who did not see the value of his theory of vot-
ing “may be pronounced an incompetent statesman, unequal to the politics of the
future.”46 Dr. Whewell’s book, Elements of Morality, an intuitionist philosophy that
clashed with Mill’s empiricism, was “one of the thousand waves on the dead sea of
commonplace.”47
Yet Mill could be charming and downright funny and frequently achieved
some of his most devastating results with more than a modicum of wit. While in
Parliament, another member confronted him with his comment about “the stupid
party.” Mill responded:
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say
that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that this is so obviously
and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny
it. Suppose any party, in addition to the share it may possess of the ability of the
community, has nearly the whole of its stupidity, that party must, by the law of
its constitution, be the stupidest party: and I do not see at all why honourable
gentlemen should see that position as at all offensive to them, for it ensures their
being always an extremely powerful party. … There is so much dense, solid force
in sheer stupidity that anybody of able men with that force pressing behind them
may ensure victory in many a struggle, and many a victory the Conservative party
has gained through that power.48
There was a pause as the other members took this in and then – the entire chamber
went up in a roar of laughter.
Similarly, when he learned that Carlyle had addressed a public banquet in
Edinburgh, joining in a drinking song lampooning Mill’s philosophy that ended
with the refrain
Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter,
Stuart Mill on Mind and Matter,
Stuart Mill exerts his skill
To make an end of Mind and Matter,
Mill wrote to Carlyle, “Please thank Mrs. Carlyle for her remembrance of me. I have
been sorry to hear a rather poor account of her health, and to see by your Edinburgh
address that your own is not quite satisfactory.”49

48 Ibid., 454.
49 Ibid., 445–46.
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Little Sunbeam
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no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the
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located before using this eBook.
Title: Little Sunbeam
Author: Eleanora H. Stooke
Illustrator: Myra Kathleen Hughes
Release date: November 22, 2023 [eBook #72200]
Language: English
Original publication: London: National Society's Depository, 1905
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE SUNBEAM ***

Transcriber's note: Unusual and inconsistent spelling is as printed.
THE CORNISH FLOWER-FARM.
LITTLE SUNBEAM
BY
ELEANORA H. STOOKE
AUTHOR OF "GRANFER," ETC.
WITH FRONTISPIECE BY MYRA K. HUGHES
LONDON
NATIONAL SOCIETY'S DEPOSITORY
BROAD SANCTUARY, WESTMINSTER

NEW YORK: THOMAS WHITTAKER, 2 & 3 BIBLE HOUSE
[All rights reserved]
PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. LTD., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
GRANFER, and ONE CHRISTMAS TIME.
Price 1s.
NATIONAL SOCIETY'S DEPOSITORY,
Sanctuary, Westminster, S. W.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. KNOCKED DOWN
II. CONCERNING AUNT CAROLINE
III. THE DOCTOR'S PRESCRIPTION
IV. PEGGY'S FIRST DAY AT LOWER BRIMLEY
V. AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR
VI. MISS LEIGHTON'S DISCOVERY
VII. A GREAT SURPRISE
VIII. CONCERNING ELLEN BARNES
IX. TEA AT LOWER BRIMLEY

