794 Rcviezi's of Books quoted from — these include his inaugural lecture at Harvard), (2) Medieval Agrarian, (3) Medieval Urban, (4) Economic Opinion, (5) England and America, 1660-1760, (6) Industrial Organization, (7) Biographical, (8) Academic. As might have been expected the medieval sections are by far the largest. They occupy together nearly half the volume, the three following sections filling two-thirds of the remainder. Broadly speaking, the first of [them, the " Medieval Agrarian" section, is concerned with the mark. Its opening essay, on " English Serfdom," surveys the external history of the ' ' mark dogma ' ' down to the appear- ance of Vinogradoff's Villainage in England ; and the subsequent progress of knowledge upon that and related subjects is indicated by a baker's dozen of brief reviews. The essay itself exhibits the author at his best. It is clearly thought and persuasively written. The general reader is likely to be left with scarcely more doubt where the truth lies than is felt by Mr. Ashley himself; and as to the mark, at least, Mr. Ashley's convictions are positive. But the same reader will probably wish that the author had worked into his essay what is important in the following reviews, instead of printing them at length. Iterated disbelief, even in the Teutonic freeman, becomes wearisome. Mr. Ashley has hit the hypothetical head of that worthy wherever he saw it. He has hit hard and straight ; and it is, perhaps, poor-spirited not to share his gaiidium certaminis. But after all, why march us up and down among the slain ? Why should not the author act upon his own conviction (p. 166) that "since the appearance of M. Fustel de Coulanges' detailed examination of von Maurer's alleged authorities the mark doctrine . . . ought to be too dead to be longer attacked "? — especially since it is not clear that even Maitland has shaken his confidence in the servile origin of the manor. In form, the " Medieval Urban " group is like its predecessor. But the ten reviews which follow its introductory essay on "The Beginnings of Town Life in the Middle Ages," do not produce the same impression of possible superfluity, because Mr. Ashley is here content to offer a clear and impartial survey of recent theories as to the origin of medieval towns, without giving in his own adherence to any one of them. The section entitled "Economic Opinion" consists, in addition to two brief reviews, of an admirable article on "The Tory Origin of Free Trade " ; it shows convincingly that Sir Dudley North and the other eighteenth-century pamphleteers in whose "liberal" doctrines McCul- loch found evidence of preternatural enlightenment, were, in fact, merely playing the game of politics against the Whig prohibition of 1678, and were by no means free traders in the "orthodox" sense — than which nothing more illuminating has been written on economic opinion in eighteenth-century England. The next section opens with a lecture on "The Colonial Legislation of England and the American Colonies ' ' which was delivered before the LTniversity of Oxford in January, 1899, and published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics for November of the same year. It argues that the grievances inflicted upon the colonists by the Acts of Trade have been
