A BOOK of this kind needs no preface, save to express the author's acknowledgments to Messrs. William Blackwood and Sons for sanctioning the republication of articles which recently appeared in Blackwood's Magazine.
If, notwithstanding the author's estimate of these articles, as indicated in his opening sentences, he now reissues them in book form, he does so in response to appeals from many quarters. It has been pressed upon him, moreover, that they must be of exceptional interest, seeing that they were made the subject of "a full-dress debate " in Parliament ; and that, too, at a time when opportunity could not be found for any adequate discussion of great questions of national importance and gravity.