X. GOOD-BYES
XI. HOME AGAIN
XII. AUNT CAROLINE'S DISAPPOINTMENT
XIII. PREPARING FOR CHRISTMAS
XIV. CONCLUSION
LITTLE SUNBEAM
CHAPTER I
KNOCKED DOWN
"COME along, Billy. Mother said we were not to be long; and I'm sure we've been more
than half an hour."
The speaker—a little girl of about nine years old, clad in a somewhat shabby blue serge
coat and skirt, with a Tam o' Shanter cap on her golden curls—tried to pull her brother
away from the toy shop window into which he was gazing longingly; but he resisted, and
still lingered.
"There's plenty of time, Peggy," he assured her. "You know we never have tea till five
o'clock, and you can't imagine what a heap of jolly things there are in this window. I wish
you could see them."
"I wish I could," she answered. "Never mind, you can tell me all about them by-and-by."
It was a cold, dull, February day; but it did not rain, and the street was thronged with
vehicles, whilst the pedestrians—mostly of the lower classes, for the district was a poor
one—hustled against each other on the pavements. No one took any notice of the two
children who had been standing before a toy shop window for the last ten minutes. And,
indeed, there was nothing about them to attract the observation of a casual observer,
although the countenance of the little girl, with its finely-cut features and sweet
expression, possessed a delicate beauty which was certainly out of the common. No one
looking at Peggy Pringle would have guessed that she was blind, for her eyes, in colour the
darkest blue, were as clear as crystal; but the sad fact was that the blessing of sight was
denied to her.
It had been a terrible trouble to the child's parents when, some months after her birth,
they had learnt the truth, that the happy baby, whose rosebud lips seemed formed only for
smiles, and whose eyes were "bits of Heaven's blue" as her young mother had used to
declare, would never see the light of day, and they had grieved deeply. But Peggy had
never appeared to realise how great was her affliction, and at the present time it would
have been difficult, if not impossible, to find a more contented little girl. "Little Sunbeam"
her father had nicknamed her years before, and a veritable sunbeam in the household she
continued to be.
Peggy and her brother, who was only thirteen months her junior, had been sent to buy
buns for tea, and she was holding the bag which contained them with one hand, whilst
with the other she kept a firm grip of Billy's coat. She was not exactly nervous in a crowd,
for she had been accustomed to London all her life, and her home was in a thickly
populated district. But she experienced a sense of bewilderment as she listened to the
hurrying footsteps on the pavement and the continual roll of carriage wheels, and she
wished Billy would tire of looking into shop windows and return home.
"Come, Billy," she urged again, "mother will wonder what is keeping us. Do come."
Accordingly, Billy took his sister by the hand with an air of protection, and they walked on.
At the corner of the street, they stood waiting for a favourable opportunity to cross.
"Is there a policeman near?" asked Peggy.
"There's one on the other side of the road," replied Billy, "but we don't want him. I can
manage all right. When I say 'Now,' mind you come right on."
A minute later Billy cried, "Now!"
So, hand in hand, the children went fearlessly forward. And they would have effected the
crossing in safety had not a private carriage, drawn by a pair of spirited horses, turned the
corner from a side street. Billy hurried his sister on; but the road was slippery, and, in her
haste, the little girl stumbled and let go her brother's hand. Some one flung Billy on one
side, whilst the coachman driving the pair of horses pulled them back on their haunches in
time to prevent a serious accident, but not before one of the animals had struck poor
Peggy on the shoulder with its hoof. She was borne to the pavement in the arms of the
policeman whose help Billy had disdained, and in a few minutes a small crowd had
congregated.
"What has happened?" inquired an imperious voice from the interior of the carriage. "Is
any one injured?"
"A little girl," answered the policeman. "I think she's more frightened than hurt, though,"
he added, as he set Peggy on the ground, and Billy, pale and frightened, rushed to her
side.
"Was my coachman at fault?" was the next question.
"No, ma'am. He was driving carefully, and had the horses under proper control; but—"
"That's all I want to know, thank you."
A head was thrust out of the carriage window, and the crowd saw the face—a haughty,
handsome face it was—of a white-haired old lady, who beckoned to the policeman to
approach, which he did.
"You had better take the little girl to a hospital, if she is hurt," the old lady said, in a tone
which expressed neither interest nor sympathy. "I suppose that would be your duty? Well,
you know your business; it is none of mine, as my servant, you assure me, is blameless.
However, here is my card should you require to communicate with me."
The handsome old face drew back from the window, and the carriage was driven away,
whilst the crowd dispersed, leaving only the policeman and one other—an elderly
clergyman, who had come upon the scene after the accident—with the frightened children.
"Where are you hurt, my dear little girl?"
Peggy's shocked face brightened at the sound of the kindly voice, which she recognised
immediately as belonging to Mr. Maloney, the Vicar of St. John's Church, where her father
was the organist.
"It's my shoulder," she answered. "Oh, Mr. Maloney, do please take me home!"
"Of course I will, my dear," he responded promptly, with a reassuring nod and smile at
Billy. "What happened?" he inquired of the policeman, who briefly explained, adding that
no one had been in fault.
"Billy couldn't have helped it," Peggy said hastily, fearful lest blame should be attached to
her brother.
"No, the little boy was not to blame," agreed the policeman. "Are you going to take charge
of the children, sir?" he asked of the clergyman.
"Yes. I know them well; their father is Mr. Pringle, the organist of St. John's Church. What
is this?" Mr. Maloney questioned as he took the card the policeman presented to him.
"The lady in the carriage gave it to me, sir. I have made a note of the name and the
address. Maybe the little girl's father will make some claim—"
"I imagine not," interposed the clergyman quickly; "but I will take the card and give it to
Mr. Pringle. Thank you,"—and he slipped the bit of pasteboard into his vest pocket.
"Oh, Billy, I dropped the buns!" exclaimed Peggy regretfully. They had no money to buy
more, and the buns had been purchased for a treat.
"The horses trod on them," Billy replied; "but, never mind, mother won't think anything
about them when she knows what's happened. I'm afraid she'll never trust you out alone
with me any more."
The little girl made no response. The pain in her shoulder was making her feel sick and
faint, and her legs trembled as she walked along by Mr. Maloney's side, her hand in his. He
saw she was suffering, and regarded her with compassionate eyes, whilst he exchanged
remarks with Billy. Soon she began to lose the drift of her companions' conversation, and
when at length, home—a small house, one of a terrace—was reached, the shock she had
received proved too much for her, and she fell insensible into her mother's arms.
When Peggy regained consciousness, she found herself undressed and in bed. Everything
was very quiet, but she was aware of some one's presence, and it was no surprise when
soft lips met hers in a loving kiss, and her mother's voice said, "You are better, Peggy
dear."
Then she was gently raised in bed, and, to her astonishment, she found her shoulder was
bandaged; but she was not in much pain now, so she took the bread and milk offered to
her, and lay down again, feeling strangely weak and tired, and disinclined to talk.
"Sleep if you can, darling," her mother said tenderly. "You will be much stronger to-
morrow. The doctor has attended to your poor shoulder. Thank God you are not more
seriously hurt!"
"What is the time mother?" Peggy asked. "Have you had tea? I was so sorry about the
buns. I dropped them, you know."
"Did you? As if that mattered! No, we have not had tea. We have been too anxious about
you to think of it. Now we shall have tea and supper together. It is nearly seven o'clock—
not quite your usual bedtime, but never mind that to-night. Rest will do you good. I want
you to sleep."
"I am very tired," Peggy murmured, "but I haven't said my prayers, and my head feels so
funny that I can't think. I will say my 'little prayer' to-night.' Then she repeated very slowly
and softly:
"Holy Father, cheer our way

