This html-edition follows
the paper version of H.B. Acton's 1972-edition of "Considerations on
Representative Government", except that it contains considerably
more empty lines between Mill's paragraphs. This is to make the text
easier to read. The details of the paper edition, that is well worth
buying if you are interested in Mill, is
John Stuart Mill:
Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Considerations on Representative
Government Edited by H.B. Acton (ISBN 0 460 11482 4).
This is in Everyman's
Library.
The texts that follow have
many links, and come all with a group of usually four arrows at the beginning
and the end of each text, that look thus:
These have in general the following effect when clicked:
- previous file
- Table of Contents
- Notes or Text associated with the file
- next file
Every file of Mill's text
links to a file with my notes, the links to which are between square
brackets, as in "[1]". In order to allow the reader to
read my notes independently, they all start with a quotation in blue of
the passage they annotate, and that generally ends with the link to the
note in Mill's text.
In contrast, Mill's own
notes are indicated by a "M" and are made superscript, like so[M1].
Because the passages I
annotate are repeated in my Notes, it is possible to read the Notes
without reading the Text that is annotated. However, each file of
Notes has at its beginning a link to the Text it annotates, and likewise
that Text has at its beginning a link to my Notes to it, and as
explained each Note also has a link to the Text and the place is is
quoted from
Those who download my
edition of Mill's "On Liberty" and my notes should realize that the
links to and from the notes are retained only if they are placed in
directory-structures of the following form:
"/Government"
- that includes Mill's textfiles and the TOC
"/Government/Notes/" - that includes my
textfiles of notes
How this directory and its
subdirectory are otherwise attached to a filesystem on the computer you
use is irrelevant, but the above is required for having the many links
work when reading off line.
Also, it may be remarked
that the reading of my Notes may be preferable for many to the
reading of Mill's text, because my Notes very likely contain all or most
of the best bits of Mill's text in quotation, while Mill's text, both in
the html I found and the paper version I use, is very sparse with
interlineation, while the text contains many long sentences and
arguments crammed in very long uninterlined paragraphs.
Maarten Maartensz
December 1, 2006.