The September 1966 issue of this Journal contains a study by Professor Irwin Feller on the rate of adoption of the Draper Automatic Loom in the New England cotton textile industry. I have no quarrel with his central conclusions concerning the economic rationality of the New England cotton manufacturers. I do, however, have some comments on his analysis of the relative costs of producing cloth on plain (power) as opposed to automatic looms.

This paper shows that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 broadened access to Parliament for families needing rights to sell land in so-called estate bills. Bills were on average 14–27 percentage points more likely to be for gentry families and not aristocratic families in legislative sessions after the Revolution compared to sessions before. Regression and archival evidence suggest that parliamentary certainty was primarily responsible for improved access by altering families’ entry calculus and brokers’ recruitment of new business. More broadly, the paper provides insight into the ways in which political institutions affect access to and the provision of property rights.

A new study of labor in France in the earlier nineteenth century seems justified for two reasons. First, a change in the point of view is desirable. Labor in that period has been treated as a movement related to political factors and to socialistic and other doctrines. I feel that it should be studied now in the light of the changes wrought in the lives of the French people by the advent of large-scale industry with its factories, machinery, and concentration of capital. It is important to realize that much of the unemployment from which French laborers suffered in this period was due to those recurrent crises in industry and trade which we now study as parts of the business cycle. We have been taught wrongly to believe that while England suffered from these crises early in the nineteenth century France was virtually exempt until 1857. Secondly, the study of French labor needs revision in the light of new evidence and of a reappraisal of some of the familiar evidence.