Mill on the Principle of Population

From the beginning of Elements of Political Economy ([1821c] 1995), Mill argued for the maximization of production. He justified this objective through the insatiability of human desire. As individuals, we are all prisoners of our insatiable desire (ibid., p. 1); but nature has not produced the objects of desire in a sufficient quantity. It follows that “the grand concern is, to increase the supply” (ibid.). Production is an objective of global welfare since it allows us to obtain the means of subsistence for mankind and “other things … which human welfare requires” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 39). Mill considered this objective as far from having been reached, observing, in his paper on education, “The state of defective food and excessive labour is the state in which we find the great bulk of mankind; the state in which they are either constantly existing, or into which they are every moment threatening to fall” (ibid., p. 30).

Such is the production problem. In “Education” ([1819] Reference Mill1825), Mill did not dwell on the proposition that this problem rested upon the principle of population—that is, the tendency of population to increase faster than capital. Nevertheless, his other writings indicate that the principle of population should be seen as an explanation of the production problem.

Although human beings have intellectual capacities that allow them to produce the means of subsistence, they are pre-eminently physiological organisms bound by the physical laws of nature. The principle of population is one of these laws. It is noteworthy that Mill’s position on this principle changed between 1803b and 1804. ^{Footnote 3} In his review of the second edition of Malthus’s Essay, published in 1803 in the Literary Review, Mill claimed that though Robert Malthus’s theory on population

Human beings, therefore, are endowed with moral capacities that allow them to overcome the physical laws of nature. Yet, Mill qualified this idea in his Essay, published in 1804, wherein he argued for the abolition of the Corn Laws. In the Essay, Mill was less optimistic about human beings, and considered Malthus’s Essay to be an authoritative point of reference on the topic of population (Mill Reference Mill1804, p. 23). From 1804 to the end of his life, Mill remained convinced of the veracity of the principle of population. Some years before his close friend Francis Place published his Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population in 1822—and some years before John Stuart was arrested in 1823–24 for distributing birth-control pamphlets—James Mill established an explicit basis for the birth-control movement in the British nineteenth century in his article “Colony,” written for the supplement of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1818. Then, in the Elements, he made use of what John Stuart Mill would some years later call “the wage fund theory,” according to which the real wage rate is determined by the ratio between capital and population. If capital increases faster than population, the real wage rate increases; and the inverse implies a decrease in the wage rate (Mill [1821c] Reference Mill1995, p. 43). From this theoretical point of view, the principle of population implies a decrease in the real wage rate, which leads people towards poverty. ^{Footnote 4} It follows that workers are forced to allocate all their time to work in order to ensure their subsistence.

The Degradation of Labor: The Case of the Division of Labor

That Mill acquired a Scottish education at the University of Edinburgh is well documented (Bain Reference Bain1882, pp. 1–35; Cumming Reference Cumming1959). It should be no surprise that as a student of Dugald Stewart and a reader of Adam Smith, Mill held that the division of labor raises the productive power of labor. Mill, quoting Smith, discusses the division of labor in his Elements (Mill [1821c] Reference Mill1995, p. 12). Once labor is divided, a particular law of human nature comes into play: the repetition of a productive operation involves an increase in the rapidity and the quality of the operation. This is a productive gain that gives rise to increasing returns.

Mill argued that the best way to divide labor would be to perform what he called the “analytical operation” and the “synthetical operation.” The former, which must be realized first, consists in decomposing the aggregate of production “in its elements; to resolve it into those elements; and carefully and comprehensively to pass them under review” (Mill [1821c] Reference Mill1995, p. 14). Once we have “the full knowledge of the elements” (ibid.), we should know the ends that we have in view in developing the productive powers. The synthetical operation then forms the perfect combination between the elements and the desired ends. Mill considered that these two operations had not been well carried out in his era. Indeed, the division of labor was based on too narrow an analysis and synthesis, “including a small number of elements … imperfectly understood” (Mill [1821c] Reference Mill1995, p. 14). This was not without consequences for the condition of workers. In “Education,” Mill explained that the division of labor was a cause of pain for workers, drawing inspiration from a “splenetic passage” in Smith’s Wealth of Nations. “The labour in which the great body of the people are employed,” Mill wrote, results in the fact that that their minds “are in danger of really degenerating” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, pp. 29–30). This leads to an explanation of the way in which the production problem generates the decline of education in society.

