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Lot 247

MILL (JOHN STUART)

22 November 2011, 10:30 GMT
London, New Bond Street

Sold for £237.50 inc. premium

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MILL (JOHN STUART)

Letter signed (“J.S. Mill”), with autograph postscript, written as Chairman of the Jamaica Committee, to a subscriber (“Dear Sir”), asking for a contribution from him as one of the Committee’s guarantors in order “to enable the Committee completely to perform the duty to which they consider themselves pledged on behalf of the subscribers of trying all the avenues of justice, exhausting all methods of bringing the question before a fair tribunal & obtaining a judicial decision which shall be binding for the future on all administrators of the law”; regretting that as the case is still in the hands of their legal advisers the Committee cannot discuss “their prospects & position”; the autograph postscript giving instructions on how to send the money, 3 pages, headed paper, mounted on an album leaf, Jamaica Committee, Fleet Street, 12 November 1867

Footnotes

The Jamaica Committee – in one of the great causes celebres of the era – was calling for the prosecution of Governor Eyre for the brutal suppression under martial law of a revolt in Jamaica. Mill was Chairman during its most active phase, receiving the support of such luminaries as Darwin (a subscriber), Huxley and Lyell. An opposing committee was soon set up by those who saw Eyre as a hero, with Carlyle in the chair and Ruskin as his second, and receiving the support of further luminaries such as Tennyson and Dickens. In the event, only two of Eyre's military subordinates came to trial, and were acquitted, and the Committee was wound up in 1869. Nevertheless, 'while the Jamaica Committee failed in its attempt to establish a decisive precedent concerning the illegality of martial law, it succeeded in engendering the Victorian era's most prolonged and fertile debate concerning military and political power and the rule of law' (R. W. Kostal, 'Jamaica Committee', ODNB).

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