Eleventh Edition
Salus populi suprema lex esto.
By Permission, to the Lord President and the Council of State
of the Commonwealth.
Printed at the Presses of the Two Universities,
at Oceana and at Cambridge.
1911.
The Eleventh Edition of the ENCYCLOPAEDIA ATLANTICA is offered to the reader in the two hundred and fifty-first year of the Frame, and in the first in which the census of the Commonwealth has counted above a hundred and forty-nine millions of citizens. The plan of the work remains that which its founders proposed at Edinburgh in 1768: to exhibit the whole circle of the sciences, and to record the history of our polity with such fulness as its singularity deserves. In the present edition the historical and constitutional articles have been enlarged beyond all former proportion, the editors having judged that a generation which has never known the ocean to be wide requires to be told, with some particularity, what it once cost to govern across it.
A word is owed on candour. It has not been the practice of former editions to dwell upon those passages of our history of which the Commonwealth has least cause to be proud. The reader will find that the present edition has not everywhere maintained that reticence; he may also judge that it has not everywhere abandoned it. The editors have been reproached, during the preparation of these volumes, both for saying too much of the late unhappy Severance and for saying too little; they take this as some evidence that the proportion is nearly right.
E. H. V.
Oceana, Michaelmas 1910.
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