of value for the light they throw on the indifference of Parliament and of the people of England to colonies and colonial questions in the first half of the nineteenth century.

At least two women-Miss Emily P. Weaver and Miss Agnes Laut— have made contributions of recognized value to the history of the Dominion of Canada; but, as far as can be recalled, Miss Mabel McLuhan Stevenson is the first Canadian woman to venture into the realm of political science. Miss Stevenson's venture, Our Government—A Book for Canadians (Toronto, George J. McLeed, Limited, 1917; 178 pp.), is an unqualified success. It is a book of 178 small pages that is characterized by the simplicity and excellence of its plan and by the care with which the plan is worked out. With good judgment, Miss Stevenson, in treating of the governmental institutions of the Dominion, begins with those nearest the people, with those with which they are most frequently in touch. She begins with local institutionsthose of the village, the township, the city and the county; and then she proceeds to describe the governmental machinery of the province and the Dominion. She confines herself rigidly to the machinery of government. She makes no attempt to describe its actual working. Her object apparently was to write a guide to municipal, provincial and Dominion government. With this end in view, she has achieved a success which is due in a large measure to the simplicity of her plan and the clearness which characterizes the description of the various departments of government with which she deals.

As far as can be tested, accuracy as well as inclusiveness, characterizes Mr. N. Omer Coté's Political Appointments, Parliaments, and the Judicial Bench in the Dominion of Canada, 1896 to 1917 (Ottawa, Lowe-Martin Company Limited, 1917; viii, 384 pp.). This is the second volume of Mr. Coté's compilation. The first was published in 1896. It dealt with the years from 1867 to 1895. Consequently, as a completed work, the handbook covers the first half century of Canadian confederation. The arrangement is remarkably good. The same may be said of the framework of the book; for there is a table of contents so detailed that it extends to six pages; and there is an index of twentyseven double-column pages. For the index, users of the handbook will be indebted to Mr. Coté as long as the book is in service. It is much fuller and more complete than is often the case in political handbooks. One instance of its completeness will suffice. In the case of proper names, the elections or political or judicial appointments to which they attach, are given. There need be no turning over of many pages to discover the particular name in which the student who is

using the book is interested. out the second volume of the compilation in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of Confederation. As a completed work the handbook is a serviceable memorial of an anniversary of much interest to the whole of the English-speaking world.

It was a commendable idea to bring

None of the works that have appeared on British imperial reconstruction embodies more painstaking and scholarly research than Dr. Arthur Berriedale Keith's Imperial Unity and the Dominions (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1916; 626 pp.). The volume is divided into two parts. Part i, dealing with "The Limitations of the Autonomy of the Dominions", is subdivided into four sections, the first concerned with the position of the governor in the Dominions, the second with the powers of the legislature, the third with appeals from the courts of the Dominions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the fourth with amendments to the constitutions of the Dominions. The first part can be characterized briefly as an examination of the powers which have been conceded since 1840 to British colonies possessing responsible government or have been acquired by those colonies through their own insistence. Dr. Keith shows in detail and with great care in what respects more powers must be exercised by the Dominions if they are to enjoy the status of full nationhood. In part ii, which deals with the question of closer union between Great Britain and the Dominions, the author offers a number of suggestions for advancing the status of the Dominions and promoting imperial unity. They are all interesting, and in view of Dr. Keith's acknowledged position as an authority in British imperial politics, each is worthy of careful consideration. Most of them are suggestions which can be adopted immediately, without awaiting any general reconstruction of the Empire.

In Letters to the People of India on Responsible Government (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1918; xx, 211 pp.), Mr. Lionel Curtis advocates the concession of responsible government to India. His study of the situation in India made in 1916-1917 has convinced him that the time must soon come when it will be necessary to transfer the control of Indian affairs from the people of the British Isles to those of India. The interest taken by educated Indians in constitutional questions is described by Mr. Curtis as intense. In August, 1917, a statement was made by Mr. Montagu, the Secretary of State for India, in the House of Commons, pledging the imperial government to the introduction by gradual stages of responsible government in India. The fulfilment of this pledge is now within the

realm of practical politics at Westminster, a fact which gives to Mr. Curtis' book an important place in the rapidly accumulating literature of British imperial reconstruction.

Professor George Burton Adams' writings in the field of medieval English constitutional history have been addressed principally to students and specialists, to whom his teaching is well known. In An Outline Sketch of English Constitutional History (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1918; 208 pp.), he writes for a wider public. The central theme of English constitutional history, in Mr. Adams' interpretation, is the limited monarchy, and to it he attributes all that is most distinctive and of peculiar import for the development of human freedom in that history. Mr. Adams believes that the conception of a contract between king and people, upon which the nation acted in the great crises of English constitutional history in 1327, 1399, 1649, 1689, is derived from the contractual relationship of feudalism which first received formulation and institutional expression in the Great Charter. Though this sketch contains no account of many institutions of government which fall within the scope of its title, it should prove useful to any one who is interested in the development of Anglo-American conceptions of government and liberty, which, in varying degrees, have become the property of civilized men everywhere.

