great territorial feudal lords and the kings and clergymen; and these were then supreme. It was the period of the ferocious Albigensian crusades. It is true that it ushered in a rather worse period,--that of the struggle between England and France, with its attendant peasant wars and Jacqueries, and huge bands of marauding free-companies. But the alteration for the worse was due to a fresh outbreak of “imaginative” spirit; and the first period was full of recurring plagues and famines, besides the ordinary unrest, murder, oppression, pillage, and general corruption. Mr. Adams says that the different classes of the population during that happy time “preyed upon each other less savagely” than at other times. All that need be said in answer is that there is not now a civilized community, under no matter what stress of capitalistic competition, in which the different classes prey upon one another with one-tenth the savagery they then showed; or in which famine and disease, even leaving war out of account, come anywhere near causing so much misery to poor people, and above all to the wage-earners, or working-men, the under strata and base of the producing classes. From many of the statements in Mr. Adams’s very interesting concluding chapter I should equally differ; and yet this chapter is one which is not merely interesting but soul-stirring, and it contains much with which most of us would heartily agree. Through the cold impartiality with which he strives to work merely as a recorder of facts, there break now and then flashes of pent-up wrath and vehement scorn for all that is mean and petty in a purely materialistic, purely capitalistic, civilization. With his scorn of what is ignoble and base in our development, his impatient contempt of the deification of the stock-market, the trading-counter, and the factory, all generous souls must agree. When we see prominent men deprecating the assertion of national honor because it “has a bad effect upon business,” or because it “impairs the value of securities”; when we see men seriously accepting Mr. Edward Atkinson’s pleasant theory that patriotism is of no consequence when compared with the price of cotton sheeting or the capacity to undersell our competitors in foreign markets, it is no wonder that a man who has in him the stuff of ancestors who helped to found our Government, and helped to bring it safely through the Civil War should think blackly of the future. But Mr. Adams should remember that there always have been men of this merely huckstering type, or of other types not much higher. It is not a nice thing that Mr. Eliot, the president of one of the greatest educational institutions of the land, should reflect discredit upon the educated men of the country by his attitude on the Venezuela affair, carrying his desertion of American principles so far as to find himself left in the lurch by the very English statesman whose cause he was championing; but Mr.