such exchanges will not only promote the mobility of labour within the country, directing men who are unemployed but have a good character to places where additional labour is required, but also that, aided by the Board of Trade, they may be able to collect such information, abroad as well as at home, as would enable them to foresee, and to some extent to provide for, periods of trade depression when likely to occur. In connexion with Labour Exchanges the Commissioners make the further suggestion that it would be desirable to have for every public elementary school an intelligence bureau, which would advise parents and teachers as to the branches of employment likely to give the best opening for children leaving school. The establishment of such bureaux would certainly supply a much felt want in our existing educational system. As a fifth remedy they urge (while recognizing the difficulty of the task) the importance of doing something, even in the most uncertain employments like that of dock labourers' work, to increase the number of those regularly employed and diminish the tale of those who live by casual labour. They think that the Board of Trade might make inquiry to see how this might best be done, and then take initial steps to bring it about. Lastly, to meet the difficulty of unemployment which arises from the existence of a class of unemployables they propose that the less hopeless of these people should be set to work, but without detention, in an industrial or agricultural institution or colony under the management of the Public Assistance Committee, their families at the same time being maintained, or partially maintained, in their own homes or in institutions. The aim is to be to impart habits of industry and perseverance to those who have partially lost or never acquired them. The most hopeless are to be maintained continuously under compulsory detention in a labour-colony established and managed under the Home Office. The Commissioners quite admit that unemployment has grown to such serious dimensions and has assumed such a permanent form that it is not likely, were all the plans recommended by them to be adopted, to disappear either immediately or completely; but the first two suggestions would do something to cut it off at its source, the last to curtail the most permanent of the elements which create it, while the intermediate measures, and still more the revival of trade, should cause much of the fluctuating but not irremediable unemployment to disappear. Probably it is to a sustained revival of trade, if such a phenomenon is possible, that we must look in the immediate future for any considerable diminution of the present dearth of employment. Therefore it behoves the Government to be very careful to do nothing, whether by its financial arrangements or otherwise, to throw obstacles in the way of such a revival. The Chancellor of the Exchequer by rash words, by rash, ill-considered, ill-digested measures, has already done so much to scare confidence away and to drive capital to look for investment outside of the country, that it is doubtful whether he has not done more harm to the prospects of the working classes, whose interests he professes to champion, than he has done good by his Old Age Pensions Act, which he introduced without consideration of the sources from which the money it would cost was to be drawn. The Conservative Party, it is true, must be regarded as partly responsible for the difficult and even disastrous position in which we find ourselves; the least that the country can expect of them is to see that the taxes which have now to be raised be so adjusted that not more than the necessary amount be taken from the pockets of the taxpayers, and that the sums to be obtained be obtained in the way which will be least injurious to trade and confidence. Viewing the Report as a whole one cannot but be struck with its monumental character. The diligence and thoroughness with which Lord George Hamilton, his colleagues, and their associates, have examined and marshalled the facts are beyond praise; so, too, are the fairness, the impartiality, and the clearness with which they have exhibited alike the merits and the defects in our existing system. The analysis they have made of the chief features in our present economic condition and their historical survey of the causes which have produced it are alike acute and suggestive, nor have they shrunk from putting their finger on the weak spots and saying to a generation only too prone to applaud itself and rest content with things as they are, Thou ailest here and here'; and if the remedies which they suggest seem to us sometimes too heroic and too far beyond the resources which as yet we possess to be carried out successfully in their entirety, yet no one can deny their thoroughness, their coherence, and