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3. Apparatus
In addition to the variant notes mentioned above, two kinds of footnote are appended to the items. Those from the copy-text, that is, Mill's own (with occasional notes by the editors of the newspapers) are signalled by the series *, +, etc., beginning anew in each item. Those editorially supplied (the great bulk of the notes) are signalled by separate series of arabic numbers for each item. In accordance with the practice throughout the edition, we attempted to identify in these notes all Mill's allusions to people and references to and quotations from written works and speeches, trying to specify where possible the edition he used or may be presumed to have used; to his notes we added (in square brackets) missing identifications and corrected mistaken ones. In the other volumes (excepting the correspondence) we avoided as assiduously as our consciences demanded and as our desires would permit adding any other information in notes, believing that Mill's texts were still almost as transparent as when first read. But newspaper writings are, like correspondence, much more time- and place-bound, and so we indulged our readers and ourselves (though still hounded by conscience) by giving explanatory notes of historical and biographical (as well as bibliographic) kind. The adequacy of these is of course for others to judge, but I should say we aimed a little higher than James Mill, whose confidence in his readers was considerably greater than ours; in one not untypical note he says: "See the writings of Kant and his followers, passim; see also Degerando, and others of his school, in various parts of their works."[22]
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