Abstract

Stephen's critique of Mill is best known in the form given to it in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873). Nevertheless, the two men's journalistic writings from the 1860s- - the decade of the American Civil War-- already reveal divergent views of human progressiveness. Both supported the North, but Mill's hope for a moral regeneration of the American people seemed to Stephen to endanger the legal case for Unionism and to threaten further violence. More broadly, Mill's progressivism reflected a mistaken view of human nature