Politics & Power Quote by Millicent Fawcett

Success, for Fawcett, isn’t the cheap kind tallied in elections won or bills stamped into law. It’s the slower, more consequential kind: the ability to bend the weather of public life by force of mind and character, to make people think in your terms even when they don’t share your party. Her target, John Stuart Mill, was never a natural machine-politician, and she quietly reframes that as a feature, not a defect.

The line is built like a measured concession. “If, however” signals she’s answering an argument already in the air: that Mill’s parliamentary career was brief, his direct “results” limited, his politics too principled to be practical. Fawcett accepts the premise only to swap out the yardstick. She defines political success as personal influence plus the creation of a “school of political thought” - a durable intellectual lineage that outlasts any single vote.

The subtext is advocacy disguised as appraisal. As a suffrage activist, Fawcett understood that movements rarely win first on the floor of a legislature; they win when ideas become respectable enough to govern with. Mill’s support for women’s rights, free speech, and liberal reform mattered not just as positions, but as permission structures: he made certain arguments sayable in public, and gave reformers a prestigious vocabulary to borrow.

Even the phrase “in the best meaning of the words” carries a moral edge. It’s a gentle rebuke to careerism: persuasion and principle are elevated over maneuvering. Fawcett isn’t just praising Mill; she’s staking a claim about how democratic change actually happens - by building adherents, not merely accumulating offices.