The Decline of Education: A Society Composed of “Animals”

The idea that education is a powerful guide toward human happiness was widespread in the Scottish Enlightenment. James Mill considered education to be a question of the same degree of importance as the objective of production: “The question whether the people should be educated, is the same with the question, whether they should be happy or miserable” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 38). Education provides people with “the art of happiness” (ibid., p. 38). In particular, its end “is to render the individual, as much as possible, an instrument of happiness, first to himself, and next to other beings” (ibid., p. 3). Since Mill frequently seems to reduce happiness to pleasure (Mill [1820] Reference Mill1825, p. 6; Mill 1835, p. 389; Fenn Reference Fenn1987, p. 57; Bianchini Reference Bianchini2015, pp. 14–15), the first aim of education is that our actions should please us: what is at stake here is thus a form of psychological hedonism. Once our actions please us, they then ought to please others: this time, what is at stake is a form of universal hedonism. The end of education, therefore, is that psychological hedonism gives rise to universal hedonism. From this point of view, education might be interpreted as an objective of global welfare.

In order to attain global welfare, education is supposed to arrange two kinds of circumstances by which an individual is surrounded: “those of a material nature, which operate more immediately upon the material part of the frame”; and “those of a mental [moral] nature, which operate more immediately upon the mental part of the frame” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 4). The first kind of circumstance comes from the material conditions in which we live, and are either “inherent to the body,” such as healthiness or sickness, or “external” to it, such as work, food, and rest (ibid., p. 21). The second kind of circumstance aims to generate ideas that correspond to “the four cardinal virtues of the ancients” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 16): justice, generosity, temperance, and intelligence. ^{Footnote 5} Generosity allows us to procure pleasure for other individuals (ibid.); justice prevents us from hurting others (ibid.); temperance is a disposition that, by matching our desire with our pleasure, aims at guiding us toward our greatest pleasure (ibid., pp. 33–34; see also Bianchini Reference Bianchini2015); and intelligence procures both knowledge and sagacity (see Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 11).

Quoting Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, Erasmus Darwin, and David Hartley, Mill claimed that physical circumstances might influence the formation of our mind (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, pp. 20–30)—or, in other words, the formation of ideas. Let’s consider the case of the imperfect division of labor. It is obvious that the latter corresponds to an improper physical circumstance for the formation of our mind. First, workers are facing a labor that stultifies them: the quality of labor is at stake (ibid., pp. 29–30). Second, they are facing a labor that is too excessive, “rendering impossible the reception of ideas, and paralyzing the organs of the mind” (ibid., p. 30): the quantity of labor is now at stake. This means that workers have the means and time to educate neither themselves nor their children. Moreover, their poor working conditions have destroyed the capacity and desire to have a moral education. The division of labor is thus dehumanizing in that it deprives workers of what constitutes the wealth of their identity.

More generally, according to Mill, extreme poverty is incompatible with education. When people are too poor, “all classes are vicious, all are hateful, and all are unhappy” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 39; see also Halévy [1901–1904] Reference Halévy, Toussaint and Simonet1995, vol. II, p. 66). Thus, extreme poverty seems to be inconsistent with the emergence of moral sentiments. Some years previous, in his History of British India, published in 1817, Mill had already claimed that the wretched poor “loses the powers of benevolent sympathy with his fellow-creatures; loses the virtuous feelings of a desire for their pleasures and an aversion to their pains” (Mill 1817, vol. V, p. 536). An excess of population in relation to capital is therefore a serious obstacle to the development of moral sentiments through education since it leads people to extreme poverty. In fine, people would be doomed to “perpetual labor” in order to provide mankind with the means of subsistence. Mill was so convinced by this idea that he envisaged the possibility of an extreme case. In “Colony” ([1818] Reference Mill1825), published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he claimed that, provided “the principle of population is free from all restriction,” there comes to be no difference between humans and animals. Individuals “would become a mere multitude of animals, of a very low description, having just two functions, that of raising food, and that of consuming it” (Mill [1818] Reference Mill1825, p. 13; emphasis added). There would be subsistence, perhaps; but not the perpetual progress, stemming from education, and so important for a utilitarian like Mill, that would allow us to train legislators in virtue, science, and art (ibid.).

