and the West India sugar preference often intruded themselves into British politics in the years from 1807 to the fiscal revolution of 1846. It would now seem, moreover, that colonial preference is again to find its way into the British tariff.

In The Empire on the Anvil (London, Smith, Elder and Company, 1916; xvi, 242 pp.), Mr. Basil Worsfold presents the case for the creation of a federal government for the British Empire. He holds that the war has made it imperative that attention should be turned to the problem of the reconstruction of the administrative system of the empire. Mr. Worsfold points out that the substitution of a federal or dual system for the system under which the British Empire is governed at present would not be to erect an imperialistic system. The very opposite, he says, would be the case. "The present system is imperialistic, since the electorate of a single state (the United Kingdom rules the rest of the empire. But under a federal system, the status of the United Kingdom would be reduced to an equality with that of other component states of the empire, and its sovereign power would be shared by them." Mr. Worsfold is convinced that under a federal system the empire would gain in administrative efficiency. The organized development of its resources under a central government would, he is confident, augment its collective strength for all purposes of peace or war; and the immediate constitutional effect of the change of system would be to convert what is now the empire of a single sovereign state into a free union of states and peoples. Mr. Worsfold boldly faces the great difficulties confronting the organization of the empire on federal lines-difficulties due to wide separation of its component parts, to differences of race and civilization, and to the preëxistence of the imperial authority now centered in the United Kingdom. He also realizes that both the United Kingdom and the oversea dominions would have to make many sacrifices to effect a new imperial organization. But he contends that these sacrifices would be compensated for by the share of imperial unity which would accrue to each of the British communities concerned. One of the serviceable features of Mr. Worsfold's book is the material that he presents concerning larger schemes for closer union of the empirein particular, concerning the work attempted and accomplished by the Imperial Federation League and also concerning the Colonial Conferences and the Committee of Imperial Defence.

There are at least two reasons for according a hearty welcome to Mr. H. C. Ferraby's The Imperial British Navy; How the Colonies Began to Think Imperially upon the Needs of the Navy (London,

Herbert Jenkins, Limited, 1918; 277 pp.). It is in the first place a clear and admirably presented history of the attitude and policies of the self-governing colonies toward responsibility for the naval defense of the Empire. In the next place Mr. Ferraby's timely contribution to the history of the relations of the self-governing colonies with Great Britain seems to suggest that the war has aroused a new and wider interest in colonial autonomy, as beneficently developed in the period from the rebellions in Canada of 1837-8 to the great crisis that confronted the Empire when the Teutonic powers started out on their mission of world conquest in the summer of 1914. Responsible government was conceded to most of the colonies, which are now Dominions, in the years from 1841 to 1854. The history of this concession-the first stage in the new relations of the colonies to Great Britain-has been adequately told. But the other changed relations growing directly out of the concession of responsible government have been singularly neglected by writers on the history of the British Empire; and as far as can be recalled, Mr. Ferraby is the first student of these newer relations to trace with any degree of completeness the way in which the colonies realized and attempted to discharge their responsibilities and obligations with regard to the defense of their own shores.

done in this direction before 1887. But between 1887 and 1914 all the colonies in one way or another had made some contribution either to the navy or to the cost of maintaining the navy. Mr. Ferraby's book must soon go to a second edition. In preparing this he will add appreciably to its value if he will show how far the colonies availed themselves of the Cardwell Act of 1865, by which power was given to them to maintain vessels of war, to raise men for service on war vessels; and to legislate for the discipline of men in the colonial naval services. Adderley, in his sympathetic study of the development of responsible government in the colonies, bestowed praise on Cardwell for the act of 1865. But exceedingly little has been written of the use to which the self-governing colonies put the act by which these new powers were conferred on them.

In The Awakening of an Empire (London, John Murray, 1917; xxvi, 326 pp.), Mr. Robert Grant Webster, of the Inner Temple, who was a Conservative member in the House of Commons from 1886 to 1899, strongly advocates a return to protection. As he views it, the policy of free trade "lies in a heap of ruins-a monument of broken promises and failure." At times Mr. Webster is a little inexact in his presentation of the fiscal history of the United Kingdom, as, for

instance, when he states that "free trade was a catch electioneering expression, invented by certain agitators in 1846." In places, also, he is severe on some of the men who were his colleagues in the House of Commons, but who were not, like himself, members of the Conservative party. From the point of view of those who are compelled to watch the progress of reconstruction in England at long range, one obvious value of Mr. Webster's book is that it manifests the spirit in which the fiscal question, as it affects reconstruction, is being discussed by some of the thorough-going protectionists.

