PREFACE. "DON'T shoot the organist; he's doing his level best." This ancient American story of a notice prominently affixed in a church in the Wild West, as a gentle appeal to the congregation, expresses the mildly deprecatory attitude that I desire to assume to my readers—if I have any-or rather the attitude that I hope they will assume to me. "Don't shoot the essayist; he's doing his level best." I confess that it is difficult to find a valid excuse for republishing old magazine articles, and in my own case I cannot plead that any host of admiring friends has put pressure on me to collect mine. I take it that the real reason for these republications is always the same-a desire on the part of the writer to leave some print of his footsteps, however shallow, on the sands of time. It must be admitted that this reason is not a very urgent one for readers, and may even prove to be slightly pathetic for the writer if it happens that no copies of his book are sold. One copy must always go to the British Museum, and that is a record of his existence on this troublous planet. But it is rather like a tombstone record. For I protest that, with the exception of one's feelings in a cemetery, I know scarcely any sensation more depressing than to stand on the floor of the great readingroom in Bloomsbury and let the eye follow, till the head is dizzy, the huge circles of books, hundreds of thousands of which no eye but the author's has ever looked at. a grave of reputations! What a mute appeal to our sympathies in the long labour, the hopes and fears, the joys and sorrows that went to the making of all these unread, and mostly unnecessary, volumes! Fortunately mine is "only a little one." I hope that the first three essays may have some general interest. Perhaps this may prove to be a harmless delusion on my part, and hope's What flattering tale may be rudely contradicted by Messrs Blackwoods' account of sales. If the first three have no general interest, I expect that the remainder will generally be looked on as rather ancient history. But history has its uses-even though it be true that it never repeats itself. And there is a certain interest (especially, let us admit, to the author!) in noting the progress of the matters reviewed in twenty years, and in learning from later events whether any of the results were more or less clearly deducible from the premisses. The state of things in the United States during the suspension of specie payments and after resumption, must always arrest the attention of business men, economists, and currency doctors. In any time, too, of great commercial depression, it is good to know that another country has been through the same mill before, and has come out safely. I doubt if the finan cial condition of any country was ever more depressed than that of the United States. in 1877. The year lives in my memory as characterised by the shrewdly humorous remark of an American to an English fellow traveller on a Cunard steamer. "The fact is, sir, that trade is so powerful bad in my country, that although I am now on my honeymoon trip to Europe, I really couldn't afford to bring my wife along!" Events have since proved that time is all that is wanted in a new, rich, and undeveloped country with an energetic and mainly honest population. The three forces that have enabled the United States to pull through their troubles so quickly and so successfully are-immigration, the extension of railroads, and the assurance of peace. There is no blood-tax, and consequently all the energies of the entire population are devoted to the production of useful and agreeable things possessing exchangeable value-or in other words, to the production of wealth. And if the question be asked, What connection has Dante with the New World? I am inclined to answer it in his own words from the 'De Monarchiâ.' "It has thus been sufficiently set forth that the proper work of the human race, taken as a whole, is to set in action the whole capacity of that understanding which is capable of development: first in the way of speculation, |