The primary concern, therefore, is to find the point that reconciles production with education:

At a collective level, the two objectives of global welfare—production and education—should both be fulfilled. The proper education of people cannot be promoted without the production of the means of subsistence. At the same time, if production is fulfilled to the detriment of education, “neither intellect, virtue, nor happiness can flourish upon the earth.” Moreover, though the production of goods is a vital necessity, the deplorable working conditions of “the great bulk of mankind” generate a certain “quantity of evil” for workers. Education is supposed to decrease this quantity of evil. To say that the precious middle point is “the point at which the greatest quantity of good is obtained with the smallest quantity of evil” is therefore to say that the precious middle point is “the point at which the greatest quantity of good is obtained” with the greatest degree of education among individuals. What follows explains the operation of this precious middle point.

Education and the Productive Power of Labor

It is worth underlining that Mill linked education to production. He considered four moral components of education, ^{Footnote 6} one of which is connected with production. Political and social education are the two components that influence individuals indirectly. Political education, which “is like the key-stone of the arch” of the process of education, refers to the legislation implemented by the “political machine” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 45). Social education is the social environment in which individuals interact. Domestic and technical education, the two other components, directly influence individuals. Domestic education performs the task of shaping our mind during childhood (ibid., p. 31), while technical education aims mainly to influence us in terms of intellectual and manual excellence: “Technical or scholastic education, including all those exercises upon which the individual is put, as means to the acquisition of habits,—habits either conducive to intellectual and moral excellence, or even to the practice of the manual arts” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 5).

In a way, technical education is related to production. Both intelligence and manual excellence turn out to be crucial in the production process. The first, intelligence, allows one to carry out the aforementioned analytical and synthetical operations. Indeed, Mill defines intelligence as “a knowledge of the order of those events of nature on which our pleasures and pains depend, and the sagacity which discovers the best means for the attaining of ends” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 40). Knowledge allows for the discerning of the means of human welfare, and therefore accomplishes the task of decomposing the aggregates of production into elements. Sagacity provides the combinations between such elements and the ends that we have in view in order to develop the production process. Regarding manual excellence, it seems conceivable that it increases productivity. ^{Footnote 7}

Technical education also counteracts the dehumanizing effects of the division of labor on workers. First, technical education decreases the quantity of labor since the time required by the learning of intelligence is substituted by that required by production (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 39). Second, technical education develops our circle of ideas by transmitting intelligence: our associations of ideas are no longer restricted. The intellectual conditions of workers would thus be improved. In Mill’s words, technical education would ensure “a firm foundation … for a life of mental action, a life of wisdom, and reflection, and ingenuity, even in those by whom the most ordinary labour will fall to be performed” (ibid., p. 40).

Degree of Education and Social Classes

Mill believed in a fundamental equality among people, in that differences between any individuals—“without entering into the dispute about individual distinctions” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 9)—are supposed to come only from education (ibid.). ^{Footnote 8} This idea—inherited from the Scottish Enlightenment—still does not imply an equality of positions regarding education. Although Mill argued in favor of an equal degree of temperance, justice, and generosity for each and every one, the absolute necessity to provide humankind with the means of subsistence means that individuals cannot have the same degree of education (ibid., p. 39). By noticing that the time required for the acquisition of intelligence is substituted by that required for the production of such means, Mill acknowledged that our level of intelligence depends on the social class to which we belong. To do so, he distinguished two kinds of individuals: those who have wealth and time to improve their intelligence in an unrestricted way, and the others, the great body of people, who do not live under such conditions.