their completeness. Everywhere they seem to point to a distant goal to be aimed at; in many directions they indicate lines which legislative action may profitably follow; and over and above this there are to be met with throughout the Report suggestions for administrative reforms which, if carried out in the spirit in which the Commissioners would have them undertaken, would go far to redress most of the evils from which our Poor Law system is now suffering. For, if we cannot say that 'whate'er is best administered is best,' it remains true that a bad or indifferent system well administered is superior to a better system administered ill. This principle is not without application to the more far-reaching and revolutionary proposals of the Report of the Minority, which may, perhaps, be considered in a later article. W. A. SPOONER. ART. IV.-WESTMINSTER IN THE TWELFTH 1. Epistolae Herberti de Losinga, Osberti de Clare, et Elmeri prioris Cantuariensis. Edited by ROBERT ANSTRUTHER. (Brussels. 1846. Also for the Caxton Society, London. 1846.) 2. On the Origins of the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.) By EDMUND BISHOP. (London: Burns and Oates. 1904.) 3. Eadmeri monachi Cantuariensis Tractatus de Conceptione Sanctae Mariae. Edited by H. THURSTON, S.J., and T. SLATER, S.J. (Freiburg: Herder. 1904.) 4. The History of Westminster Abbey by John Flete. Edited by J. ARMITAGE ROBINSON, D.D., Dean of Westminster. (Cambridge: at the University Press. 1909.) THE Norman had come and conquered, and he plainly meant to stay. The massive churches rising everywhere proved that, as surely as the castles. Westminster, indeed, had been in front of the time. Its new church was a prophecy; built by the Normanized king, and after the fashion of Jumièges, which had given its abbot Robert to be bishop of London, chief adviser of Edward, and presently archbishop. When the Conqueror arrived the choir of Westminster was ready for his coronation, and the English abbot, winning his favour on that occasion, held his own when others were displaced. The first Norman abbot, who succeeded Edwin in 1071,' walked not in the ways of his fathers,' and was soon sent back to his old abbey of Jumièges. The next, Vitalis, was a good man from Bernay, a cell of the reformed Fécamp. Then from the abbey of Bec came a favourite pupil of Lanfranc and Anselm, Gilbert Crispin, a high-born Norman, learned and devout, the biographer of Bec's founder, Abbot Herluin. In December 1117, after ruling for thirty-two years, Gilbert was laid in the south walk of the cloister of his building; and there in the new cloister of the fourteenth century his time-worn effigy can still be seen. King Henry was abroad, and the abbey remained vacant. Next year the good Queen Maud, as the chroniclers constantly call her, was buried near King Edward's grave before the high altar. But still the king had not returned. When at last he crossed in November 1120, the White Ship sank with all his hopes. In January 1121 Herbert the almoner was appointed abbot, the first monk of the house to be chosen for more than seventy years. Of Herbert we know little. The monastic historian Flete tells us that he was a Norman. Perhaps he followed Gilbert from Bec, for one of Gilbert's earliest charters is attested by Herbert the monk. If so, he was past middle age when he became abbot. The prior, a younger man, This was full of zeal and energy, had been passed over. Osbert, a native of Clare in Suffolk, who is by far the most conspicuous representative of Westminster for the next thirty or forty years, notwithstanding his enforced retirement from his monastic home during most of that period. Osbert's history has yet to be written. A few facts are to be gleaned from the Westminster muniments, but the main story must be gathered from his extant letters, which have hitherto been only incompletely edited. We first catch sight of Osbert in the early years of Abbot Herbert's rule. We have a letter of his written to Hugh, the prior of St. Pancras at Lewes, before he was transferred in 1123 to King Henry's new monastery at Reading. Osbert, who writes from Ely, is already in trouble, and speaks of himself as proscriptus.' After discoursing largely on friendship, he recalls a visit which, in company with two of his brethren, Gregory and Godefrid, he had paid to Hugh in days gone by. He describes the warmth of his reception and the eternal friendship which at once sprang up between them. Then, after an elaborate exposition of a passage of Zechariah, he turns to speak of his present situation and uses language which ought to help us to understand his career. Unfortunately, like much else of his writing, it is capable of more than one interpretation. As the passage has not yet been printed, it may be given here. Towards the close of his letter, which, as he says, |