You have honoured with your presidency this year not a leisured man, who is capable of making a serene survey of all historical work done during the last twelve months, but a very busy Government servant, whose duties keep him tight to desks (three separate desks!) in Whitehall from 10.30 a.m. to 8 p.m. on most days of the week, and who must confess to you with all frankness that he has read little historical literature during the past year, save the single volume of Magna Charta Essays, Which is this Society's most important contribution in the fields of research for 1918. Your President, therefore, feels some diffidence on coming before you to-day with an annual address, when he remembers that the last of the series was delivered in February 1917 by a master of research and expression, a great teacher, and a trainer of other teachers, who possesses such a command of a long period of English History as does no other man living, and whom every member of the Society respects and reveres as the unquestioned lord of his own domain. His enthusiasm for the systematic gathering of knowledge, and his power of orderly marshalling of the essential facts, makes his successor feel a proper humility as he takes over the chair that has been so efficiently filled during the last three years.

Among the Surveys of the Manors of the Prior of Norwich contained in the volume known as Stow MS. 936 in the British Museum is one which has features of special and, it might even be said, of unique interest. It is the Survey of the Manor of Martham with which the series is concluded. The whole compilation, unfortunately, is in a defective condition. The first folio begins in the middle of a sentence under the heading ‘ham,’ the last syllable of the word ‘Hindringham,’ the beginning of which was on the preceding folio now lost. In other places also the record is abruptly broken off. The series was apparently commenced soon after the appointment of William de Kyrkeby to the Priory in 1272, and was continued at various dates, the survey of Martham being made in 4 Henry de Lakenham 1292.

There are two excellent reasons for this article. The first is the times in which we live. If it is not written now, it may never be written at all. My second reason is the subject itself. It rescues from oblivion a theory which has undergone the test of no public examination. That theory made its appearance nearly thirty years ago. It has never been accepted, though it seems likely to be true; and it has never been explained. Unless we are to go on blundering for ever, it is time that some attempt was made to clear the matter up.

The early relations of England with Russia were not only of a commercial, but also of a political character. The correspondence of Queen Elizabeth with the Russian Czars has already been described by the author. The friendly intercourse between both courts had attained the force of a tradition at the end of the century, and even the great unrest, the ‘Smuta,’ which preceded in Russia the elevation of the new dynasty, had no fatal influence on the position of the English in the Muscovite empire. Since the accession to the Russian throne of Czar Michael, the relations of the two courts, interrupted for a time, were resumed, and an animated correspondence followed between the first Stuarts and the first Romanovs. For the period of thirty-seven years (from 1613–49) We can identify 128 letters, though it is probable that a few others have not come to our knowledge. Of these, seventy-five were written by the English court, sixteen by James I, fifty-seven by Charles I, and two by the young prince Charles; fifty-three letters were written in Russia, forty-four by Czar Michael and nine by his father, the patriarch Philaret.

In the year 1505 the Portuguese, under Albuquerque, discovered Ceylon, and from that date until 1818 the island was the scene of intermittent warfare between its original possessors and successive European Powers.

The English customs duties under the early Stewarts, and the many vexed constitutional questions involved in connection with them, furnished some of the bitterest subjects of controversy at the time, both in and out of Parliament, and constitutional historians have devoted much attention to them. The questions that have been debated in this connection, however, have been mainly of one kind, and have related mainly to the constitutional powers of the Crown and the proper application of mediæval precedents under changed conditions. But there is an entirely different standpoint from which the customs can be approached, that of their administration as an essential part of the revenue-producing system, and comparatively little attention has been devoted to this aspect of the subject. It is important from a purely English point of view, but it is also specially interesting to the investigator of the English background for the early period of American colonisation, since customs duties played such an important part in fostering the growth of Virginia and of other newly established colonies.

The purpose of the following essay is to form some estimate of the place occupied by the King’s Council in the political and administrative machinery of England during the eventful reigns of the Lancastrian and Yorkist Kings, while an attempt must also be made to discover the source of its power, to exhibit the means whereby it hoped to control the entire government, and to trace the fluctuations of its long conflict with the monarchy.

The most learned of historians would find it difficult to add much to the sum of knowledge in treating the subject of my paper. That subject is the comparison between the administration of certain colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their administration in the nineteenth. The question is why, whereas in most colonies there has been steady progress from representative to responsible government-Lord Blachford was clearly wrong when he seemed to imply that Crown Colony government was the necessary preliminary to both these-in the West Indies, on the other hand, the tendency has been in the opposite direction, viz. from representative to Crown Colony government.

The history of South Africa is the story of the disintegration and eventual reconstruction of a country essentially one in all the main features that make for political unity. It is, as Carlyle said of the United Kingdom, and with even more truth, ' one on the ground plan of the Universe,' a compact block of temperate territory jutting out from tropical Africa into the Southern Ocean. There is a coast fringe, nowhere of any size except in the East, where it belongs to Portugal and falls outside the scope of our story, and immediately round the Cape where it forms a little Italy, a region of orchards and vineyards, the seclusion of which from the life of the veld beyond may have accounted for many mistakes in the days when South Africa was governed from Cape Town. For the rest South Africa is a vast terraced plateau, greener and better watered towards its eastern edge, shading off towards sandy desert on the West, but singularly uniform in all its characteristics, and broken up by no serious natural barriers.

I Have been asked to speak on the constitutional development of Canada, and there is perhaps a danger in a lecture on this subject being given by a Canadian. We are all inclined to think the history of our own country of special importance, to claim that all men should study the chronicles of our own land, where they may see different principles in conflict more clearly than they will in the story of other nations; where they may learn solutions for modern problems, which if they will only apply them, will send a more efficient and more peaceful world spinning on its way. Most of us, indeed, suffer from national egotism, which perverts our sense of history. You have only to read debates in Parliament in the eighteenth century to see how Englishmen overvalued English institutions. Trial by jury, Habeas Corpus, and representative assemblies were to Burke and Fox, and to many lesser men, panaceas for a world diseased.