THE HISTORY OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT IN ENGLAND.
English Local Government frosts the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: the Parish and the County. By Sidney and Beatrice Webb. (Longmans and Co. 16s. net.)—This is the type of work before which the reviewer is helpless. He can only call attention to the magnitude of its range and the industry displayed in it; he cannot hope to give any idea of the manner of treat- ment. It is the kind of book, commoner in Germany than in England, where the writer selects a difficult and arid province of inquiry and leaves no detail unrecorded. Mr. and Mrs. Webb aim at describing the whole system of local government as it existed in England and Wales between the years 1689 and 1835, and in this, their first volume, they deal with the parish and the county. They have selected the most interesting epoch in local history, for during the eighteenth century the national Government, on the whole, abstained from intervention in local affairs, leaving them to be managed as best they could by the various types of local body which had grown up in the land. But this fact complicates the history, for it makes the authorities obscure. We do not find the annals of the localities in the Parliamentary history of England or in the more important kinds of literature. Local acts, local newspapers, and local archives are the sources, and the task of investigation becomes almost unthinkable. For example, say the writers, "to gain an explanation of certain features in the govern- ment of the City of London, we found ourselves exploring the church chests of villages in Northumberland." They were assisted by a staff of workers, mostly connected with the London School of Economics, and we aro glad to learn that the manuscript notes made in the course of the inquiry have been preserved at the School for the use of future students. But with it all, Mr. and Mrs. Webb are modest about their achievement. They do not consider that they have come near exhausting all the available sources of information. "What we have aimed at is rather the mapping out of the whole field of English local government for this period, without assuming to have dealt exhaustively with any part of it." As we have said, it would be idle to recapitulate the results which Mr. and Mrs. Webb arrive at. Suffice it to Bay that it is a book of very great interest to others than the specialist, since it contains a vivid picture of eighteenth-century provincial life. The method seems to us as good as possible. The authors are never lost amid the multitude of their detail, but disentangle the lines of growth with masterly precision. It is a work which in its way should become a classic.
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