No author has a right to assume that anybody has read all his books or any of them, but he may reasonably claim that he shall not be publicly classified, labelled, catalogued, and placed In the shelves, on the strength of half of his work, and that half arbitrarily selected.  If it be permitted to me without excess of egotism to name the masters to whom I went to school in the days of early manhood, so far from being revolutionists and terrorists, they belonged entirely to the opposite camp.  Austin’s Jurisprudence and Mill’s Logic and Utilitarianism were everything, and Rousseau’s Social Contract was nothing.  To the best of my knowledge and belief, I never said a word about “Natural Rights” in any piece of practical public business in all my life; and when that famous phrase again made its naked appearance on the platform three or four years ago, it gave me as much surprise and dismay as if I were this afternoon to meet a Deinotherium shambling down Parliament Street.  Mill was the chief influence for me, as he was for most of my contemporaries in those days.  Experience of life and independent use of one’s mind—­which he would have been the most ready of men to applaud—­have since, as is natural, led to many important corrections and deductions in Mill’s political and philosophical teaching.  But then we were disciples, and not critics; and nobody will suppose that the admirer of Wordsworth, the author of the Essay on Coleridge, and of the treatise on Representative Government, the administrator in the most bureaucratic and authoritative of public services, was a terrorist or an unbridled democrat, or anything else but the most careful and rationalistic of political theorisers.  It was Mill who first held up for my admiration the illustrious man whom Austin enthusiastically called the “godlike Turgot,” and it was he who encouraged me to write a study on that great and inspiring character.  I remember the suspicion and the murmurings with which Louis Blanc, then living in brave and honourable exile in London, and the good friend of so many of us, and who was really a literary Jacobin to the tips of his fingers, remonstrated against that piece of what he thought grievously misplaced glorification.  Turgot was, indeed, a very singular hero with whom to open the career of literary Jacobin.  So was Burke,—­the author of those wise sentences that still ring in our ears:  “The question with me is, not whether you have a right to render your people miserable, but whether it is not your interest to make them happy.  It is not what a lawyer tells me I may do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I ought to do.  Nobody shall persuade me, where a whole people are concerned, that acts of lenity are not means of conciliation.” Burke, Austin, Mill, Turgot, Comte—­what strange sponsors for the “theories and principles of the Terror”!