With Thy love's perpetual ray:
Grant us every closing day
Light at evening time."
It was a pathetic prayer, coming as it did from the lips of one who lived in permanent
darkness. But it had been one of the first Peggy had learnt and she had always been very
fond of it, calling it her "little prayer." To-night her eyelids closed as she repeated the last
line, and a few minutes later she had fallen asleep.
Mrs. Pringle remained by the bedside some while longer, tears, which she had repressed till
now, running down her cheeks, though her heart was full of gratitude to Him Who had
spared her child's life. She was a most affectionate mother, devoted to both her children;
but her little daughter, doubtless by reason of her affliction, was always her first care. She
shuddered as she thought what might have been the result of the accident that afternoon,
and pictured her darling trampled beneath the horses' hoofs.
"God gave His angels charge over her," she murmured, as she bent her head once more,
and kissed the little sleeper. Then she stole softly away, and went downstairs to the sitting-
room where Billy his father were keeping each other company, both heavy-hearted, though
the doctor had assured them there was no cause for alarm.
"How is she now?" they asked, with one accord, as she entered the room.
"Sleeping peacefully," she told them, a smile lighting up her pale, tearful countenance.
"You may go and look at her; but please be very careful not to disturb her. I have every
hope that she will be better after a good rest. We have much to thank God for this night!"
CHAPTER II
CONCERNING AUNT CAROLINE
WHEN Mr. Pringle and Billy returned to the sitting-room after having been upstairs to look
at Peggy asleep so comfortably, they found that Mrs. Pringle, with the assistance of Sarah,
the maid-of-all-work of the establishment, had prepared the long-delayed tea. Whilst the
family sat down to the meal, Sarah, at her own suggestion, went to keep watch by the
little sleeper; and a few minutes later there was a knock at the front door.
"Go and see who's there, Billy," said Mr. Pringle. "I should not be surprised if it is Mr.
Maloney," he proceeded, turning to his wife, "for he was very concerned about Peggy and
said he hoped to look in by-and-by to hear the doctor's report."
And Mr. Maloney the visitor proved to be. He accepted Mrs. Pringle's offer of a cup of tea,
and took the chair Billy placed for him at the table.
"I am glad to know the doctor thinks your little girl is not much hurt," he said in his
pleasant voice. "Billy greeted me with the good news the moment he opened the door."
"The only injury she has sustained is to her shoulder," replied Mr. Pringle, "but of course
she has experienced a great shock. Her escape from a frightful death was quite
providential," he added with a slight break in his voice.
"Quite," Mr. Maloney agreed. "It was too bad of the owner of the carriage to drive on, as
she did, without ascertaining the extent of the poor child's injuries," he continued warmly.
"The least she could have done, under the circumstances, one would have thought, would
have been to have driven her home."
"She was a nasty old woman, I'm sure she was," declared Billy with flushing cheeks and
sparkling eyes. "She told the policeman, he had better take Peggy to a hospital if she was
hurt, and she said it was his business, not hers. She spoke in such a proud way—as
though she didn't care for anything or any one."
"Well, Peggy found a friend in need," Mr. Pringle remarked with a grateful glance at Mr.
Maloney, who smiled and said he was glad to have been of service.
The Vicar and the organist of St. John's were on terms of friendship, though the former
was elderly and the latter not middle-aged. Mr. Maloney had lived most of his life in
London. He was a hard worker, and much beloved by all who knew him. But some of his
acquaintances declared him lacking in ambition, for on several occasions he had declined
preferment, choosing to retain the living of St. John's, which he had held for more than
twenty years. He was an unmarried man, and consequently the living, though a poor one,
supplied his simple needs.
He was getting an old man now, but the bright, unquenchable light of that enthusiasm
which had made him a faithful labourer in Christ's vineyard all his days still shone in his
earnest, deep-set eyes, and earnestness was stamped indelibly upon his countenance. And
the truth was that his ambition soared far and away beyond the worldly meaning of the
term: he was working for the "Well done" of the Master for Whose sake he had elected to
live amongst those of little account in this world.
Mr. Pringle had been the organist of St. John's since his marriage ten years previously. He
was a tall, fair man with a thoughtful face and clear blue eyes. Peggy much resembled
him; whilst Billy took after his mother in appearance, being brown-haired and brown-eyed.
The Pringles were a very united family, and theirs was a happy home though it was a
rather poor one, and Mr. Pringle was glad to add to his salary by taking music pupils.
"I did not see the owner of the carriage," Mr. Maloney remarked by-and-by, after they had
discussed Peggy's accident at some length. "Why, dear me, how stupid of me!" he
exclaimed, a sudden recollection crossing his mind. "I have her card in my pocket here!
She gave it to the policeman, who, in his turn, gave it to me, thinking that you might be
inclined to seek redress from her for poor Peggy's injuries, I believe. Let us see who the
unsympathetic old lady is."
He had produced the card by this time, and now handed it to Mrs. Pringle, who glanced at
it, uttered a cry of astonishment, and grew very red.
"You know her?" Mr. Maloney inquired.
"Yes," she replied in a low tone, "I do. I can understand that she evinced no interest—
though she could not have known whose child Peggy was."
She passed the card to her husband as she spoke.
A brief silence followed, during which Billy, keenly observant, noticed that his mother was
trembling, and that his father's face had grown very stern.
"Who is the lady, father?" he ventured to ask at length.
"She is called Miss Leighton," was the answer. "You never heard of her, Billy; but I expect
you have?" he said, addressing Mr. Maloney.
"I think not," the Vicar responded. "Is she a person of importance?"
"She is a very rich woman. Her father was James Leighton, the great ironfounder who died
so immensely wealthy—"
"Ah, then I have heard of her," Mr. Maloney broke in. "But I thought she was quite a
