_Copyright, 1893,_
By The Forum Publishing Company.

_Copyright, 1894,_
By Lloyd Bryce.

_Copyright, 1895, 1897,_
By Harper and Brothers.

_All rights reserved._

University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A.




PREFACE.


Whatever interest may be possessed by a collection of detached papers,
issued at considerable intervals during a term of several years, and
written without special reference one to the other, or, at the first,
with any view to subsequent publication, depends as much upon the date
at which they were composed, and the condition of affairs then
existent, as it does upon essential unity of treatment. If such unity
perchance be found in these, it will not be due to antecedent purpose,
but to the fact that they embody the thought of an individual mind,
consecutive in the line of its main conceptions, but adjusting itself
continually to changing conditions, which the progress of events