Present-Day American Usage

 Galen Strawson's The Secret Connexion: Causation, Realism, and David Hume gives page numbers for its quotations from Hume in the manner (T 266) or (E 153), referring to particular Clarendon Press editions of Hume's works. It happens that I have the edition he uses for A Treatise of Human Nature, which in Part II, Causation in the Treatise, I did refer to at times. Having reached, Part III, Causation in the Enquiry, I went to find my copy, doubting I had the one used. I did not: I had an edition printed by Bobbs-Merrill.

Curiously, Bobb-Merrill printed it as An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. On page lv, "A Note on the Text" concludes

Spelling and punctuation have been revised throughout to conform to present-day American usage.

And so it has. For example the edition replaces with "insure" the "ensure" in

The poorest artificer, who labours alone, expects at least the protection of the magistrate, to ensure him the enjoyment of the fruits of his labour.

And of course it removes the "u" from "labour".

This strikes me as just wrong. It is well to impose present-day American spelling on present-day American authors; though Jacques Barzun thought otherwise about publishers' conventions, as he wrote in the essay "Dialogue in C-Sharp", collected in A Word or Two Before You Go...: Brief Essays on Language. But though Bobbs-Merrill's market consisted of present-day Americans, its author was not one. I have to think that anyone capable of following the arguments of An Enquiry can manage English or Scottish spelling and an older system of punctuation.

It is fair to say that the edition appeared in 1955. Quite likely practices had changed with twenty or thirty years at Bobbs-Merrill and comparable publishers.