philanthropist—hardly the sort of woman who would act as this Miss Leighton did to-day."
"That is exactly how she would act," Mrs. Pringle said decidedly. "We are speaking of the
same person. She gives away vast amounts of money yearly to charities, but she denies
herself nothing in order to do so, for she is very wealthy. She was never a woman who
showed kindness in little ways or to individuals. I know her well; in fact, she is my aunt."
"Really?" the Vicar said, looking intensely astonished. He knew the Pringles were not well
off—that they lived solely on Mr. Pringle's earnings, and it seemed odd that so rich and
charitable a lady as Miss Leighton should do so much for strangers and nothing for her
relations.
"The truth is, my wife offended her aunt by marrying me," Mr. Pringle explained, rightly
reading the expression of Mr. Maloney's countenance; "and Miss Leighton never forgives
any one who offends her."
"Then God help her!" the Vicar exclaimed solemnly.
"Yes," said Mrs. Pringle, sighing, "poor Aunt Caroline! She was very good to me years ago,
she had me educated when my parents died, and afterwards she allowed me to live with
her. She would have continued to provide for me, if I had not become engaged to John,"
glancing at her husband with a loving smile. "I had to choose between him and Aunt
Caroline, and since my marriage I have never seen my aunt. 'She washed her hands of
me,' she said, on my wedding day. She declared she would never willingly look on my face
again, and I know she will keep her word."
"You can realise now what sacrifices my wife has made for my sake," Mr. Pringle said,
rather sadly, as he met Mr. Maloney's interested glance.
"I have made no sacrifices," Mrs. Pringle returned quickly. "But, sometimes it grieves me
to think of the bitter feelings Aunt Caroline harbours against me. She considers me
ungrateful; I was never that. I do not want her money, but I should like to be on friendly
terms with her. It was ten years ago I saw her; she must be getting an old woman."
"She looked very old, mother," Billy said, and as he spoke, Mrs. Pringle started, for in the
excitement of talking of her aunt, whom she rarely mentioned now even to her husband,
she had forgotten the boy was present, listening to every word.
"Her hair was quite white," he continued, "as white as snow. I didn't like her eyes, they
were so very sharp. Oh, mother, how odd that she should be your aunt! And how surprised
she would have been, if she had found out that Peggy was your little girl, wouldn't she? I
expect she would have been sorry for her, then, don't you think so?"
"I—I—perhaps so," his mother replied, "but she did not find out, and it was best as it was."
She took up the card which her husband had laid on the table and tore it into little bits,
which, upon rising, she threw into the fire.
"There, we will talk no more of Aunt Caroline," she said. "Thinking of her always makes me
unhappy, and I don't want to be that to-night, when I ought to be feeling nothing but
thankfulness on Peggy's account."
A short while later, Mr. Maloney took his departure, and, after that, Billy said good-night to
his parents and went upstairs. He peeped into Peggy's room; but did not go in, for Sarah,
who was still watching by the bedside, raised a warning finger when she caught sight of
him in the doorway. She was to be relieved from her post very soon by her mistress,
whose intention it was to sit up all night.
Although Billy was really tired and was soon in bed, it was long before he could get to
sleep, for he felt strangely restless and excited; he continually pictured the pair of high-
stepping horses which had so nearly trodden his sister beneath their hoofs, and he was
haunted by the proud face of the old lady who had appeared so unconcerned.
"She must be very wicked," thought the little boy, "for father said she never forgives any
one who offends her. How dreadful that is! Doesn't she know it's wrong, I wonder! And,
oh, how strange that she should be mother's aunt! How surprised Peggy will be when she
knows!"
Then he forgot Miss Leighton in thinking of Peggy once more. He had not omitted to thank
his Father in Heaven, as he had knelt by his bedside before getting into bed, for having
spared his sister's life; but his full heart thanked Him again and again as he lay awake
mentally reviewing the events of the last few hours, and he fell asleep, at length, with the
fervent prayer upon his lips:
"Dear Jesus, please always take care of Peggy, and remember she is blind."
CHAPTER III
THE DOCTOR'S PRESCRIPTION
A MONTH had elapsed since Peggy's accident, and the little girl, though about again, had
not recovered her usual health and spirits. Her mother watched her with loving solicitude,
noting how shattered her nerves seemed to be, for she started at any sudden sound and
dreaded being left alone. The doctor pronounced her to be suffering from the effects of the
shock to her nervous system, prescribed a complete change of air, and said time would
work a cure.
"How can we send her away for a change?" Mrs. Pringle asked her husband despairingly.
"It is impossible."
"I wish you could take her to the seaside for a few weeks, Margaret," Mr. Pringle
responded, looking much troubled. "But I really do not see how it can be managed—where
the money is to come from, I mean."
"Never mind, father," Peggy said quickly, "I am sure I shall be well soon. I am a lot better,
really."
"Do you feel so, darling?" he questioned, as he drew her towards him, and anxiously
scrutinised her face.
Then, as she assured him she did, he kissed her gently, an expression of deep pain and
regret on his own countenance.
It grieved Mr. Pringle that he could not afford his little daughter the change of air which the
doctor had prescribed, and he went off to give a music lesson with a very heavy heart.
When he returned, an hour later, upon opening the front door the sound of a man's hearty
laugh fell upon his ears, and almost immediately Peggy, with a flush of excitement on her
cheeks, came out of the sitting-room, her sensitive ears having warned her of his arrival,
and whispered:
"Oh, father, we've a visitor! Guess who it is. But, no, you never will, so I may as well tell
you. It's Mr. Tiddy. You remember who he is, don't you? The Cornish gentleman who
married Miss Bates."
"Oh!" exclaimed Mr. Pringle, suddenly enlightened. Miss Bates had been a school friend of
his wife's. The two had always corresponded regularly, though they had not met of late.
Miss Bates had earned her living as a governess until five years previously, when she had
