1 Mill tells us that his Essay _On Liberty_ was planned and written
down in 1854. It was in mounting the steps of the Capitol in
January, 1855, that the thought first arose of converting it into a
volume, and it was not published till 1859. The author, who in his
Autobiography speaks with exquisite modesty of all his literary
performances, allows himself one single exception when speaking of
his Essay _On Liberty_. “None of my writings,” he says, “have been
either so carefully composed or so sedulously corrected as this.”
Its final revision was to have been the work of the winter of 1858
to 1859, which he and his wife had arranged to pass in the South of
Europe, a hope which was frustrated by his wife’s death. “The
_Liberty_,” he writes, “is likely to survive longer than anything
else that I have written (with the possible exception of the
_Logic_), because the conjunction of her mind with mine has rendered
it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the
changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to bring
out into strong relief: the importance to man and society, of a
large variety of character, and of giving full freedom to human
nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.”
2 Herzen defined Nihilism as “the most perfect freedom from all
settled concepts, from all inherited restraints and impediments
which hamper the progress of the Occidental intellect with the
historical drag tied to its foot.”
_ 3 Ueber die Akademische Freiheit der Deutschen Universitäten_, Rede
beim Antritt des Rectorats an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in
Berlin, am October 15, 1877, gehalten von Dr. H. Helmholtz.
_ 4 Ueber eine Akademie der Deutschen Sprache_, p. 34. Another keen
observer of English life, Dr. K. Hillebrand, in an article in the
October number of the _Nineteenth Century_, remarks: “Nowhere is
there greater individual liberty than in England, and nowhere do
people renounce it more readily of their own accord.”