1 Mill tells us that his Essay _On Liberty_ was planned and written down in 1854. It was in mounting the steps of the Capitol in January, 1855, that the thought first arose of converting it into a volume, and it was not published till 1859. The author, who in his Autobiography speaks with exquisite modesty of all his literary performances, allows himself one single exception when speaking of his Essay _On Liberty_. “None of my writings,” he says, “have been either so carefully composed or so sedulously corrected as this.” Its final revision was to have been the work of the winter of 1858 to 1859, which he and his wife had arranged to pass in the South of Europe, a hope which was frustrated by his wife’s death. “The _Liberty_,” he writes, “is likely to survive longer than anything else that I have written (with the possible exception of the _Logic_), because the conjunction of her mind with mine has rendered it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth, which the changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to bring out into strong relief: the importance to man and society, of a large variety of character, and of giving full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.” 2 Herzen defined Nihilism as “the most perfect freedom from all settled concepts, from all inherited restraints and impediments which hamper the progress of the Occidental intellect with the historical drag tied to its foot.” _ 3 Ueber die Akademische Freiheit der Deutschen Universitäten_, Rede beim Antritt des Rectorats an der Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin, am October 15, 1877, gehalten von Dr. H. Helmholtz. _ 4 Ueber eine Akademie der Deutschen Sprache_, p. 34. Another keen observer of English life, Dr. K. Hillebrand, in an article in the October number of the _Nineteenth Century_, remarks: “Nowhere is there greater individual liberty than in England, and nowhere do people renounce it more readily of their own accord.” 5 Spencer Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 391. 6 Spencer Hardy, _Manual of Buddhism_, p. 39. 7 “As one generation dies and gives way to another, the heir of the consequences of all its virtues and all its vices, the exact result of preëxistent causes, so each individual, in the long chain of life, inherits all, of good or evil, which all its predecessors have done or been, and takes up the struggle towards enlightenment precisely where they left it.” Rhys Davids, _Buddhism_, p. 104. 8 Bunsen, _Egypt_, ii. pp. 77, 150. _ 9 Mémoire sur l’Origine Egyptienne de l’Alphabet Phénicien_, par E. de Rougé, Paris, 1874. 10 See Brandis, _Das Münzwesen_.