married a well-to-do farmer in Cornwall.
"He is a very nice man, father," Peggy continued, "and he's brought us a hamper full of all
sorts of good things to eat—cream, and butter, and eggs, and a big cake, which his wife
made herself, with a sugary top, and a couple of chickens! Do come and see him at once."
Accordingly Mr. Pringle allowed his little daughter to lead him into the sitting-room, where
the visitor was being entertained by Mrs. Pringle and Billy, and after a few minutes'
conversation with him, he mentally agreed with Peggy that this new acquaintance was a
very nice man.
Ebenezer Tiddy was a thorough countryman in appearance, being clad in a tweed suit, and
boots which had evidently been made to keep out inches deep of mud. He was tall and
vigorous, with a ruddy, kindly countenance, and steady grey eyes which looked one
straight in the face. He had entered the house a complete stranger half an hour before, but
already the children were at their ease with him, and Mrs. Pringle was looking decidedly
more cheerful than when her husband had left her after their conversation about the
doctor's prescription. Mr. Pringle felt glad Mr. Tiddy had come, since his presence had
evidently proved exhilarating.
"I arrived in town last night," the visitor explained, "and the first thing this morning I said
to myself, 'I'd better execute my wife's business before I attend to my own.' And now
you're here, Mr. Pringle, I'll speak of the real object of my visit. Said my wife to me one
day last week, 'Ebenezer, how I should like to have little Peggy Pringle to stay with us for a
while! Her mother has written to me that she met with an accident and doesn't seem to
pick up after it as she ought. I believe a change of air would be the best medicine for her
now.'"
Here Mr. Tiddy paused, and looked at Peggy, who, sensitive like all blind people, was fully
conscious of his gaze.
"Oh, Mr. Tiddy!" she exclaimed. "And—what did you say?"
"That she'd better write and invite you to visit us at once, my dear, believing, as I do, that
Cornish breezes and Cornish living would make you strong in no time. 'But she can't travel
alone,' said my wife, who is quicker of thought than I am, 'and how are we to get her here,
Ebenezer?' 'That can be easily managed,' I replied; 'when I go to London next week to
interview the florist who is going to buy our flowers this spring, I'll ask her parents to trust
her to me.' And if they will," concluded Mr. Tiddy, looking smilingly first at Mrs. Pringle,
then at her husband, "I am sure I shall be very pleased and proud, and my wife and
myself will do our best to make her visit a happy one. The little maid won't have any
children for playmates, but I don't think she'll be dull, for there's always something or
other to interest folks at a farm, and I need hardly say we'll take good care of her."
"How kind you are!" Mrs. Pringle exclaimed, her face alight with pleasure, "Peggy does
indeed need a change very badly, and we have been bemoaning the fact that we could not
give her one. I am sure she would be quite happy with you and your wife."
"I remember Miss Bates," said Peggy. "She stayed with us once when I was a little girl."
"And what are you now, pray?" asked Mr. Tiddy, highly amused. "A big girl, eh?"
"I am nine years old," she answered, in a dignified tone. "But I am not very tall for my
age."
"Cornish air will make you grow. Will you make up your mind, then, to travel westwards
with me? Would your brother care to come too?"
"Billy goes to school, and it is the middle of the term," Mrs. Pringle explained; "being
Saturday, it is the weekly holiday: that is why you find him at home now. You are very kind
to give him an invitation, but he knows he must not neglect his work."
"He must pay us a visit in his summer holidays, then," said Mr. Tiddy, sympathising with
the disappointment he read in the little boy's face. "I shall not forget. And now, Mrs.
Pringle, do you think you can part with your little maid on Tuesday? I hope to return to
Cornwall as soon as that. I only require one clear day in town to transact my business."
"Peggy can be ready by Tuesday," Mrs. Pringle answered, after a few moments' reflection,
whilst Peggy herself felt quite bewildered by the suddenness with which everything was
being arranged.
"Come and spend to-morrow with us," suggested Mr. Pringle hospitably, "that is, if you
have made no previous engagement."
"I have not. Thank you, I shall be delighted to come," answered Mr. Tiddy, his countenance
beaming with pleasure. "I have heard so much of you all from my wife that I can't fancy
you were strangers to me till this last hour."
When at length he took his departure, which was after a little further conversation, he
seemed quite an old friend, and the children were pleased and excited at the prospect of
his visit on the morrow.
"It is as though a load has been lifted off my shoulders," Mr. Pringle confessed, as he
returned to the sitting-room after having said good-bye to Mr. Tiddy at the front door. He
sat down in an arm-chair as he spoke, and his little daughter took a stool at his feet and
rested her golden head against his knee. "It seems so marvellous this invitation should
have come for Peggy just at this very time," he proceeded earnestly, "when it seemed
utterly impossible to carry out the doctor's prescription. Surely God must have prompted
Mr. Tiddy to come to us to-day."
"Yes, and there's no one I would so gladly entrust Peggy to as my old friend," Mrs. Pringle
answered contentedly. "You're pleased you're going, are you not, Peggy?" she questioned,
noticing a faint shadow on her little daughter's face.
"Y-e-s," was the response, given a trifle doubtfully. The thought of a visit to Cornwall had
filled Peggy with a transport of delight at first; but now, she had had time to reflect that
she would have no mother and father and Billy with her, and she had never been parted
from them before. "I shall miss you all so much," she murmured with quivering lips, "and
Cornwall is so far away."
"We shall miss you, little Sunbeam," her father assured her as he softly stroked her curly
hair, "but we are glad you are going, because we want you to get well and strong. I believe
you will have a most enjoyable time, and, of one thing I am quite certain, that both Mr.
and Mrs. Tiddy will be kindness itself. I only hope they won't spoil you and want to keep
you altogether."
"I shouldn't stay, if they did," Peggy returned, half indignant at the suggestion. "And—and
I'm beginning to wish I wasn't going at all."
