was good enough to take the chair at that given in the University of London-and my friend Dr. C. W. Alvord for reading my proofs. The lectures were for the most part delivered from notes and written out afterwards. An engagement as Professor pro tempore in Columbia University in the autumn postponed their publication but enabled me to add a number of references and illustrations of my theme. It also provided an opportunity, which I should be loth to neglect, of acknowledging the gracious hospitality and unfailing courtesy which fell to my lot on this as on other occasions. I should like to add, if I might be so bold, that if Britons were as conspicuously eager to learn about the United States as American students are about England, there would be fewer obstacles to that better understanding which it is the object of the Sir George Watson Foundation to foster. A. F. POLLARD UNIVERSITY OF LONDON 1 February, 1925 UNIV. OF FACTORS IN AMERICAN HISTORY A CHAPTER I INHERITANCE AND TRADITION HUNDRED and fifty years ago, almost to this day,' Parliament was discussing two sets of legislative proposals, one of which helped to retain and build up the present Dominion of Canada, while the other went far to dismember the British Empire and create the United States. The Quebec Act, which was introduced into the House of Lords on 2 May, 1774, granted the French Canadians the free use of their own religion, civil laws, and land tenure; it has always been regarded as their Magna Carta, and it kept them almost surprisingly loyal during America's Revolution and its subsequent wars with Great Britain. The other proposals which engaged the attention of Parliament during that spring were four penal acts against Boston' which rallied the other twelve colonies to the side of Massachusetts, produced the first Continental Congress, and led to the Declaration of Independence. The communities, 1 9 May, 1924. "Reprinted in W, MacDonald's Select Charters, etc., 1914, PP. 337-56. thus repelled or revolting from the empire and constrained to unite with one another, have grown into what is potentially, if not actually, the most powerful state in the world-powerful not merely by weight of numbers' or force of arms, nor even by reason of its wealth, but through the pervading influence of its ideas of law and politics. Yet it took the Great War to make us realize the significance of the portent. The colonists had gone west, and not until they returned in the closing years of the war to give the victory to the Allies did there come home to us the necessity of studying, in the hope that we might understand, a phenomenon comparable, in the perspective of the history of the world, with the civilization of ancient Greece, the far-flung, long-drawn rule of Rome, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Revolutions of Industry and of France. The two first of those elements in our culture were for centuries the staple of our education. The next four forced their way into educational curricula during the nineteenth century. It is not a credit to our prescience that it should have been left to the twentieth to take educational cognizance of the greatest experiment in politics the world has ever seen; and there was a capacious breach in British education when Sir George The area of U. S., excluding Alaska and overseas possessions, is over 3 million square miles. The density of England's population is 700 per square mile. If the United States became as populous, it would contain over 2,000 million people, more than the present population of the world, |