John Rae and John Stuart Mill

[WHEN about forty years ago Professor C. W. Mixter, the rediscoverer of John Rae's New Principles of Political Economy (1834), was preparing the new edition of this work, and collecting for it what information about Rae's life could be gathered, he gave in two articles and in his introduction to the new edition several extracts of drafts of letters by Rae to Mill, written about 1863 but perhaps never sent, and mentioned a letter written by Mill to Rae, apparently about the same time, but never received by Rae. (Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. XVI, Nov., 1901, pp. 123-125, Economic Journal, Vol. XII, 1902, pp. 111-120 and The Sociological Theory of Capital, 1905, Introduction.) Among the papers of the Mill-Taylor Collection in the Library of the London School of Economics the following letter by Rae to Mill, written nearly ten years earlier, has been found, together with the draft of Mill's reply. The latter will, it is hoped, ultimately be included in the new edition of Mill's letters which is being prepared. As it may be some time, however, till this edition reaches the date to which the present letters belong, and as the draft of Mill's reply (which was almost certainly sent but perhaps never reached Rae) contains a point of some interest in the history of Economics, it is here reprinted together with Rae's letter.-Ed.]

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