Politics & Power Quote by Millicent Fawcett

Fawcett is doing something sly here: she flatters John Stuart Mill while quietly indicting the political culture that surrounded him. The line lands as a double-edged compliment. Mill is elevated to “great thinker” status, but the voters who supposedly rallied to him are demoted to spectators, moved less by principles than by prestige. It’s a diagnosis of celebrity politics before the term existed: reputation as a shortcut that lets the public feel informed without doing the work of being informed.

The context sharpens the critique. Mill’s 1865 election to Parliament came at a moment when liberal reform, women’s rights, and expanded suffrage were colliding with Victorian respectability. Fawcett, a suffrage activist who admired Mill’s advocacy for women, doesn’t pretend the electorate was courageously embracing his more controversial positions. She suggests many supporters were effectively voting for “Mill” as a brand, not Mill’s program - a candid reminder that progress often arrives through accidents of image and timing, not mass conversion.

The subtext is strategic, too. By emphasizing that Mill’s support didn’t hinge on detailed agreement, Fawcett implicitly argues that reformers shouldn’t over-romanticize public consensus. If voters can back a candidate without grasping his politics, then the pathway for radical ideas may be less about winning every argument and more about leveraging moral authority, intellectual legitimacy, and the halo effect of respected figures. It’s an activist’s realism: admiration can be politically useful, but it’s also a warning about how shallow “support” can be once ideas actually demand change.