Being convinced of the principle of population does not necessarily mean that we cannot have a strong belief in indefinite progress. ^{Footnote 9} Such seems to be Mill’s opinion in a note to his edition of Charles de Villers’s Essay on the Spirit and Influence of the Reformation of Luther, published in 1805 (Villers Reference Villers1805, pp. 25–26). In “Education,” moreover, Mill claimed that human progress can be personified in the very educated individuals who are not forced to work: “the progressive being(s)” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 42). Since such individuals should benefit from their wealth and time to acquire their high degree of education, one could say that they should be drawn either from the aristocracy or from the middle class. But this does not amount to saying that the aristocracy as a whole comprises progressive beings: in fact, we know that Mill was very critical of the aristocracy (Mill Reference Mill1836b; Fenn Reference Fenn2010, vol. 1, ch. 9; Bianchini Reference Bianchini2016, pp. 18–19). On the contrary, he claimed that there are other individuals neither so rich as to be corrupted by their wealth nor so needy as to be brutalized by labor. Mill considered the avoidance of these two extreme situations—riches and wretchedness—to be a source of progress, in the way of the Aristotelian “golden mean.” He claimed, indeed, that the attainment of the “middle” between wretchedness and large riches was desirable in that it involved the development of science and arts in society. In Elements, Mill devoted a long passage describing this idea:

It seems therefore obvious that the progressive beings, obtaining “as a class, the greatest sum of human enjoyment,” ^{Footnote 10} come from some kind of “precious” middle class. However, in “Government,” Mill emphasized that they belong to “the middle rank,” defined as “the most wise and the most virtuous part of the community” (Mill [1820] Reference Mill1825, pp. 31–32). The fact that Mill used the notion of “middle rank” has led some commentators, such as Wyndham Henry Burston (1973, pp. 206–208) and Terrence Ball (1992, pp. xx–xxi), to claim that Mill never meant “middle class” when he referred to “middle rank.” According to them, Mill had in mind the eighteenth-century Scottish notion of “rank,” which distinguished people according to their education, intellect, and public-spiritedness rather than according to acknowledged class components such as wealth or socio-economic characteristics. ^{Footnote 11} Although Mill’s inheritance from the Scottish Enlightment could explain why he used the notion of “middle rank” in “Government,” he does indeed use the notion of “middle class” several times in his other writings. See, for instance, “Sur la souveraineté,” published in the Edinburgh Review in 1811, wherein Mill claimed that only the emergence of a “middling class” could prevent the propagation of despotism (Mill Reference Mill1811a, p. 417; emphasis added). This makes it clear that for Mill the middle class was a concept wide enough to take into account, beyond socio-economic characteristics, what ought to be viewed as “public-spiritedness.” Contrary to Ball’s interpretation, it seems that Mill did use “middle rank” and “middle class” as roughly synonymous. A possible explanation might be that the phrase “middle class” was increasingly used from 1750, such that it came to be an alternative to “middle rank.” ^{Footnote 12}

The progressive beings come, therefore, from a genuine middle class, and they exhibit two characteristics that are worth emphasizing. The first is their particular material condition. Mill maintained that they have enough wealth to realize “all the purposes not only of independence, and of physical enjoyment, but of taste and elegance” (Mill Reference Mill1821c, p. 54); to be exempt from manual labor (ibid., p. 63); and to make provision for their children (ibid., p. 55). The elitist and enlightened middle class thus contributes to the economic development of society in two ways. It propagates knowledge that is conducive, in some manner, to the productive power of labor, and it accumulates capital in a moderate fashion through their desire to educate their children. The second characteristic of the progressive beings is that their interest is consistent with that of the community (Mill [1820] Reference Mill1825, pp. 31–32). For this reason, they can fulfill “the higher and more delicate functions of society,” such as those of “judges, administrators, teachers, inventors in all the arts, and superintendents in all the more important works, by which the dominion of the human species is extended over the powers of nature” (Mill [1821c] Reference Mill1995, p. 63). Better: the progressive beings can become legislators who give the highest expression to the progressive situation of the country (Mill Reference Mill1817a, p. 649; see also Westerman Reference Westerman1999, p. 189). It follows that such individuals propagate the progress of the human mind in a particular place and time; ^{Footnote 13} such individuals personify the idea that the world can and must be converted to the moral of utility; and such individuals create and propagate all the laws through which individuals interact and exist in a society. In other words, such individuals, “who are raised above solicitude for the means of subsistence” (Mill [1821c] Reference Mill1995, p. 31), make history. ^{Footnote 14}

The means of subsistence for humanity as a whole should be provided by individuals whose wealth and time are not sufficient to fully improve their education: the poor. ^{Footnote 15} Although the progressive beings do not seem restrained by any relation of subordination, the poor are forced to work in order to provide mankind with such means. Yet, this does not mean that the poor should enter the labor market as soon as possible, without having benefitted from technical education. Provided they are not wretchedly poor, Mill claimed, they should be educated to the point where their productive power of labor is optimal:

