No matter how one measures its commitment to public education, the S outh in 1890 lagged far behind the rest of the nation. Twenty years later, southern public schools were still characterized by relative backwardness, but the preceding two decades had seen impressive expansion in absolute terms. Among the salient features of this transformation were sharply increased per pupil expenditures, school terms, and enrollment rates; greater provision of normal schools and related institutions; and high rates of investment in school capital. State legislatures increased their appropriations, limitations on local taxes were abolished, and the number of counties and school districts voting to increase school expenditures skyrocketed.

It is doubtful that any other period of comparable length in British history witnessed as many profound changes in politics as did the first quarter of the twentieth century. To mention only some of the more important examples, voter turnout rose from about 21% to 76% of the adult population; the party system was transformed when Labour displaced the Liberals as the major party of the left; legislative power was profoundly altered by the Parliament Act of 1911 which deprived the Lords of the right to veto permanently bills passed by the Commons; the social base of parlimentary recruitment expanded to include more members from lower middle- and working-class backgrounds; the disruptive influence of Irish self-government was removed from political life; and public concern shifted from issues related to Empire and wider access to parliamentary politics to domestic matters of a distributional nature. Under the cumulative impact of these changes, particularly in the party system, British politics in essence ceased to be traditional, and became modern.

A necessary step in any assessment of early national economic growth is a characterization of market development before independence from Great Britain. Drawing up such a characterization, however, presents problems as at least two different pictures of the eighteenth-century economy are currently available. One depicts the intense involvement of early Americans in markets and overseas trade, while another equally powerful image suggests a colonial landscape of sleepy villages inhabited by farmers devoid of a profit orientation and almost entirely dependent upon their own households and neighborhood reciprocity for goods and services.

The problem of explaining the process of development of the Russian bureaucracy in the nineteenth century has been eased substantially by the appearance within the last ten years of an extraordinary collection of studies. Some of these have concen- trated on individuals, but by far the most important group of works (Amburger, 1966; Armstrong, 1959, 1973; Orlovsky, 1981; Pintner, 1970, 1975, 1980a, 1980b; Troitskii, 1974; Torke, 1967; Zaionchkovskii, 1964, 1974, 1975, 1978) has dealt with institu- tions and with groups of bureaucrats. Other interesting and helpful essays that summarize or synthesize the many individual findings have also appeared e.g., Raeff (1979), Field (1979), Orlovsky (1976).

In his 1978 essay in this journal, Robert E. Gallman praised but also criticized my work on the “egalitarian myth,” arguing that it had not in fact “dealt a death blow to the ‘egalitarian hypothesis’“ (1978:194). In my response the following year, I tried to show that his criticism was based in large part on a misreading of what I had written, attributing to me “statements I had never made and viewpoints I do not hold.” He thus had created “an elaborate model to refute a point that I had not made” (1979a: 208). Although I argued that his overall criticism was invalid, primarily because it was not based on “germane historical evidence,” I closed by praising the “admirably reasoned spirit that infuses Professor Gallman’s essay,” praise I publicly repeated in the American Historical Review (1979a: 224, 1980b: 1163).