more creditable to them, because, in his “History of British India,” he had animadverted with much severity on some parts of the Company’s administration.  Two years afterwards, in 1823, the historian’s son, the illustrious subject of these brief memoirs, then a lad of seventeen, obtained a clerkship under his father.  According to the ordinary course of things in those days, the newly-appointed junior would have had nothing to do, except a little abstracting, indexing, and searching, or pretending to search, into records; but young Mill was almost immediately set to indite despatches to the governments of the three Indian Presidencies, on what, in India-House phraseology, were distinguished as “political” subjects,—­subjects, that is, for the most part growing out of the relations of the said governments with “native” states or foreign potentates.  This continued to be his business almost to the last.  In 1828 he was promoted to be assistant examiner, and in 1856 he succeeded to the post of chief examiner; after which his duty consisted rather in supervising what his assistants had written than in writing himself:  but for the three and twenty years preceding he had had immediate charge of the political department, and had written almost every “political” despatch of any importance that conveyed the instructions of the merchant princes of Leadenhall Street to their pro-consuls in Asia.  Of the quality of these documents, it is sufficient to say, that they were John Mill’s; but, in respect to their quantity, it may be worth mentioning that a descriptive catalogue of them completely fills a small quarto volume of between three hundred and four hundred pages, in their author’s handwriting, which now lies before me; also that the share of the Court of Directors in the correspondence between themselves and the Indian governments used to average annually about ten huge vellum-bound volumes, foolscap size, and five or six inches thick, and that of these volumes two a year, for more than twenty years running, were exclusively of Mill’s composition; this, too, at times, when he was engaged upon such voluntary work in addition as his “Logic” and “Political Economy.”

In 1857 broke out the Sepoy war, and in the following year the East-India Company was extinguished in all but the name, its governmental functions being transferred to the Crown.  That most illustrious of corporations died hard; and with what affectionate loyalty Mill struggled to avert its fate is evidenced by the famous Petition to Parliament which he drew up for his old masters, and which opens with the following effective antithesis:  “Your petitioners, at their own expense, and by the agency of their own civil and military servants, originally acquired for this country its magnificent empire in the East.  The foundations of this empire were laid by your petitioners, at that time neither aided nor controlled by Parliament, at the same period at which a succession of administrations under the control of Parliament were losing, by their incapacity and rashness, another great empire on the opposite side of the Atlantic.”