Indeed, it is easy to exaggerate the value and importance even of the metropolitan archives. To begin with, the records of the City of London will be found of little or no use for investigating the history of English agriculture. What will they teach us about the complex questions of land tenure, the life of the peasantry, the relations between the lords and the tenants of the soil, about the condition of the people, high and low, about those local courts and franchises and customs, and disciplinary and formative machinery, which “through oppression prepared the way for order and by routine educated men for the dominion of law”? You must go a long way out of London to get anything like a grasp of the constitution of a county palatine, and to understand the working, if I may use the expression, of such forms of local government as were once active in the manor, the honour, or the hundred. You must study such matters not only in the rolls and charters that survive, but you must study them too in the geographical areas with which they are concerned. What! gather together all the parish registers, and all the wills and all the sessional papers within the four seas and toss them all together into a vast heap “somewhere” in London! What for? That a score or two of cockney dryasdusts may have the opportunity of getting at them by a short ride outside a “penny bus”? Why, you might just as well propose that all the parish churches should be carted away bodily and set up “somewhere” in battle array as a kind of ecclesiastical wall round the metropolis, in order to give adequate facilities of study to the Institute of British Architects in Conduit Street.