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 784 Rcviezcs of Books riences in affaires dii ca-tir : but other great men, long before and even since Socrates, have behaved awkwardly in seeking for a wife, and have even been unfortunately mated. The Wesleys had many instances in their revival services of persons who acted like the demoniacs of Christ's day, as they passed through the experience of conversion — violent physical agitation, prostration, out- cries, imprecations, and finally the emerging of a cleansed and pacified moral life. But these revival phenomena were less the effect of sensa- tional preaching than they were the symptoms of that strangely patho- logical condition of moral life in England which was too weak to do more than to stagger into an apprehension of the Gospel of Righteous- ness when it was proclaimed in strong but simple terms. William Edwards Huntington. Etudes SUV r Histoire Economiqiie de la France (1760-1789). Par Camille Bloch. Preface de M. Emile Levasseur. (Paris : Alphonse Picard et Fils. 1900. Pp. ix, 269.) This volume contains several essays on distinct phases of the old regime in France such as the municipal assemblies of 1787, the ca/iiers, the treaty of commerce of 1786. The most noteworthy of them are those on " Le Commerce des Grains dans la Generalite d'Orleans" and " La Repartition de la Propriete Fonciere a la veille de la Revolution dans quelques'paroisses de la Generalite d'Orleans." The latter touches the question of the amount of land owned by the peasantry, a subject on which opinion is still seriously divided. It would be difficult to answer such a question on the basis of an investigation of so narrow a field as the gincra/ite of Orleans, and yet the state of affairs which M. Bloch has discovered in Orleans is doubly interesting because of its rela- tion to the larger problem. M. Bloch has drawn his inferences from the rolls for the viiigtn-mes in fifteen typical parishes. Although the returns are not in all cases complete or reliable he regards them as better than the returns for the tailk, and as sufficiently trustworthy considering the scope of his in- quiry. The statistical tables with which he supplements his treatment of the subject render his investigation useful in examining features of it to which he does not call special attention. He is interested in the holdings of the peasants rather than in the amount of land possessed by the Third Estate as a whole. His tables answer nearly all the questions one would like to ask, but they do not indicate the number of peasants who owned no land, because the returns include only the proprietors. Some of the figures are unusually instructive. Out of 35,707 arpents in the fifteen parishes the peasants held 15,947, the peasants and the bour- geois together, 22,828. In three parishes the peasants held more than the bourgeois, nobles, and ecclesiastics put together : in eight they held more than the nobles. M. Bloch finds that the peasant holdings were generally small ; the three sets of proprietors with which they are com- pared held from one and one-half to forty times as much per individual.