on of the most eminent individual
minds in the country, placed there, without reference to party, by
voters who appreciate their individual eminence. I can understand that
persons, otherwise intelligent, should, for want of sufficient
examination, be repelled from Mr. Hare's plan by what they think the
complex nature of its machinery. But any one who does not feel the want
which the scheme is intended to supply; any one who throws it over as a
mere theoretical subtlety or crotchet, tending to no valuable purpose,
and unworthy of the attention of practical men, may be pronounced an
incompetent statesman, unequal to the politics of the future. I mean,
unless he is a minister or aspires to become one: for we are quite
accustomed to a minister continuing to profess unqualified hostility to
an improvement almost to the very day when his conscience or his
interest induces him to take it up as a public measure, and carry it.

Had I met with Mr. Hare's system before the publication of my pamphlet,
I should have given an account of it there. Not having done so, I wrote
an article in _Fraser's Magazine_ (reprinted in my miscellaneous
writings) principally for that purpose, though I included in it, along
with Mr. Hare's book, a review of two other productions on the question
of the day; one of them a pamphlet by my early friend, Mr. John Austin,
who had in his old age become an enemy to all further Parliamentary
reform; the other an able and vigourous, though partially erroneous,
work by Mr. Lorimer.

In the course of the same summer I fulfilled a duty particularly
incumbent upon me, that of helping (by an article in the _Edinburgh
Review_) to make known Mr. Bain's profound treatise on the Mind, just
then completed by the publication of its second volume. And I carried
through the press a selection of my minor writings, forming the first
two volumes of _Dissertations and Discussions_. The selection had been
made during my wife's lifetime, but the revision, in concert with her,
with a view to republication, had been barely commenced; and when I had
no longer the guidance of her judgment I despaired of pursuing it
further, and republished the papers as they were, with the exception of
striking out such passages as were no longer in accordance with my
opinions. My literary work of the year was terminated with an essay in
_Fraser's Magazine_ (afterwards republished in the third volume of
_Dissertations and Discussions_), entitled "A