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both academic and practical. Professor David Williams puts these essays in their setting with an introductory biographical sketch which is unusually informative, a model of its kind. As is customary with books from the University of Wales Press, this volume is attractively produced and most reasonably priced. It provides an excellent survey of the work of one of the doyens of history in Wales, and is on all accounts to be welcomed. In many ways, Sir Frederick represents the Fabian tradition in Wales: he could reasonably be regarded as the spiritual heir of Tom Ellis. Several essays here bear testimony to his Fabian passion for social improvement and reconstruction, particularly in the economic and administrative fields. There is a concise analysis of the roots of the prolonged depression that crucified South Wales between the wars, and the efforts to remedy it which finally bore fruit after 1945. Another essay (which perhaps owes something to the sensitive appreciation of literary evidence that Sir Frederick derived from his Oxford tutor, Sir Owen M. Edwards) assesses the attitudes of the novels of Disraeli, Kingsley, Mrs. Gaskell, and Dickens to the discontents of the 'bleak age' of the 1840s. Yet another reviews the career of Robert Owen of Newtown. The sociological implica- tions of industrial growth are illustrated by a discussion of urban planning, and by a moving account of the early years of adult education, and of Sir Frederick's class at Blaenau Ffestiniog, the first class directly sponsored by a Welsh university college. His concern with governmental issues is reflected by a comprehensive survey of the constitutional evolution of the dominion of Ceylon, in which Sir Frederick himself played a major part as a member of the special commission of 1944-45. Here and elsewhere we see Sir Frederick happily cast in the role of the scholar as activist, or, in the words of C. Wright Mills, 'the scholar as history-maker', asking the important questions about the present, and supplying a good many of the answers. Those contributions here which deal specifically with Wales call for special consideration. Sir Frederick's interests (notably where his native Pembrokeshire is concerned) range over the whole course of Welsh history-and of prehistory as well. One shrewd lecture assesses the role of Welsh historians in fostering or in frustrating a sense of nationality; reminiscences of Owen Edwards and John Edward Lloyd enliven the discussion. Sir Frederick's conclusion is that Welsh historians have played only a minor part in fostering national sentiment in Wales. This may, perhaps, be questioned. In a wider sense, beyond such specific issues as the desire for self-government, the sense of cultural identity in Wales is surely ultimately historical in source. The purging of old myths by academic historians may result in a more realistic, and therefore more durable, sense of national consciousness in Wales. Sir Frederick himself has helped to lead the way here. Equally provocative is the essay which lends the title to the present volume. It originally appeared in Nineteenth