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denominational schools focused on the county council as the new all-embracing authority, and Dr. Davies gives a blow by blow account of the fight by the Liberal-dominated county council against the 1902 Act. This is perhaps the most interesting part of the book. Dr. Davies shows how the Liberal members tried to find a way out of the conflict through the so-called Montgomeryshire 'Concordat'; the collapse of the 'Concordat' led the county council into open revolt along with Merioneth. The withdrawal of support from denominational schools was much more effective in Montgomeryshire (where non-provided schools far out- numbered provided schools) than in Merioneth, where non-provided schools formed only a small minority. Although Dr. Davies devotes much of his book to the political and religious conflicts of the early years of state education in Montgomery- shire, he also looks at other aspects of educational administration in a county such as Montgomery. He has a very interesting section on the problem of school attendance in the year following the 1870 Act, and useful chapters on such questions as school meals and welfare, language policy, and the implementation of the 1944 Act. Dr. Davies shows in the latter part of his work how rural depopulation came to be the main problem in educational administration in the years after the second world war. This book is a useful contribution to the growing body of local studies of the history of education and will also give an additional viewpoint to anyone studying the development of educational policy in Britain since 1870. RICHARD LEWIS Teesside Polytechnic, Middlesbrough ESSAYS IN ANTI-LABOUR HISTORY: RESPONSES TO THE RISE OF LABOUR IN BRITAIN. Edited by K. D. Brown. Macmillan, 1974. Pp. 409. £10.00. The title of this important collection of essays is not only a little polemical; it is somewhat misleading as well. In so far as they have a general theme, it is in responses to collectivism and state intervention. Thus, five of the eleven essays deal specifically with the reaction of laissez-faire apologists to the apparent increase of etatisme in the old political parties. As Mr. J. W. Mason, in his essay on Thomas Mackay, puts it: It is difficult now to recapture the depth of despair felt by individualists like Mackay in the late nineteenth century. The Con- servative Party under Salisbury, no less than the Liberal Party under Gladstone, seemed to Mackay to be sliding down the collectivist slope into the quagmire of socialism. (Italics mine.) To these essays the 'Rise of Labour' is only incidental or, indeed, entirely external to the argument. In fact, only four of the other essays discuss organized working-class movements in any detail, and these disparately.