Tins book presents about three hundred, mostly minute-long, fragments from
Debates in almost every year of the nineteenth century; it is not un"ce a series of regular scientific "readings. " Under such circum- stances personalities are indistinguishable," and sudden events like the Franco-Prussian War ungrasped. The reader is generally at the mercy of detached sentences from unknown parliamentarians; however, these slightly-contexed extractions gain substance through their very unremarkability. They are unremarkable because of the sameness of their approach, and ours, to our respective and so different circumstances. This then is the value-of the book, that it is not merely a lightly diverting collection of historical curiosities. It is interesting, too, that contemporary views, in the extracts, of the better-known aspects of the nineteenth century are strikingly akin to our own retrospective appreciations of them—for instance, the independent back-water rule of country magistrates, the effect of Napoleon's invasion threats, Parliament's scorn for the despots and their low regard of Parliament, our loose and undisturbed mid-century empire managed by self-reliant governors, and, later, our indifference to the Continental Powers except as partners in the Eastern Question. The editors, who say they chose simply what interested them, were pre- sumably impressed by the preponderating effect of this unchanging approach to chang- ing conditions, but, as if in counter-balarice, they select from the early nineteenth century a number of Radical and liberal criticisms of electioneering bribery which give a rather one-sided picture conflicting irreconcilably with the rest of the book.
A. E. T.
Previous page