Mr. Christopher Turnor's The Land and the Empire (London, John Murray, 1917; 144 pp.) is a distinctly valuable addition to the library of reconstruction literature. It is of more than passing usefulness because of its clear and well-ordered exposition of the agricultural economy of England on the eve of the war, and because of the comparison which the author makes of the agriculture of England with that of Belgium, Germany and Denmark and the statistical and other detail on which this comparison is based. Mr. Turnor, like Mr. Webster, is not an admirer of the old school of economists, the school that so greatly influenced England's fiscal policy during the hundred years preceding the outbreak of war in 1914. But only a few pages of Mr. Turnor's book are concerned with the old-school economists and the fiscal system. In the main it is a plea for a better organization of agriculture in England, for a new and more social attitude of owners of land toward land as a peculiar form of property, for a large extension of small holdings under national as distinct from county systems of inception, finance and oversight and for better wages for agricultural laborers in counties. where wages are notoriously low and inadequate. In urging better organization of agricultural economy, Mr. Turnor repeatedly emphasizes the importance of cooperation in purchasing farm supplies in some departments of farm work and in particular in marketing farm products. Like the late Earl Grey, he attaches great importance to the ethical and social value of cooperation; and above all, he pleads for a national land policy. His book is of special interest to students of farm economy in the United States, for Mr. Turnor treats of farm problems in England, some of which are quite similar to problems which have engaged, or are now engaging, the attention of the Department of Agriculture at Washington.

The preparation of The Government of England-National, Local, and Imperial (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1917, xi, 384 pp.) must have been a congenial undertaking for Professor D. D. Wallace. From

the first page to the last this is obvious, for, as the book manifests, he is an admirer of the political civilization of Great Britain and the British Empire and is disposed to endorse the statement of Admiral Dewey when he declared that after many years of wandering he had come to the conclusion that the mightiest factor in the civilization of the world was the imperial policy of Great Britain. Professor Wallace's aim in writing his book was to describe "the English government as it is, without distracting the reader with a long account of how it came to be what it is." To this end he has grouped his subjects into the following divisions the legislature, the executive, local government, empire and colonies, and social and political characteristics. The field into which he has thus moved is a large one to be covered in a book of eighty thousand words. To some degree Professor Wallace has succeeded. He gives an easy, flowing description of the framework of the British government. He is eminently successful in describing the attitude of the people of England toward their governmental institutions and in conveying the spirit in which these institutions are worked. But the book lacks compactness; and in some places, even when the limitations of space are kept in mind, there is obvious skimpiness. One instance of this is in the chapter describing political parties at Westminster. A reader previously ignorant of the subject would end his perusal of the chapter with the impression that in 1916, the year in which the book was written, as in the first half of the nineteenth century, there were only two parties in Parliament. There is not a word about the Nationalist party, nor about the Labor party as it has existed and developed since the general election of 1906. There is nothing in the book, in fact, to indicate the development of the group system that was the outstanding feature in the House of Commons from the third extension of the franchise in 1884 to the beginning of the Great War. Professor Wallace's statements, moreover, are in some places inaccurate. Parts of the book are now out of date by reason of the revolutionary changes in the electoral system made by the Reform Act of 1918. To be out of date, is, however, the lot of writers on the English constitution, for of no country is political progress more characteristic than of Great Britain.

Treatises and monographs of worth on various subjects in British imperial history are not wanting, but a tolerably satisfactory brief history of the British Empire remains to be written. The most recent attempt to supply this desideratum has been made by two professors of history in Grinnell College, Cecil Fairfield Lavell and Charles Edward Payne. In Imperial England (New York, The Macmillan

Company, 1918; ix, 395 pp.), these gentlemen display a fluent and engaging style, but their book is weak both on the side of imperial policy and of colonial government. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was what we are justified in calling a British colonial system, and it was destroyed in the nineteenth century, but the authors give no evidence of an understanding of its rise, development or fall. They tell us nothing of the imperial aspects of mercantilism or free trade, though a story of the old British Empire that leaves out mercantilism, or of the new British Empire that dispenses with free trade, is in as serious a predicament as Hamlet without the prince. One sentence is deemed sufficient for the government of the Australian Commonwealth, though space to the extent of fifteen pages is found for the achievements of Livingstone. Had the authors made more judicious use of the books contained in the list of suggested reading appended to the volume, they would have greatly improved their work.

The Colonization of Australia, 1829-1842, The Wakefield Experiment in Empire Building (London, Sidgwick and Jackson, Limited, 1915; xx, 363 pp.), by Mr. Richard Charles Mills, is a detailed and excellently presented study of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of colonization and its working in South Australia. Wakefield's plan was based on three principles: (1) the sale of government lands in the colonies at a uniform and sufficient price; (2) the use of the whole or a fixed proportion of the revenue from land sales in promoting emigration from the United Kingdom to the colonies; and (3) a judicious selection of emigrants with respect to age, sex and social position, with a preference for young married couples. At least two plans of colonization in which the government was concerned had been tried in the era of British colonial history that began in 1783, before Wakefield established himself as an authority on colonization. Both were tried in the years from 1815 to 1830. The first was Wilmot Horton's scheme for settling paupers in the British North American provinces or in Cape Colony. Horton's plan was not undertaken on a large scale, and no success attended it. The second attempt resulted in the Swan River settlement in Western Australia where success was partial and slow. Wakefield's plan of colonization was the most interesting of any of those that were tried, until, in the era of responsible government (1843-1855), crown lands in the self-governing colonies were turned over to the colonial governments. A study of the Wakefield system is well worth the care which Mr. Mills has bestowed upon it. The introductory pages of his book, moreover, are