determined effort was made to discourage the production of tobacco. James I. wrote a book against the culture of that pernicious "weed," as he was the first to describe it. But the hardy plant held its own and flourished in spite of the royal disfavor. Nor were the colonists more successful in their political intentions. Especially interesting, in view of recent discussions, is the account given of the communistic experiments which belonged to the early history of the American colonies. In Virginia all the products of the colony were to go into a common stock. But after twelve years' trial of this plan, there was a division of the land among the older settlers. The pernicious character of the system had been demonstrated. "Every man sharked for his own bootie," says a writer on Virginia in 1609, "and was altogether careless of the succeeding penurie." The two years of communism in the Plymouth colony was scarcely more successful. Bradford, finding that the matter was one of life and death with the colony, abolished the system, although the abolition was a revolutionary stroke, in violation of the contract with the shareholders. This idea, that the outcome was to be very different from the intentions, appears not only in the striking chapter on 'The Procession of Motives,' but crops up again and again in other parts of the book. Thus, the ill success which attended the government of the colonies from London resulted in the almost unconscious establishment of several independent democratic communities in America. This happened in Virginia and Plymouth. The Massachusetts Bay Colony, however, was self-governing from the start. But although causes and principles are matters of chief interest with Mr. Eggleston, his book is full of a picturesqueness which is all the more effective for being unobtrusive. The author has not that tiresome sort of picturesqueness which insists on saying the whole thing itself. The reader is credited with a little imagination, and that faculty has frequent opportunity for exercise. It is charmed by the striking passage in which is described the delight of the emigrants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when, after having set sail from England, they found themselves upon the open sea for the first time without the supervision, or even the neighborhood, of bosses. We know the sense of freedom which the broad and blue ocean affords to us all; what must have been that feeling to men who had scarcely ever had an hour of life untroubled by the domination of an antagonistic religious authority! Every day, for ten weeks together, they had preaching and exposition. "On one ship," says Mr. Eggleston, "the watches were set to the accompaniment of psalm-singing."