THE COMING OF PARLIAMENT.
The Coming of Parliament. By L. Cecil Jane. (T. Fisher Unwin. 5s.)—The contents of this volume do not correspond with any closeness to its title. One expects to find an account of how the rudiments of popular representation were developed into the instrument of government which we know as the Houses of Parliament. But if we take the word "Parliament" as a symbol of the Constitutional principle, then we may learn from Mr. Jane a good deal about how it "came." He tells how feudalism passed away, how the loss of the Continental dominions of the Plantagenets affected the political status of England, how the power of the nobles was broken, and how a Limited Monarchy— limited not by the power of a rival despotism of aristocrats, but by the rights of the people—was established; and writes of other cognate matters. We have in this a commentary on the history of England, viewed in its political aspect, the special period dealt with being that of three hundred odd years which began with the passing of the Statute of Labourers (1349) and ended with the Restoration of the Stuarts. The volume will have its uses, but we should have preferred something more to the purpose. The irrelevancy of the greater part of the illustrations is specially noticeable. What has "Travelling by Sea in the Fourteenth Century" to do with Parliament ? And what "The Emperor Charles V. " ?
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