to begin? How, after passive obedience, to commence resistance? How to break through the miserable conventionalism, the sordid commonplace of a king’s surroundings? For it is only in medieval fairy-tales that kings are permitted to be kingly. Yet, despite custom and usage, he was determined to make a new departure in the annals of modern sovereignty. Three years of continuous slavery on the treadmill of the Throne had been sufficient to make him thirst for freedom,--freedom of speech,--freedom of action. He had tacitly submitted to a certain ministry because he had been assured that the said ministry was popular,--but latterly, rumours of discontent and grievance had reached him,--albeit indistinctly and incoherently,--and he began to be doubtful as to whether it might not be the Press which supported the existing state of policy, rather than the People. The Press! He began to consider of what material this great power in his country was composed. Originally, the Press in all countries, was intended to be the most magnificent institution of the civilized world,--the voice of truth, of liberty, of justice--a voice which in its clamant utterances could neither be bribed nor biassed to cry out false news. Originally, such was meant to be its mission;--but nowadays, what, in all honesty and frankness, is the Press? What was it, for example, to this king, who from personal knowledge, was able to practically estimate and enumerate the forces which controlled it thus:--Six, or at the most a dozen men, the proprietors and editors of different newspapers sold in cheap millions to the people. Most of these newspapers were formed into ‘companies’; and the managers issued ‘shares’ in the fashion of tea merchants and grocers. False news, if of a duly sensational character, would sometimes send up the shares in the market,--true information would equally, on occasion, send them down. These premises granted, might it not follow that for newspaper speculators, the False would often prove more lucrative than the True? And, concerning the persons who wrote for these newspapers,--of what calling and election were they? Male and female, young and old, they were generally of a semi-educated class lacking all distinctive ability,--men and women who were, on an average, desperately poor, and desperately dissatisfied. To earn daily bread they naturally had to please the editors set in authority over them; hence their expressed views and opinions on any subject could only be counted as _nil_, being written, not independently, but under the absolute control of their employers. Thus meditating, the King summed up the total of his own mental argument, and found that the vast sounding ‘power of the Press’ so far as his own dominion was concerned, resolved itself into the mere trade monopoly of the aforesaid leading dozen men. What he now proposed to himself to discover among other things, was,--how far and how truly these dozen tradesmen voiced the mind of the