Fifteen or sixteen years allocated to the acquisition of intelligence is the degree of technical education that these individuals can attain. When those years are allocated to technical education, they reach their “point of maturity”; that is, the point at which their productivity is the largest. Once this point of maturity is reached, they are supposed to become workers “more efficient, more intelligent, and hence more productive” (Fenn Reference Fenn1987, p. 71). As Nathalie Sigot (Reference Sigot1995, pp. 275–276) noted, this point could be interpreted to be the optimum of education. Once it is reached, indeed, any further education would depress production. When an individual enters the labor market before attaining his point of maturity, his productive powers would be lower than if he had attained maturity, and a loss of production would occur. When he enters the labor market after reaching the point of maturity, there is also a waste of production via a kind of opportunity cost, since time has been allocated to instruction instead of labor (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 39).

Of course, workers who are educated up to their point of maturity reach a greater level of utility and productivity than those who are not educated. However, though their level of technical education—which, I repeat, mainly concerns their level of intelligence—implies that they have reached their largest productivity, they have not necessarily reached their greatest welfare. Indeed, “[t]he question,” Mill acknowledged, “whether they should have more or less of intelligence, is merely the question, whether they should have more or less of misery, when happiness might be given in its stead” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 38). After all, intelligence provides workers with the art of happiness, whereas labor is usually painful to them (Mill Reference Mill1836a, p. 553). From this point of view, one could argue that, provided workers are well informed and have the choice between working on the labor market and continuing their instruction when they reach their point of maturity, their welfare or happiness leads them to continue their education. And, since workers constitute the greatest number of individuals in society, this situation seems to lead to “the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” However, according to Mill, there are several reasons why such is not the case. The first is that workers have no wealth and time to fund their technical education. At best, the state could improve their education till their point of maturity (see below). The second reason is that the proper education of people presupposes the production of the means of subsistence. Without the production of such means, it is vain to talk about the education of people, as there is an incompatibility between poverty and the improvement of education. According to Mill, it is necessary for human welfare that workers produce the means of subsistence. To do so, they should be under the influence of technical education up to their point of maturity. Note that if their technical education stops at fifteen or sixteen years of age, workers could continue their moral education through social and political education. For instance, their proneness to sympathize with the middle class could lead them to improve their material and moral condition (Mill [1820] Reference Mill1825, p. 32). Also, they could access culture through the reading of the press, which, if free, would allow “the prevalence of true opinions” (Mill [1821b] Reference Mill1825, p. 31). ^{Footnote 16} In his Elements, Mill suggests that the workers’ wage should allow them not only to access the means of subsistence, but also “something for enjoyment” (Mill [1821c] Reference Mill1995, p. 221). ^{Footnote 17} This “something” might be interpreted as access to culture, and would be guaranteed by the “virtuous” progressive beings.

Production and education are thus fulfilled in this way: workers are educated until their point of maturity in order to achieve the objective of production, whereas the progressive beings are “infinitely” educated to provide society with virtue, science, and art. It might therefore be argued that this inequality of position is necessary both for the accumulation of capital and for moral progress. Such is Mill’s point of view, as appears very explicitly in his paper on aristocracy, published in the London Review in 1836:

