LAST STAGE OF EDUCATION, AND FIRST OF SELF-EDUCATION For the first year or two after my visit to France, I continued my old studies, with the addition of some new ones.

When I returned, my father was just finishing for the press his _Elements of Political Economy_, and he made me perform an exercise on the manuscript, which Mr.Bentham practised on all his own writings, making what he called "marginal contents"; a short abstract of every paragraph, to enable the writer more easily to judge of, and improve, the order of the ideas, and the general character of the exposition.

Soon after, my father put into my hands Condillac's _Traite des Sensations_, and the logical and metaphysical volumes of his _Cours d'Etudes_; the first (notwithstanding the superficial resemblance between Condillac's psychological system and my father's) quite as much for a warning as for an example.

I am not sure whether it was in this winter or the next that I first read a history of the French Revolution.

I learnt with astonishment that the principles of democracy, then apparently in so insignificant and hopeless a minority everywhere in Europe, had borne all before them in France thirty years earlier, and had been the creed of the nation.