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]