What Mill meant by the “inequality of wealth” was the “natural” one, which was the result of the laws of the accumulation of capital, but not the “unnatural” inequality of wealth that came from coerced inheritance, as in aristocracy. As Winch noted (1966, p. 201), Mill acknowledged his preference for a society that legitimated inequality according to capital accumulation and intellectual merit. For this reason, Mill did not argue in favor of redistributive politics from the middle class to workers. The middle class was in a position of economic and social hegemony over the working class (Fenn Reference Fenn1987, p. 103). If the middle class was richer than the working class, it was because the former had accumulated wealth in a honorable way, in conformity with laws of accumulation. This accumulation of wealth is supposed to arouse individuals’ sympathy. In his Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, published in 1829, Mill emphasized that the proneness to sympathize with the rich—the bourgeois of the middle class—was a remarkable phenomenon in human nature. This proneness should give rise to the “desire of accomplishments of their ends; and to lend ourselves for the attainment of them” (Mill [1829] Reference Mill, Bain, Findlater, Grote and Mill1967, vol. II, p. 167). Such a Smithian idea—though Mill did not quote Smith on this point—was reinforced by what Mill ([1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 44) called “the principle of imitation.” Workers would thus be guided by the example of the elite and virtuous middle class “which gives to science, to art, and to legislation itself, their most distinguished ornaments” (Mill [1820] Reference Mill1825, p. 32). In Elements, one can find this idea expressed in a particular state of society ^{Footnote 18} composed of the middle class and “a well paid body of labourers and artisans” (Mill [1821c] Reference Mill1995, p. 54). People of the middle class, thanks to whom “knowledge is cultivated and enlarged” (ibid., p. 63), exempted from manual labor, “constitute the governing portion of society,” and “give the tone to its sentiments and amusements” (ibid., p. 54). They generate virtue, science, and art, and they obtain, as a class, the greatest sum of welfare. Regarding the skilled workers, they produce the means of subsistence, and “are placed in circumstances which impart the feeling of independence, and give them opportunity for the cultivation of their minds” (ibid.). ^{Footnote 19} Provided education and production, as objectives, are achieved in this way, “intellect, virtue, … happiness can flourish upon the earth” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825], p. 32).

The precious middle point symbolizes such a situation. However, the manner in which this point should be realized is far from obvious.

The Establishment of Security

According to Mill, “[t]he concern of Government is to increase to the utmost the pleasures, and diminish to the utmost the pains” (Mill [1820] Reference Mill1825, p. 4). From this point of view, the attainment of the precious middle point could be viewed as a question belonging to the area of what Jeremy Bentham called “agenda.” ^{Footnote 20} Government should, first and foremost, establish the protection of rights in order to allow the development of production.

“Without law there is no security; consequently no abundance, nor even certain subsistence. And the only equality which can exist in such a condition, is the equality of misery,” Bentham ([1785–1786] 1828–1843, p. 307) wrote in his Principles of the Civil Codes. In other words, life cannot be conceived without security, and the latter subordinates subsistence, abundance, and even equality. It seems that Mill was also confident in the necessity to establish security.

According to Mill, it is a law of human nature that every individual seeks to possess the greatest possible quantity of the material objects that they insatiably desire. As we noted above, however, nature has not created them in sufficient quantity. It follows that “the strong, if left to themselves, would take from the weak every thing, or at least as much as they pleased” (Mill [1821a] Reference Mill1825, p. 4), and “the weak, who are the greater number, have an interest in conspiring to protect themselves against the strong,” in order to secure the produce of their labor (ibid.). This led Mill to maintain a conception of government as rooted in the individual’s need for protection from the potential threat to security. ^{Footnote 21} The representative government, provided it is based on the “identity of interests between ruler and ruled” (Mill Reference Mill1825, p. 213), was the only form of government that would “prevent the predominance of the interest of any individual or of any class” (Mill Reference Mill1826a, p. 781; Hamburger Reference Hamburger1963, p. 22; Milgate and Stimson Reference Milgate and Stimson1993, p. 902; Bianchini Reference Bianchini2016, p. 25). ^{Footnote 22} A question then arises: Who is supposed to identify their own interests with those of the community? The answer, obviously, is the progressive beings. Thanks to our proneness to sympathize with the progressive beings, electors “account it to their honour” to follow the progressive beings “as models for their imitation” (Mill [1820] Reference Mill1825, p. 33). On the condition that the secret ballot be established, electors would then choose such individuals as their representatives. Once the progressive beings are the people’s representatives, rights will be protected in order to ensure the greatest happiness of society. ^{Footnote 23} And, in particular, the representative government will secure the produce of our labor in order to allow the development of production.

