When he became Her Majesty's Secretary of State for the Colonies in the Unionist government of 1895, Joseph Chamberlain was already the acknowledged leader of those who believed that Britain would most surely safeguard her military and economic future through closer links with the Empire and the extension of its boundaries. Yet a mere fifteen years before he had played an important part in the campaign against Disraeli's imperialist designs that had swept the Liberals back to power. The change in Chamberlain's political fortunes as a result of the Home Rule controversy needs no recapitulation here. More interesting is the process by which he was won over to those very ideas of imperial consolidation that Disraeli had propounded so frequently.

Since 1951 the population, social structure, and economy of Norristown, Pennsylvania, have been the focus of study of an interdisciplinary research seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. Under the over-all theme of technological change and social adjustment, a variety of investigations have been conducted to discover the ways in which the processes of industrialization and urbanization in the twentieth century have operated dynamically to bring about changes in the social and economic structure of the Norristown community.

As part of a general inquiry into the economic growth of die United Kingdom, an attempt is being made to estimate long-term trends in output of individual industries over as long a period of time as the data allow. Throughout the eighteenth century wool was the major English manufacturing industry. It is the purpose of this article to consider the evidence of contemporary estimates of the value of the woolen manufacture, with a view to using them as a basis for an assessment of the broad trends in its output over this crucial period of Britain's industrial history.

Unlike the English country squire and the Prussian Junker, the French gentilhomme campagnard has been stereotyped by literature and history as idle, dull, and poor. Without rejecting Molière's picture of the court fop or La Bruyère's caricature of the proud but impoverished hobereau, attention must be turned toward the more typical provincial nobleman of the Old Regime. Here is a social type that was neither congenitally frivolous nor hopelessly rustic. Historical research, especially in local and private archives, is uncovering the existence of an active, shrewd, and prosperous landholding nobility who were not, as Arthur Young too often suggests, a thoroughly urbanized class of absentee proprietors leasing their domains at fixed money rents to bourgeois tenants. On the contrary, personal estate management not only was the best way of assuring a gentilhomme campagnard a good income but it was also recognized as his profession, and, in contrast to retail trade and purely. commercial speculation, a perfectly respectable noble enterprise.