That is Ruskin without the eloquence; that is his advice to stay in the station in which we have been placed, and not be always trying to get out of it. A little more from Mill:
“I know not why it should be matter of congratulation that persons who are already richer than any one needs to be, should have doubled their means of consuming things which give little or no pleasure except as representative of wealth, or that numbers should pass over, every year, from the middle classes into a richer class, or from the class of the occupied rich to that of the unoccupied.”
This reminds one of the well-known passage where Ruskin speaks of those who try “to advance in life without knowing what life means, who mean only that they are to get more horses and more footmen and more fortune and more public honours and--not more personal soul.”[59]
As some injustice has been done to Mill, particularly by us the pupils and friends of his eloquent antagonist, I will quote a little more from him to show that though the laws of Nature were represented by him as hard, he was himself as Ruskinian as any of us. He suggests a limitation of the right of bequest, so that no one should receive by gift or inheritance more than a moderate independence, so that there might be “a well paid and affluent body of labourers; no enormous fortunes, except what were earned and accumulated during a single lifetime; but a much larger body sufficiently at leisure to cultivate freely the graces of life.” Just so does Ruskin tell us that a man who dies rich dies disgraced. Mill proceeds to express his dread of greater density of population, because it crowds out solitude, so needful for depth of character, and takes away wild natural beauty. The whole passage might have come from Brantwood.
As to machinery, Mill goes on in the very spirit of _Fors Clavigera_: “Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make large fortunes.” I am afraid that with posterity John Stuart Mill may suffer in reputation from being the object of so much invective, embedded in peerless English, and written under a mighty spirit of prophesying. _Fors Clavigera_ and _Unto This Last_ will be read much longer than Mill’s _Principles_, and future ages may describe him as a cold-blooded Philistine, when really he was among the best and wisest of men. Certain Stoics and Epicureans, of whom all we know is that they encountered Paul, have hardly had justice from the ordinary English reader of the Acts. Mill obtained the verdict of contemporaries: but the future is the charmer’s.