Essays on Equality, Law, and Education

Equality, as Stefan Collini asserts in the Introduction above, is the dominant theme in this volume. Perhaps because the word does not appear in the title of any of Mill’s great essays, its importance in his thought and life is not often emphasized. The materials now gathered, which demonstrate its significance in his thought on education and law as well as on sexual, racial, and domestic issues, derive from each of the decades of his writing career, that is, from the 1820s to the 1870s. They also cover a wide range in provenance. The majority, eleven of the eighteen in the text proper, originated as reviews or essays in periodicals: three in each of the Westminster Review and Fraser’s Magazine, two in the Monthly Repository, and one in each of Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, the Edinburgh Review, and the Fortnightly Review. Of these eleven, three were reprinted during Mill’s lifetime in the British edition of Dissertations and Discussions, one (“Treaty Obligations”) was republished in the posthumous fourth volume, and one (“The Slave Power”) in the U.S. editions of that collection. Two of the items, the Inaugural Address at St. Andrews (originally a speech) and The Subjection of Women, appeared as books; and one, Remarks on Mr. Fitzroy’s Bill, as a pamphlet. Parliamentary evidence, in written form and as a transcription of oral answers (republished in pamphlet form), supplies two further items. And two more not published by Mill are presented from manuscript. The appendices given to ancillary textual matter include essays and fragments by Harriet Taylor Mill, only one of which was published in her lifetime (in the Westminster), a manuscript fragment of the Inaugural Address, and three publications of the Jamaica Committee under Mill’s chairmanship.