1 Speech, truth and liberty: Bentham to J. St. Mill Peter Niesen Submitted to Archives de Philosophies In his account of John Stuart Mill’s life as a public intellectual, Richard Reeves relates the history of a failed campaign that appears to have briefly landed the 16-year-old Mill in prison. With some companions, Mill had distributed controversial leaflets in a working class neighbourhood, arguing for birth control and providing the necessary medical information: All animal procreation is the result of seminal contact between the sexes. With mankind and healthy married people, sexual intercourse is as unavoidable, as it is wholesome and virtuous. But it is by no means desirable, it is, indeed, a continued torture, that a married woman should be incessantly breeding or bringing forth children, often unhealthy, and born with a certainty of death in infancy and nothing but the patients of pain ... What is done by other people is this. A piece of soft sponge is tied by a bobbin or penny ribbon, and inserted just before the sexual intercourse takes place, and is withdrawn again as soon as it has taken place. [...] If the sponge be large enough, that is; as large as a green walnut, or a small apple, it will prevent conception, and thus, without diminishing the pleasures of married life, or doing the least injury to the health of the most delicate woman, both the woman and her husband will be saved from all the miseries which having too many children produces. 1 The leaflet assembles a number of Radical motives that would continue to shape Mill’s life and work: an unflinching look at social miseries; a naturalistic understanding of human relations; a disregard of religious and bourgeois notions of decorum; an unfeigned concern for universal hedonism, together with an irrepressible penchant for education and 1 Handbill IV, now in the Francis Place Collection of the British Library, quoted in Himes 1927, 315, cf. Reeves 2007, 1-2. Reeves ascribes authorship of the pamphlet to Richard Carlile, which Himes denies. For the larger historical context see Minenka 1972.