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judges and jury, and though Professor Keeton argues very ably that they acted within the unsatisfactory rules and conventions of the day, he does not deny their political motives-which were hardly comparable with Pym's or Cromwell's. Statesmen and conspirators at least knew what treatment they could expect. The townsmen and countryfolk of the west who had in one way or another become involved in Monmouth's rebellion were a different matter. Jeffreys' notorious tour, with its sentences of death or transporta- tion handed out by the hundred, is excused by three pleas as familiar in the twentieth century as they were then: the stories were exaggerated for propaganda purposes; other people did things just as bad; there were orders from above. All the arguments contain a good deal of truth but not much contribution to historical understanding. Certainly Whig writers then, and later, circulated stories on inadequate evidence and dressed up party interests as constitutional or humanitarian ideals; certainly the Jacobite rebels of 1745 were ill-treated too; certainly James and Sunderland approved of Jeffreys' activities. What does this prove? Professor Keeton cannot claim to offer much new factual material. There are no private Jeffreys papers, and it would be useful to have more specific instances of apparently deliberate destruction of references to him. The diaries of a moderate Whig baroner in Cheshire, Sir Willoughby Ashton, which have not been much used before, have some vivid dialogue but little significant information. When the lurid colours have been toned down we are left with a pretty nasty specimen of the brutal authoritarian. D. H. PENNINGTON. Manchester. THE CENTRAL LABOUR COLLEGE. By W. W. Craik. Lawrence and Wishart, 1964. Pp. 192. 30s. The Central Labour College by W. W. Craik suffers from the failing memory of the author, and the complete lack of the records of the college. Consequently, it is an inadequate account of an institution which, in the thirteen effective years of its existence, turned out nineteen Labour members of Parliament, six ministers of Cabinet rank, and three general secretaries of national trade unions. With one exception, every constituency in the South Wales coalfield has, at one time or another, had an ex-Labour College student as its member. This is part of the story that is missing, together with the support that the South Wales miners gave to the rebellious students. Without that support there would have been no college. The author describes the establishment of Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1899, by a wealthy American, with the object of 'training working men for service in the Labour Movement'. The conflict between the ideas of