struggle on questions of radical reform--all these facts have worked together to generate a feeling which is far from being propitious to liberal doctrines. Socialism itself has been contributing to it directly by laying an emphatic stress on the conditions of material existence, and treating political life merely as subordinate to economic aims. In England the repressive tendency has been felt less than on the Continent, but even here some of the foremost men in the country are beginning, in consequence of social well-known events, to ask themselves: Whither are we drifting? The book which best illustrates the new direction of thought is probably Taine's 'Origines de la France Contemporaine.' It is highly characteristic, both in its literary connexion with the profound and melancholy liberalism of Tocqueville, and in its almost savage onslaught on revolutionary legend and doctrine. In the field of historical research the fermentation of political thought of which I have been speaking has been powerfully seconded by a growing distrust among scholars for preconceived theories, and by the wish to reconsider solutions which had been too easily taken for granted. The combined action of these forces has been curiously experienced in the particular subject of our study. The Germanist school had held very high the principle of individual liberty, had tried to connect it with the Teutonic element in history, had explained its working in the society described by Tacitus, and had regretfully followed its decay in later times. For the representatives of the New School this 'original Teutonic freedom' has entirely lost its significance, and they regard the process of social development as starting with the domination of the few and the serfdom of the many. The votaries of the free village community have been studying with interest epochs and ethnographical variations unacquainted with the economic individualism of modern Europe, they have been attentive in tracing out even the secondary details of the agrarian associations which have directed the husbandry of so many centuries, but the New School subordinates communal practice to private property and connects it with serfdom. We may already notice the new tendency in Inama-Sternegg's Wirthschaftsgeschichte[29]: he enters the lists against Maurer, denies that the Mark ever had anything to do with political work, reduces its influence on husbandry, and enhances that of great property. The most remarkable of French medievalists--Fustel de Coulanges--has been fighting all along against the Teutonic village community, and for an early development of private property in connexion with Roman influence. English scholarship has to reckon with similar views in Seebohm's well-known work. [Seebohm.]