That originality and independence became more conspicuous when he reached his second stage as a political economist, strug gling forward towards the standpoint from which his systematic work was written.
While his great systematic works were in progress, Mill turned aside for a few months from his Political Economy during the winter of the Irish famine (1846-47) to advocate the creation of peasant-proprietorships as a remedy for distress and disorder in Ireland. The Political Economy was published in 1848. Mill now made a more thorough study of Socialist writers, and began to look upon some more equal distribution of the produce of labour as a practicability of the remote future, and to dwell upon the prospect of such changes in human character as might render a stable society possible without the institution of private property. Mill was convinced that the social question was as important as the political question. He desired the extension of the franchise, but he never saw it as the panacea for all ills. He declined to accept property, devised originally to secure peace in a primitive society, as necessarily sacred in its existing developments in a quite dif ferent stage of society. He separated questions of production and distribution, and he examined with an open mind Socialist solu tions. He could not rest satisfied with a distribution which con demned the labouring classes to a cramped and wretched existence, and in many instances to starvation. He did not come to a social ist solution, but he had the great merit of having considered afresh the foundations of society.
This he has called his third stage as a political economist, and he says that he was helped towards it by the lady, Mrs. Taylor (Harriet Hardy), who became his wife in 1851. It is generally supposed that he writes with a lover's extravagance about this lady's powers when he compares her with Shelley and Carlyle. But he expressly says that he owed none of his technical doctrine to her, that she influenced only his ideals of life for the individual and for society; the only work perhaps which was directly inspired by her is the essay on the enfranchisement of women (Disserta tions, vol. ii.). It is obvious that his real emancipation began when he threw off his father's authority, and entered on married life, against the wishes of his family. This new inner life was strength ened and enlarged by Mrs. Taylor.
During the seven years of his married life Mill published less than in any other period of his career, but four of his most closely reasoned and characteristic works, the Liberty, the Utilitarianism, the Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform, and the Subjection of Women, besides his posthumously published essays on Nature and on the Utility of Religion, were thought out and partly written in collaboration with his wife. In 1856 he became head of the ex
aminer's office in the India House, and for two years, till the dis solution of the Company in 1858, his official work, never a light task, kept him fully occupied. It fell to him as head of the office to write the defence of the Company's government of India when the transfer of its powers was proposed. Mill opposed the trans fer, and the documents in which he defended the Company's ad ministration are models of trenchant and dignified pleading.
On the dissolution of the Company Mill was offered a seat in the new council, but declined, and retired with a pension of £1,500. His retirement from official work was followed almost immediately by his wife's death at Avignon. Mill spent most of the rest of his life at a villa at St. Veran, near Avignon, returning to his Black heath house only for a short period in each year. He sought relief in active literary occupation, in politics, sociology and psychology. He published, with a touching dedication to his wife, the treatise on Liberty. He then turned to politics, and published, in view of the impending Reform Bill, a pamphlet on parliamentary reform. In the autumn of the same year he turned to psychology, review ing Bain's works in the Edinburgh Review. In his Representative Government (186o) he systematized opinions already put forward in many casual articles and essays. His Utilitarianism (published in Fraser's in 1860 was a closely-reasoned systematic attempt to answer objections to his ethical theory and remove misconceptions of it. He was especially anxious to make it clear that he included in "utility" the pleasures of the imagination and the gratification of the higher emotions, and to show how powerfully the good of man kind as a motive appealed to the imagination. His next treatise, The Subjection of Women, was not published till 1869. He was one of the founders, with Mrs. P. A. Taylor, Miss Emily Davies and others, of the first women's suffrage society, which developed into the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and his writings are the classical theoretical statement of the case for women's suffrage. He presented to Parliament the first petition on the subject. (See further Blackburn, Women's Suffrage Rec ord.) His Examination of Hamilton's Philosophy, published in 1865, had engaged a large share of his time for three years bef ore.