In the seventeenth century America escaped from the world, in the twentieth century it has been forced to return to it. This cycle contains the drama of the American historical consciousness which protected America's provincialism in the past but is bound now, in the age of the reverse migration, to serve as an instrument of its dissolution.

It is just fifty years since the distinguished legal historian, Adhémar Esmein, addressing an international conference in London, discussed the interpretation of the Roman law maxim Princeps legibus solutus est by the medieval glossators, and the influence of their teachings on the growth of French government. Esmein thought that the glossators had perverted a doctrine of classical constitutional law, which had merely exempted the emperor from the observance of certain legal rules, into a general principle of irresponsible absolutism. Certain French constitutional lawyers of the sixteenth century, he maintained, struggled stoutly against this doctrine but, none the less, its acceptance opened the way to various abuses in French public life ranging from the arbitrary decision of legal cases to the issuance of lettres de cachet. Esmein accordingly took advantage of the occasion to congratulate his English hosts on having escaped the glossators' baneful influence.

The history of Muhammadan Law in India falls naturally into three periods: (A) The period of Muslim domination (1206 A.D.–1857 A.D.); (B) The British period (1661–1951); (C) The Republican period (commencing with the promulgation of the Constitution of India on 26 January 1950). The dates are in such cases somewhat misleading and not mathematically “neat”. They may overlap, as in the British period, or, be ambient, as during the Muslim Sultanate. On the other hand they indicate with some degree of clarity the historical evolution and the time sequence of each system of jurisprudence. It will thus be seen that the Muhammadan law in India is one more instance of law being a function of society, thus being in a continuous state of flux. It is hardly necessary for me to add that the above classification must be read culliert to itc natural limitations.

A very great deal of our knowledge of urban life in Tokugawa Japan relates to the “happy society” of Genroku in the early 18th century, to the life of the theater and the gay quarters, and to the activities of the great merchant houses and the more extravagant and colorful of their heads. Extensive coverage is given theories of the state, administrative arrangements, and the discrepancies between the actual and theoretical positions of the classes of Tokugawa society. Ordinarily, mobility is treated in passing, partly because vertical social mobility is rightly presumed to have been a minor feature of that society until at least its closing period, and partly because the materials required are so difficult to unearth and so resistant to rigorous analysis. Bellah's observation that “…mobility was largely within classes rather than between them,” is apt, although Taeuber reminds us that “…movements of surplus youth from the rural areas to the cities were adjustments of population to resources and employment opportunies that ante-dated modern industrialization by some centuries.” Lampard completes the thought with respect to its implications for the transition to industrialism in his remark that “…old commercial-administrative centers [provide] ready markets, some tradition of urban life, and constant pressure to secure a livelihood from non-farming activity.”

The scholarly interest in emerging nations in the post-World War II period had its anthropological and sociological focus on the development of cities in these areas. Nationalism seems to be connected with industrialization and with urbanization. In West Africa much of the attention spent on study of developing cities has concentrated on the importance in such situations of the voluntary organization. It seems quite clear now that voluntary organizations are one of the most often used and most effective techniques for softening the shock of transplantation from the certainties of tribal life into the uncertainties of city life. The formation of voluntary organizations in cities is not restricted to Africa, however. In Central and South America, in Southeast Asia, and in India the voluntary organization has grown and developed and been studied. Most attempts to compare voluntary organizations in these places seem to have assumed that they were a natural or inevitable result of a process called “urbanization”. It does not seem to me to be necessary to compare these social phenomena in the context of such a process. We should compare voluntary organizations in different times and places and under different circumstances in order to enhance our understanding of more general social and cultural processes. This paper attempts two things: the delineation of the history of the formation of voluntary organization of one immigrant group in one West African city; and a comparison between the voluntary organizations of this group and of some other groups. It is hoped that the former will contribute to the body of knowledge we have about voluntary organizations, and that the latter will suggest hypotheses about social and cultural processes in general. It is not sufficient to describe the voluntary organizations of the Ibo in Calabar. It is necessary to trace the history of the town itself; to compare the reaction of the Ibo to the urban environment with that of the Efik, the indigenous inhabitants of the town; and to show in what ways the culture of the Ibo and the Efik predispose them to react in the ways they do.

The emergence of one-party political systems among the new nations of Africa, now an unmistakable trend, has been disconcerting to social scientists for at least two reasons: first, this trend was not clearly foreseen during the period leading to independence; and, second, now that it is clearly discernible students of Africa are uncertain as to how the trend should be interpreted and evaluated. This question was discussed in a recent article by D. E. Apter from the viewpoint of political science. The present paper deals with the same problem, but from an anthropological viewpoint. It considers only the new nations in Africa south of the Sahara; these were also Apter's main concern, though he includes in his discussion some of the new nations in other parts of the world as well.

Mr. Gray's argument, if I have understood it correctly, is that two-party political systems, which he equates with the register of a vote for any purpose, are culturally linked with a philosophy which sees true and false, right and wrong, as polar opposites and which springs from the claims of the Christian church to final authority in matters of truth and morals. He argues that we are moving away from such a philosophy in the light of recent discoveries in physics, notably Einstein's theory of relativity and presumably (though he does not mention this) Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. He draws support from Dr. Apter's statement of a generalization familiar to the student of politics, that in a successful two-party system both sides must court the “floating voter”, and this leads them to moderate their opposition rather than carry it to extremes. Mr. Gray does not accept this as a general proposition, but takes it as a description of a recent change in the attitudes of political parties, to be correlated with new trends in philosophy. Hence, he argues, the two-party system is not an essential element of democracy and there is no need to be distressed if it is not adopted in African states. African culture, he argues, is not based on our philosophical premises, and the evidence he advances is that Africans are free in some societies to choose between the cults of different deities.

Table II, p. 142, top row of boxes, second from the left, to read:

23 1

17 69

Table III, p. 152 liberal minus vote on Roebuck's resolution should read:

73

Page 136, line 5, change 8th word from “of” to:

or

Page 138, 12th line from bottom, change 9th word from “of” to:

for