As a defender of benevolent despotism Mill is no doubt put down by today's "liberals" as a forerunner of the imperialism of Disraeli and Joseph Chamberlain in the 1890's. The few lines in his essay, On Liberty, would seem to justify this sort of characterization. But it is invalidated by a true understanding of Mill's philosophy of progress. His premise that some people are unready for self-government under a representative system, though distasteful to minds emotionally charged with anti-imperialist and anti-colonial sentiments, seems to be supported by the expectation that despotism is likely to prevail for some time in countries recently freed from white imperialism. The hard and unpalatable fact that Mill courageously faced was that cultural and political backwardness made despotism, alien or home-grown, inevitable. He reasoned that in promoting good government and the requisites of ultimate self-government an alien despotism of civilized Europeans was generally superior to a native one. This was demonstrated, he thought, by two circumstances connected with the British rule of India. One was that the British had succeeded where the native despots had failed in establishing the order and national unity necessary for progress and freedom. The other circumstance was that in educating the Indian people according to Western ideas and feelings, and, in the process, implanting the ideas of political freedom and self-government, the British were deliberately creating the conditions for the withering away of their rule.
(Abram L. Harris, "John Stuart Mill: Servant of the East India Company," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 30 [May 1964]: 185-202, at 201)