Ensuring the enjoyment of the fruits of our labor is indeed what motivates people to work, and so to generate capital. ^{Footnote 24} Consequently, savings and property that come from the laws of accumulation should not be taxed. What, though, about the protection of accumulation that is not from labor, such as rent? Mill’s views on land value taxation appear in his History of British India, and some years later in his Elements of Political Economy. In the former book, Mill acknowledged that David Ricardo’s analysis of taxation is “the most profound, by far, which has yet been given to the world” (Mill [Reference Mill1817b] 1826, vol. 1, p. 279; see also Winch Reference Winch1966, p. 197). And, as noticed by Winch (1966, pp. 197, 391–395), his chief examiner position at the India Office in London would be a way to establish “the radical conclusions which he drew from Ricardo’s interpretation of the rent doctrine” in India. In book 2 of the first volume of his History, Mill discussed the possibility for the Hindu State to derive its revenue from the annual produce of the land. Although he severely criticized the existing Indian system, considering it uncertain and corrupted, Mill was not at all against the idea to let the state tax rent once wages and profits have been paid. In the Elements, however, Mill seemed to be more of a pragmatist by putting the emphasis on the question of the feasibility of the taxation of rent. He distinguished two cases in a context marked by the enclosure movement. When land is not organized according to the laws of private property, rent might fund government’s expenses ([1821c] (1995) pp. 248–249). Nevertheless, once land has become private property, the taxation of rent is a more delicate question since it could transgress what he called “the principles of justice” (ibid., p. 251). Here Mill advanced two kinds of argument against the taxation of rent. First, the taxation would be partial because only one set of individuals would be taxed. Second, the taxation would radically change people’s habits regarding land as private property. This means it is individual expectations that legitimate the policy that rent should be exempted from tax. ^{Footnote 25} However, Mill envisaged a common case in which the government could tax the landholder without injustice: when the population increases faster than capital. This situation generates an increasing rent that was not expected: that which constitutes an unearned increment in rent (ibid., pp. 252–253). Though Ricardo was not averse to the possibility of envisaging complete land nationalization, he qualified the feasibility of Mill’s idea (Ricardo [1821] Reference Ricardo and Sraffa2005, pp. 132–133; see also Winch Reference Winch1966, p. 198): How, for instance, is it possible to distinguish pure rent from extra rent? Whatever it be, Mill believed that this case justified the taxation of rent. The latter could therefore allow the government to fund a part of the education of the poor (see below).

Although the establishment of security is a necessary condition to attain the precious middle point, it is not a sufficient one. Attaining this point also implies that the representative government promotes measures that equalize the growth of capital with that of population.

The Equalization of the Growth of Capital with the Growth of Population

The idea that legislation should be used to alter the tendency of the rate of increase of population to exceed the rate of growth of capital was widespread in Mill’s circle. ^{Footnote 26} Such, for instance, was the concern of a close friend of Mill’s, Francis Place, who published Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population in 1822. According to Mill, there are two ways of fighting against the principle of population: either by artificially increasing capital, or by stabilizing the growth of population according to the growth of capital (Mill [1821c] Reference Mill1995, p. 57). The first way is inefficient since it always leads to an increase of population; there remains, then, only the second way. ^{Footnote 27}

Mill distinguished two kinds of action that the government could take in order to stabilize the level of population: direct actions and indirect ones. The direct actions are rewards and punishments. Mill cited three reasons why such actions were not appropriate to fight the principle of population. First, it was not obvious how to find a mode of punishment that would be proportional to the “offence” of breeding a child in poverty (ibid., p. 57). Second, since all families do not live in the same social conditions, it would be difficult “to ascertain and define the state of circumstances which is, and that which is not, adequate to the maintenance of one, or two, or any other number of children” (ibid., pp. 57–58 ). And, last, how to apply rewards to the case of not having any children would be still more difficult. How could legislation draw a distinction between a married couple who cannot have children for biological reasons and one who has no children by acting according to the rules of self-command? But although such direct government actions would not be effective in counteracting the principle of population, Mill was more optimistic regarding the indirect ones:

It might be argued that the improvement of people’s education would come from the promotion of educational infrastructure such as Lancasterian schools (see below), benefit societies, and savings banks. ^{Footnote 28} Benefit societies would help to encourage self-command and foresight (1816b, p. 265); and savings banks would train the human mind to cultivate both temperance and the disposition to accumulate (1816a, pp. 92–93). Once these two institutions had been established, people would see sense regarding the question of population, and they would be inclined to regulate themselves. The idea that the strength of a nation is synonymous with the quantity of its inhabitants would therefore be obsolete: this would be a case of “the decay of superstition.” It follows that popular sanction would be propagated into society: disapprobation would be directed upon individuals who breed children in intemperance and approbation upon those who refrain from breeding them through self-command.

