Excerpt from The Empire: A Series of Letters Published in "the Daily News," 1862, 1863 I did not intend, when the letters were written, to reprint them in that form; but when I tried to put the matter of them into a more regular shape, I found that the discussion which ran through the series had followed the main lines of thought, and that in attempting to be more methodical I only became less clear. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.