In an Annual Address delivered two years ago the late President of this Society took occasion to lament the neglect in Great Britain of the serious and scientific study of the history of Europe since the close of the Napoleonic wars; and unfortunately there cannot be any doubt as to the full justice of his complaint. It applies in some measure to the history of our own country, but it is especially true of the development of the States of Continental Europe. To this neglect many facts bear witness. There is first the paucity of textbooks; we have as yet in English no good general history of the period, or even of a part of it, on any comprehensive plan; the only large work is that by Fyffe, which is incomplete in many respects, and has other defects; and the various smaller books, though some of them have real merit, are all very far from adequate. Both Fyffe and the lesser books, for example, are extremely weak in regard to those economic forces and policies which have been of such vast importance throughout the century: to take only a single illustration, none of the writers seem to have had any conception of the true relation of the economic policy of the Zollverein to the political problem of the positions of Prussia and the Austrian Empire in the Germanic Confederation, or of the extent to which that policy was manipulated for political purposes. This tendency to ignore or underestimate the play of economic forces is indeed characteristic of most that has been written in English on Continental history since 1815, though in face of the great amount of work done in this field by foreign investigators, particularly in Germany, the attitude of the English writers is scarcely excusable.