She lay awake a long while that night, crying at the thought of the coming separation from
her family, but she did not admit it the next morning.
Mr. Tiddy spent Sunday with his new friends as had been arranged, and in the evening he
accompanied them to St. John's. After the service, he waited with Mrs. Pringle and the
children to hear the voluntary. It was "The Heavens are telling," which Mr. Pringle played at
his visitor's request.
"Did you like it, Mr. Tiddy?" Peggy whispered at the conclusion of the piece as they passed
out of the church.
"Yes, I liked it," he answered earnestly. "Your father plays the organ beautifully. 'The
Heavens are telling the glory of God!' So they do, don't they?" They were in the street by
now, Peggy's hand in the firm clasp of her new friend. "I can't tell how folks can prefer to
live in town," he proceeded. "Give me the country and plenty of fresh air. Ah, my dear, I'll
show you some rare sights in Cornwall—"
"You forget," interposed Peggy, "I cannot see."
"Poor dear!" he said softly. "How thoughtless of me to forget!"
"Does it seem to you very dreadful to be blind?" she asked, catching the tone of tender
sympathy in his deep voice.
Then, as he hesitated what answer to make, she continued:
"You know, I shall never see as long as I live, but I think I shall get on very well. Mother
says I am very useful in the house. I am learning to do lots of things—to play the piano
and to knit, and father says, if he had more money—Oh, here are the others!" And she
suddenly broke off.
That was the first occasion on which Peggy had been to church since her accident. Her
mother had been doubtful about taking her to-night, and had wanted to leave her at home
with Sarah for her companion. But the little girl had begged to be allowed to go, and had
gained her own way, and the service had had a beneficial effect upon her, having soothed
her nerves instead of having excited them. She slept well that night, and the next day was
spent in making preparations for her visit, and passed so busily that when bedtime came
again, she was too weary to lie awake thinking of the parting from all those who made up
her little world, which was so near at hand.
She was called early on the following morning, and after breakfast—of which she partook
but little—and a somewhat tearful good-bye to Billy and Sarah, she drove off in a cab with
her parents to Paddington railway station, where she was consigned to the care of Mr.
Tiddy, who had already selected a comfortable carriage and procured a foot-warmer for his
little charge.
"Good-bye, Peggy, darling," whispered her mother, as the guard bustled by requesting
people to take their places. "God bless and protect you, dear."
"Good-bye, little Sunbeam," said her father cheerily, as he lifted her into the carriage and
wrapped her up in a rug. "We shall expect you to come back well and strong."
"Yes," murmured Peggy, bravely smiling. "Good-bye—oh, good-bye!"
CHAPTER IV
PEGGY'S FIRST DAY AT LOWER BRIMLEY
ON a certain bright March morning, Mrs. Tiddy stood beneath the creeper-covered porch at
the front door of Lower Brimley Farm, waiting for her husband, who had been up and out-
of-doors since daybreak, to return to breakfast. Mr. Tiddy had arrived home from London
on the previous evening, having brought Peggy Pringle with him. But the little girl, over-
tired as the result of the long journey, had been sleeping firmly when her hostess had
visited her bedroom half an hour before, and orders had been given that she was not to be
awakened.
The mistress of Lower Brimley was a small-sized woman with a trim figure and a pleasant
countenance, which wore a very contented expression at the present moment. The view
over which Mrs. Tiddy's blue eyes wandered admiringly was a most beautiful one, for
Lower Brimley was situated on the slope of a hill, not ten minutes' walk from the sea and
the small fishing village which straggled in one steep street from the beach to the old grey
church on the cliff.
The soft air was sweet with the scent of flowers on this sunny spring morning, for the land
close by was given up to the cultivation of daffodils and narcissi of nearly every species,
which flourished in the rich moist soil and were now in full bloom, and the garden in front
of the house was a fine show, too, with violets, hyacinths, and purple and scarlet
anemones, against a background of rhododendron bushes. In short, there was a wealth of
flowers everywhere; and as Mrs. Tiddy's contemplative gaze roamed over her own domain
to the distant sea, glimmering like silver in the bright sunshine, it was caught and held by
the golden furze on the cliffs, and she murmured admiringly:
"What a glorious sight! And to think that that dear child will never know how beautiful it all
is! How sad to be blind!"
An expression of deep regret crossed Mrs. Tiddy's face as she thought of her little visitor;
but it gave place to a bright smile as she caught sight of her husband approaching. And
she ran down the path to the garden gate to meet him, anxious to hear that he had found
everything on the farm in good order. She was soon satisfied upon that point, for he was in
high spirits, and complimented her upon her management during his absence. And then
they went into the house together, and sat down to breakfast in the parlour, a large
comfortably-furnished room, the windows of which commanded a view of the village and
the sea.
"And how is my fellow-traveller?" Mr. Tiddy inquired by-and-by.
"She was sleeping firmly half an hour ago and I have given orders that she is not to be
disturbed," his wife-responded. "She was so very tired last night, and I fancy she felt
home-sick—poor little soul! She has never been away from her own people before, you
see, and oh, Ebenezer, think how helpless one must feel to be always in darkness!"
"Yes," he agreed, "but though she has been denied sight, her other senses seem
preternaturally keen. It's always the way with blind people, I've heard. And—why, here she
comes!"
Mr. Tiddy rose as the door opened, and Peggy stood hesitating upon the threshold of the
room. Going to her side, he gave her a hearty kiss, inquired how she was this morning,
and, having been assured that she was quite well, led her to his wife.
"I thought you were still in bed and asleep, my dear child," said Mrs. Tiddy, her voice
expressing the surprise she felt.
"I woke up, and I was afraid I was late for breakfast, so I dressed as quickly as I could and
came down," Peggy explained, as she returned Mrs. Tiddy's kiss and took the chair by her
side.
"How clever of you to find your way alone!"

