The J. S. Million (JSM) were a sect of radical utilitarians who left Liverpool in 1865 to establish in South America a utopian colony called Evertham-or-Paradise.
Despite their name, their members numbered in the hundreds.
Their history is today relatively obscure.
Our knowledge derives from a selection of official records, one Spanish-language secondary source, and parts of several journals, including those of the leader, Eliezer Axelis; the convict-rebel, John Grousewater; and the widow, Elizabeth Harrow.
Axelis’ governing principle was simple: the maximisation of happiness, with happiness measured as total happiness in the colony.
This required the security of all members, as the loss of anyone was a loss of total happiness; and procreation, as the addition of anyone was an addition of total happiness.
By year three, the JSM had achieved the first goal, but lagged in achieving the second.
Women were uneager to birth.
Under these conditions Axelis instituted what he termed “the partakings,” and what Elizabeth Harrow later called “the rape chamber.” It was, he declared, “the inevitable product… of a moral calculus” expressed “in the mathematics of practical application.”
Nine months later, happiness in the colony greatly increased.
Yet there were misgivings, questions about the morality of the partakings and the very definition of happiness; a disagreement in principle.
“What is the maximisation of happiness?” asked John Grousewater in his pamphlet of 1870, Futilitarianism, before answering: “It is not total happiness, but happiness on average, which must be maximised!”
Axelis jailed Grousewater, but the heretical idea persisted, fomenting into a rebellion that toppled Axelis, freed Grousewater and redefined the JSM. Whereas, before, maximum happiness had required security and procreation, now it necessitated elimination.
“Elegance and reason,” Grousewater declared. “Not breed—but cull.”
Under banners proclaiming Kill For Happiness, he began planning the identification and execution of the JSM’s unhappiest members, and he decided that the first such act would need to be the one with the greatest positive impact: the death of the most-miserable member of the colony.
The search commenced.
Interviews were conducted. Gallows constructed.
On December 2, 1871, three Interviewers entered the home of Elizabeth Harrow, whom they found weeping over the body of her dead child. The Interviewers introduced themselves, stated their purpose. Elizabeth began the narration of her life, encompassing her incestuous birth, wretched childhood, squalidness, abuse, brief love, followed by tragic death, of her husband, the despair, the pain […] until the present moment.
One of the interviewers had already slit his own throat when the second murdered the third, before rushing outside.
Elizabeth followed:
“When all had gathered, I upon the gallows recited, at their urging, once more my life’s tale… When I’d done, there was nought before me but the red multitude of death, and what was not stilled by own or other hand died thereafter of suffocation under the great mass of sorrow or suffering [it?] couldn’t the whole of which even begin to comprehend.”
Weeks later, alone and starving, she scrawled:
“I am finally become the happiest in Paradise.”