As late as 1888 Henry Sidgwick, a follower of
Mill, rose indignantly at the meeting of the British Association in
Bath, to which I had just read the paper on The Transition to
Social-Democracy, which was subsequently published; as one of the
Fabian Essays, and declared that I had advocated nationalisation of
land; that nationalisation of land was a crime; and that he would not
take part in a discussion of a criminal proposal. With that he left the
platform, all the more impressively as his apparently mild and judicial
temperament made the incident so unexpected that his friends who had not
actually witnessed it were with difficulty persuaded that it had really
happened. It illustrates the entire failure of Mill up to that date to
undo the individualistic teaching of the earlier volumes of his
Political Economy by the Socialist conclusions to which his work on the
treatise led him at the end. Sidney Webb astonished and confounded our
Individualist opponents by citing Mill against them; and it is probably
due to Webb more than to any other disciple that it is now generally
known that Mill died a Socialist. Webb read Mill and mastered Mill as he
seemed to have read and mastered everybody else; but the only other
prominent Socialist who can be claimed by Mill as a convert was, rather
unexpectedly, William Morris, who said that when he read the passage in
which Mill, after admitting that the worst evils of Communism are,
compared to the evils of our Commercialism, as dust in the balance,
nevertheless condemned Communism, he immediately became a Communist, as
Mill had clearly given his verdict against the evidence.
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