"Clever!" laughed Peggy. "You forget I had my supper in this room last night, and I heard
your voices as I came downstairs. What a lovely morning, isn't it? I smelt violets and
hyacinths when I opened my bedroom window, and I heard the sea."
"The sea is very calm to-day, almost as still as a mill-pond," remarked Mr. Tiddy somewhat
dubiously. "You must have very sharp ears, if you heard it."
"Oh, but I did," persisted Peggy. "The waves were whispering ever so softly, but I heard
them. I was never at the seaside but once before, when we all went to Bournemouth for a
week, nearly two years ago."
The little girl was looking very bright this morning, and she did full justice to the fried
bacon and chopped potatoes to which Mr. Tiddy helped her, remarking, as he did so, that
he hoped she could enjoy country fare. And at the conclusion of the meal, he suggested
that she should put on her hat and jacket and go for a stroll with him about the farm,
whilst his wife attended to her domestic duties in the house.
Accordingly, Peggy accompanied her host out into the brilliant spring sunshine, and asked
him numerous questions about his flowers. He explained all about their cultivation, and
watched her with keenly interested eyes as she felt the various blooms with her sensitive
fingers.
"I shall remember all you have told me," she declared. "This is a 'Princess Mary,' is it not?
And this is the daffodil you said the country people call 'butter and eggs'?"
"Yes!" he exclaimed in astonishment. "But how can you possibly tell?"
"I can feel the difference, Mr. Tiddy, and I can smell. It seems to me all these daffodils
have different scents."
"To me, they are alike," he admitted, "but I suppose they are not. Really, Peggy, you are a
very clever little girl."
When they returned to the house they went by the back way, where, in the yard, they
were met by a big, black-and-white smooth-haired sheep-dog, who sniffed at Peggy
suspiciously at first. But when she ventured to extend her hand to him, he licked it with his
great pink tongue, whilst a very soft expression crept into his amber eyes.
"He likes you, my dear," Mr. Tiddy said. "And he does not take to every one, let me tell
you. He evidently intends to regard you as a friend."
"What is his name?" Peggy inquired, as she passed her hand over the dog's sleek head.
"Wolf. We gave him the name when he was a puppy, because he was such a lean, fierce-
looking creature. He is a splendid house-dog; but he is not very sociable, as a rule. He
seems to have taken a fancy to you, however."
"He knows I like him," Peggy said, as she caressed her new acquaintance, who continued
to wag his tail amicably. "What a tall dog he is! Wolf—dear old Wolf!"
The animal gave a delighted cry, and Mr. Tiddy nodded his head approvingly.
"I'm glad he's taken to you," he said. "For you couldn't get a better protector than Wolf."
Peggy never forgot that first day at Lower Brimley. The afternoon she passed quietly in the
house with Mrs. Tiddy, who wrote a long letter to her old school fellow in which were many
messages from Peggy.
"Tell her how much I miss them all," said the little girl. "But please say, too, that I am sure
I shall be very happy here, because every one is so kind to me, and it is a lovely, lovely
place! And, please don't forget to send my dear love!" And for a few minutes, her blue
eyes were full of tears.
"Peggy," said Mrs. Tiddy by-and-by, "I have heard all the details in connection with your
accident from my husband, and I do not wonder it was a shock to your nerves. Is your
shoulder quite well now, dear?"
"Oh, yes, Mrs. Tiddy. It got well very quickly. Every one said it was a wonder I was not
killed; but I think myself God took especial care of me, because He knew I wasn't quite
like other people—not being able to see, you know. Mr. Maloney—that's the Vicar of St.
John's—thinks so too. Wasn't it strange that it should have been mother's aunt who was in
the carriage?"
"Very. Your mother never sees her Aunt Caroline, does she?"
"Never. Do you know her, Mrs. Tiddy?"
"No, though, of course, I have heard a good bit about her from your mother."
"Billy and I never heard of her at all till my accident. I don't think she can be nice; and
Billy said she looked very proud. I heard her speak, but I was too frightened then to take
much notice of her voice. I always tell what people are like by their voices."
"Do you, my dear?"
"Yes," Peggy nodded. "I knew Mr. Tiddy was good and kind, the moment I heard him
speak: I felt I could trust him. Do you know, I quite enjoyed the journey yesterday, after
we had properly started. Of course, I didn't like saying good-bye to mother and father. I
had never been in a corridor-train before, and we had dinner at a big table just as though
we were in a proper room, and there was a kitchen on the train, and cooks. Oh, how Billy
would have liked to have been there! What a lot I shall have to tell him when I go home!
Oh, Mrs. Tiddy, it was kind of you to think of inviting me to stay with you!"
"I am sure your visit will be a great pleasure to me, my dear," Mrs. Tiddy replied cordially.
"And I shall be well content, if I can send you home with roses in your cheeks. To-morrow
I will take you into the village and down to the beach; but I must not let you do too much
on your first day. There, I have finished my letter, and can now have an idle hour before
tea."
She put aside her writing materials as she spoke, and went to the window, where Peggy
was seated, listening to the sparrows twittering beneath the eaves of the roof and the
sound of children's voices wafted upwards from the village below.
"You and Mr. Tiddy are so very kind to take so much trouble to explain everything to me,"
the little girl said, with a grateful ring in her sweet, clear voice, "that I am already
beginning to know this place quite well—the house and the grounds, too."
"Shall I tell you what I see from this window?" asked Mrs. Tiddy.
"Oh, please!" Peggy answered delightedly. Then as her kind hostess did so, she listened
with attention, her face aglow with interest and pleasure. "How well you make me
understand!" she cried, as Mrs. Tiddy ceased speaking. She leaned her head out of the

