The political conflicts that followed the accession of George III
in 1760 are of high interest, as one of their results was the loss of the old American colonies. Mr. L. B. Namier's intensive study of the political system then prevailing and of the House of Commons elected in 1761, in a volume entitled England in the Age of the American Revolution (Macmillan, 25s.), therefore deserves attention. Mr. Namier accumulates minute details and, with an almost excessive distrust for the generalizations of the text-books, seldom stops to sum up. But the effect of his remarkable monograph is to place the young King in a more favourable light, to discredit both Newcastle and Bute, and to show that the House of Commons, with its overwhelming Whig majority, was much more inde- pendent than is commonly supposed. It follows that the Stamp Act was not forced on America by a despot, but was deliberately adopted by a not unrepresentative House of
Commons. * a * *
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