These actions should prevent people from lapsing into extreme poverty and, as a consequence, they should generate a demand for education. But it is still necessary that the conditions of supply satisfy the demand. This is the topic of the following, and final, subsection.

Mill on the Supply of Education

That Mill was very involved in educational matters is not a surprising idea. His way of speaking in his article on education was sometimes explicit enough: “An institution for education which is hostile to progression, is … the most preposterous, and vicious thing, which the mind of man can conceive” (Mill [1819] Reference Mill1825, p. 42). More generally, his life leads him at several times to educational matters both practically and theoretically. After finishing his Scottish education to become a preacher, and before leaving Scotland to begin a journalism career in London in 1802, he was mainly concerned with the education of his elder son, John Stuart—and thereafter, successively, with his other eight children—and with the question of public education. In 1808 the Royal Lancasterian Society was created in order to promote and popularize non-denominational schools based on the monitorial system of Joseph Lancaster. ^{Footnote 29} But this society was criticized by the partisans of the Church of England who favored the preservation of denominational schools. James Mill was the chief polemicist in favor of Lancasterian schools. He wrote the anonymous paper entitled “Schools for All, in Preference to Schools for Churchmen Only,” published in 1813 in the Edinburgh Review. And as Halévy ([1901–1904] Reference Halévy, Toussaint and Simonet1995, vol. II, p. 167) noted, Bentham’s Chrestomathia and Mill’s paper on education published in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, are follow-ups to this polemic.

“Schools for All” is chiefly an attack upon the English Church for thwarting the education of the poor, with allusions to the progress effected by the Lancasterian schools. An education conforming to what Mill called “the principles of toleration,” ^{Footnote 30} by which he meant the habits of forming opinions based on the truth of sensation, is good in itself. But the spreading of preconceived opinions that come from Scripture, as characterized by the teaching system of the partisans of the Church of England, is too restrictive. As a method of teaching, the monitorial system is supposed to be more efficient than the restrictive one. Boy teachers could understand their comrades much better than adults who had been educated many years previously (Burston Reference Burston1969, p. 65); and on the financial level, the monitorial system is cheaper than the “restrictive system.” The latter “makes two schools (one for churchmen, and one for those who are not churchmen)” whereas “one school,” the Lancasterian, would suffice (Mill Reference Mill1813, p. 210). The establishment of the Lancasterian schools would thus allow savings and also ensure education in every district of the kingdom.

Quoting Smith, Mill claims that individuals who are able to pay for instruction should improve their education through the laws of market forces (ibid., p. 211). This means that the progressive beings should be privately educated through free parental choice of the form of education—one instance of which might be the well-known education of John Stuart Mill, entirely devised and supervised by his father. James Mill controlled the whole environment of his nine children by means of the monitorial system. Even when the education of John Stuart had reached an advanced stage, James Mill refused tempting offers to send his son to Cambridge (Burston Reference Burston1969, p. 227). Perhaps Mill thought that such a private system of education enabled him to insulate his children from the possible influences of a corrupt society. Another instance might be the chrestomatic schools. Founded according to Bentham’s Chrestomathia, published in 1816 with the assistance of Mill, ^{Footnote 31} these schools aimed to extend the higher branches of learning for the benefit of the middling and higher ranks of life.

What about the instruction of the poor? In his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Smith ([1776] 1981, vol. II, pp. 175–176) stated that government should encourage the instruction of the poor, or even make it mandatory. ^{Footnote 32} Here again, Mill seems to follow the teaching of Smith. When we do not have time and wealth to pay for our instruction, government should fund our instruction, because the laws of the market are incapable of ensuring our education:

Mill was aware that state action for education generated the risk of entrusting education to a corrupted government. But the liberty of the press was a security against intellectual despotism (ibid., p. 212). The liberty of the press was indeed a way both to diffuse knowledge and inform people of the government’s actions. With this caveat in mind, Mill argued in favor of the construction of “school-houses” and appropriate working conditions for teachers (Mill Reference Mill1813, pp. 211–212). Although scholars should still pay for their instruction, the monitorial system was thought to be markedly cheaper than any system hitherto envisaged in the history of mankind, and could quickly be made operational.