Few authors make clearer the undertaking to which they have set themselves than do Mr. J. L. Hammond and Mrs. Barbara Hammond in the opening pages of The Town Labourer, 1760-1832 (London, Longmans, Green and Company, 1917; xi, 346 pp.). They remind us that in 1760 England's exports were worth fourteen million sterling and in 1832 fifty millions, and that in the former year her imports were valued at nine millions and in the latter at forty millions. Their work is "concerned with the fortunes of the mass of the people engaged in the industries that produced this new wealth"; and throughout its pages they follow the fortunes of the urban proletariat which, between 1760 and 1832, was recruited from nearly all the forty counties of England and massed in what are today the industrial towns and cities of the midlands and Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire. The authors show where the proletariat came from; and what the life, the discipline and the long hours of the new industry meant for the first generation of men and women of the factory era. They describe the housing and the municipal conditions in which the urban proletariat lived in the years before municipal life had accommodated itself to the inpouring of the new workers-children as well

as men and women-into places which had previously been little more than villages as regards their municipal organization. The war on the trade unions is examined in some detail, and the final chapters of the book are devoted to an analysis of the mental attitude of the rich-the old and the new rich—toward the victims of the industrial system and of the mental attitude of the poor toward the conditions of their own life. Like The Village Labourer by the same authors, published in 1911, this volume is intensely interesting and of great value as a contribution to the history of the English common people.

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The English Village, by Julia Patton (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1918; x, 236 pp.), will be welcomed by students of social problems and of the development of what is sometimes called "the social spirit." Although primarily Although primarily a literary study", in that the raw material is found in the writings in prose and verse which picture village life and village character in England from 1750 to 1850, the author's interest is less in literary origins and developments than in the "chapter in the social history of England" which is unconsciously spread upon the record through the medium of imaginative literature. The village of literature changed markedly in the course of the century that is studied, reflecting both the actual changes in social and economic conditions which were in progress and the growing knowledge and sympathy on the part of the public. "By 1850 it was no longer a place of idyllic beauty and charmed life, where strong Labour' and 'contented Virtue' dwelt in unbroken peace; it had become a real fleshand-blood, stone-and-timber village, still beautiful, still quiet and roseembowered, but the abode of people whose lives encompassed both happy and sad in a range of experience normal to human life everywhere." As this development is followed by Miss Patton through the multitude of writings which she seems to know with an unusual intimacy-by many an obscure verse-maker as well as by Crabbe and Goldsmith and Cowper and others more familiar-a fresh and poignant sense is aroused of the widespread hardship among the agricultural classes in the period between 1760 and 1830, of their hatred of the work-house and their horror of the poor-house, of the increase of the pauper population under the allowance system and of many other features of the social and economic history of the century.

The title of Lord Prothero's book, English Farming: Past and Present (second edition, London, Longmans, Green and Company, 1917; xv, 504 pp.), is not sufficiently inclusive. It fails to indicate, or even to suggest, many topics in English agrarian history with which the book deals. Lord Prothero has, in fact, given us a compre

hensive account of English agriculture from the time of the manorial system to the eve of the great war, so complete and thorough that it is impossible to suggest any aspect of farming or of rural economy which it does not discuss. In narrating the history of English agriculture during six centuries, the author describes the evolution of rural England and traces the changing relations of social classes to each other. The book, furthermore, supplements the histories of modern English industry, describing the exodus from town to country of men who had accumulated wealth in commerce or in manufacture and the effects of this on rural economy. In showing how the industrial revolution affected English farming and how the enclosure of the commons added to the labor supply in the factory towns, Lord Prothero makes a new and valuable contribution to the history of industrial England. This is a book which cannot be ignored by any student of English history who is interested in the disappearance of the old open-field system of agriculture, the rise and economic fortunes of the governing territorial class, the history of land tenures, the relations of tenants and landlords, the operation of the corn laws from the middle ages to 1846, or the old poor law as it affected rural England.

Some twenty-five subjects are discussed by Mr. J. H. Balfour Browne, K.C., in Recollections, Literary and Political (London, Constable and Company, 1917; vi, 311 pp.). Several of them are of interest to students of English politics of the pre-war period. The essay on Politics and Parties" has a distinct value from this standpoint. So has the essay on "Humor at Elections". In particular the discussion of socialism and syndicalism is worthy of mention in view of Mr. Browne's long acknowledged position at the English bar.

For a volume of collected papers-there are nineteen contributors -Experts in City Government (New York, D. Appleton and Company, 1919; xvi, 363 pp.), edited by E. A. Fitzpatrick, exhibits an unusual degree of homogeneity, if not of systematic discourse. This is due in part, no doubt, to the fact that most of the papers are not reprints but were written specifically for the book. There is as usual wide variation in the merits of the several contributions. There is also not a little contradiction in respect to facts and points of view. For example, Mr. Pollock concludes (page 85) "that the independent boards whose membership is non-salaried and overlapping, have been one of the biggest single influences in developing expert service in municipal administration ", while Dr. Beard thinks (page 341) "not that the lay board should be utterly rejected, but that reliance upon it