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later, at St. Michael's College, Llandaff, that High Churchmanship made its home. Mr. Price is undoubtedly right to conclude that it was social snobbery attached to a barely concealed sectarianism and the quite accidental conditions of relative expansion in the last quarter of the century that kept the College and effectively isolated it from the large developments in the other areas of higher education in Wales. This is bound to be the central theme of the next volume, and one looks forward enormously to its completion. In the meantime, this is a volume of great interest and, one hopes, of wide appeal. St. David's College has reason to be most grateful to Mr. Price for the excellence of his work, and the book is a worthy tribute to an institution which has been so closely involved in Welsh social developments over a century and a half. IEUAN GWYNEDD JONES Aberystwyth POLITICS AND THE CHURCHES IN GREAT BRITAIN, 1832 to 1868. By G. I. T. Machin. Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1977. Pp. 438. £ 15.00. In 1964 Dr. Machin published a study of The Catholic Question in English Politics, 1820-1830, which quickly established itself as a standard monograph. His second book provides a sequel not only in subject matter, but also in method and approach; and indeed its concluding sentences hint that a third volume is to come. Whether or not we have here the second part of a trilogy on the role of ecclesiastical issues in nineteenth-century British politics, certainly the present study possesses all the thoroughness we now expect from this scholar. Nonconformist 'Voluntaries' and their demands loom largest of all, but Tractarians, Ultra-Protestants, Jews and unbelievers are kept well in view, and the book is genuinely about the churches in Great Britain, not England. The massive bibliography includes forty-one unpublished theses as well as some fifty collections of manuscripts. (Characteristically, although Wales inevitably plays a comparatively minor part in his story until towards the end, the author deploys five manuscripts collections in the National Library.) References abound almost in the transatlantic manner. Although some of the proliferating publications on the political edges of his field have been overlooked and a few inaccuracies have crept in, equally there is some enterprising use of chapel membership lists, baptismal registers and poll books to indicate Dissenting electoral behaviour. The book's conclusions are briefly stated and very familiar: the rapid multi- plication of Dissenting and Roman Catholic citizens led not only to civil equality, but to increased state activity in spheres hitherto left to the established churches. Clearly it is for its narrative that it will be valued, and this flows steadily on with barely noticeable summarizing and inter- pretative pauses, to halt in 1868 when a new era was apparently about to open with the abolition at last of compulsory church rates and the disestablishment of the Irish Church. Here, then, is a study which is unfailingly balanced and scholarly if lacking in elegance and edge, and