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The Prophet Of Modern Constitutional

Liberalism: John Stuart Mill And The

The political economy of progress : John Stuart Mill

The age of deference : the Supreme Court, national

Constitutional Landmarks: Supreme Court Decisions on

Supreme Democracy: The End of Elitism in Supreme Court

Religion and the American constitutional experiment 4th

SCOTUS 2018: Major Decisions and Developments of the US

SCOTUS 2019: Major Decisions and Developments of the US

SCOTUS 2020: Major Decisions and Developments of the

john Stuart Mill and

JOHN LAWRENCE HILL

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit

© John Lawrence Hill 2020

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

First published 2020

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd. Padstow Cornwall

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

isbn 978-1-108-48529-6 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or

Part I Mill and His Place in the Liberal Tradition

1 Mill’s Life, Work and Character 7

2 Liberalism before Mill 27

3 Inventing Modern Liberalism 38

Part ii Mill and the Constitution

4 Constitutional Liberties before Mill 57

5 The Intellectual Origins of the Right to Privacy 77

6 Mill and Modern Freedom of Expression 100

7 A New Equality 120

The cemetery Saint Veran in Avignon, France, is a twenty-minute walk outside

4 Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:260.

occasionally he is directly quoted in a majority opinion, but much more frequently

Mill and His Place in the Liberal Tradition

Mill’s Life, Work and Character

Early Years and Education

Romanticism and Mill’s “Transition”

14 Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:139.

“The Most Valuable Friendship of My Life”

26 Capaldi, Mill: A Biography, 107.

32 Packe, Life of Mill, 348.

Mill’s Private Side

Nor were strangers exempt from Mill’s condescension. In a letter to Harriet, he

46 Mill, Autobiography, CW, 1:262.

Title: Little Sunbeam

Author: Eleanora H. Stooke

Illustrator: Myra Kathleen Hughes

Release date: November 22, 2023 [eBook #72200]

Original publication: London: National Society's Depository, 1905

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE SUNBEAM ***

THE CORNISH FLOWER-FARM.

AUTHOR OF "GRANFER," ETC.

WITH FRONTISPIECE BY MYRA K. HUGHES

BROAD SANCTUARY, WESTMINSTER

[All rights reserved]

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

GRANFER, and ONE CHRISTMAS TIME.

NATIONAL SOCIETY'S DEPOSITORY,

II. CONCERNING AUNT CAROLINE

III. THE DOCTOR'S PRESCRIPTION

IV. PEGGY'S FIRST DAY AT LOWER BRIMLEY

VI. MISS LEIGHTON'S DISCOVERY

VII. A GREAT SURPRISE

* START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITTLE SUNBEAM *