Editor’s Note

This is the complete text of On Liberty, first published in London in 1859. It is set from a public-domain transcription of the reprint issued by the Walter Scott Publishing Company in the Scott Library around 1901, which reproduces the text of 1859. Mill’s dedication to the memory of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, and his epigraph from Wilhelm von Humboldt are kept, as are his own footnotes, which are printed at the end of each chapter.

Spelling and punctuation are those of the source (defence, recognised); chapter headings have been set in title case rather than capitals, and straight quotation marks as curly ones. One error of the reprint has been corrected. In Chapter II the reprint reads that a body of Christian ethics “has ever been possible without eking it out from the Old Testament”; the first edition, the sense of the passage, and Mill’s argument all require “has never been possible,” and we print never.

Removed from the source: the transcription’s header and license, the publisher’s pages, and the introduction by W. L. Courtney (about 5,300 words), which is not Mill’s.