Politics & Power Quote by Millicent Fawcett

Calling something a “failure” is often a power move, not a verdict. Fawcett’s sentence is built to disarm that move. She’s responding to a familiar Victorian maneuver: respectable critics pronouncing John Stuart Mill’s reformist politics ineffective because they didn’t immediately translate into legislation or consensus. Her phrasing quietly puts “such persons” on trial. The vagueness is tactical; she doesn’t dignify the detractors with names, but she does mark them as a type whose judgments are socially motivated.

The key sleight of hand is her distinction between “assertion” and “practical success.” An “assertion” is noise, reputation-management, a way to shut down a cause by declaring it passé. “Practical success,” by contrast, is measurable and cumulative. Fawcett is insisting that political writing isn’t only a scoreboard of bills passed; it’s a long game of making certain “objects” thinkable, repeatable, and eventually administrable. Mill’s advocacy reshapes the terms of debate, which is exactly what opponents want to pretend doesn’t count.

Context matters: Fawcett, a leading suffragist and liberal activist, is defending the utility of persuasion itself at a moment when women’s political claims were routinely dismissed as impractical, hysterical, or destined to fail. Her sentence reads like a legal brief for reform: the prosecution’s rhetoric (“failure”) doesn’t negate the evidence of influence. It’s not just about Mill. It’s about how movements survive elite sneers by redefining what victory looks like.