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 288 REVIEWS OF BOOKS April and Social Questions '. His alert and original mind was full of questions which are now, more insistently than then, forcing themselves upon the mind of this generation ; and the contributions which he made to the solution of them, whether by discussion, or, as in some cases, by social experiments, come home with special value to us to-day. W. H. Frere. The Quit-rent System in the American Colonies. By Beverley W. Bond, Jr. (Yale Historical Publications.) (Newhaven, Connecticut : Yale University Press ; Oxford : University Press, 1919.) The last word on this scholarly volume has been said by Mr. C. M. Andrews in its introductory chapter : Professor Bond's account of the quit-rent in America is an exceedingly valuable con- tribution to our knowledge of colonial history, because in bringing together in orderly and intelligent fashion a large amount of information, widely scattered and often difficult of access and never before used except in part and by Professor Bond himself, it opens a new chapter of colonial life and throws light upon a little-known phase of the struggle that took place in America to get rid of an outside control that was hampering colonial progress. There is one point, to begin with, that needs noting. Throughout the volume the word .' feudal ' is used in the widest sense as meaning medieval tenure in general. The danger from this use is that some prejudice, attached to feudalism as such, is imported into the consideration of a system wholly different. Neither Mr. Bond nor Mr. Andrews seems to recognize that, apart from the money going to an alien proprietary or government, there was nothing reactionary or benighted in calling upon the individual to pay a tax to the community for the grant of land. In fact the existence of the quit-rent was a recognition, however feeble, of the principle that finds expression in its most extreme form in the adherents of the ' single tax'. Not infrequently the attempt to enforce the quit-rent was in the interests of democratic settlement. Thus in Virginia enlightened governors, like Spotswood or Nicholson, sought in vain by these means to break up the large areas of land which were held for speculative purposes by the members of an oligarchical ring. The fact that the British government sought, and were successful in their efforts, to use the quit-rents as a reserve fund, independent of the votes of the assembly, gives the clue to the assembly's conduct in its support of the council. In turning to the more general question — how far was the system of quit-rents a contributing cause to the discontent that brought about the revolution ? — ^the answer is extremely doubtful. In the first place, in the original New England colonies, which gave the backbone to American resistance, the system of quit-rents never prevailed. In Virginia, according to Mr. Bond himself, * during the colonial period the quit-rent system was, for the most part, successful, and illustrates how much could be done with a charge of this kind when once it had got firmly established in a crown colony'. It is true that in 1779 these charges were summarily abolished ; but this was only natural, considering that they had been attached to the demesne of the Crown. The moral to be drawn from the conflicting experience of Pennsylvania and of Maryland is that it was the manner, rather than the fact, of the enforcement of the system that made