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Webb: English Local Governmejit 631 than in any of the others (pp. 801-953) ; this we are told by the editors is exceptional and is due to an intention to do honor to Lord Acton by utilizing the collection of his books presented by Mr. Carnegie to John Morley and by Mr. Morley to Cambridge University in compiling " a full bibliography of the Thirty Years' War, and more especially of its extant original documents and contemporary narrative and controversial literature ". Only the specialist can venture to criticize this effort. But it naturally suggests the thought that the editors in the bibliographies of the other volumes seem to be occupying rather untenable ground in giving more than the average student needs and not enough for the specialist. Victor Coffin. English Local Government from the Revolution to the Municipaf Corporations Act: The Parish and the County. By Sidney and Beatrice Webb. (London, New York, and Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Company. 1906. Pp. xxv, 664.) At last the local constitutional history of England is receiving the treatment which it deserves as compared with the history of the national organization. This book is epoch-making. The completed work as planned by the authors will constitute a veritable magnum opus both in scope and in quality, to judge by this splendid installment. It is to com- prise at least five volumes, grouped in two general divisions. The first division, in three volumes, deals with the " constitutional form and the administrative procedure of the various kinds of local governing authori- ties " ; and the second, in two volumes, with " the action of all these authorities in respect to the various functions entrusted to Local Gov- ernment." Hitherto the attention of original investigators has been con- fined mainly to the Anglo-Saxon and early feudal periods of English local institutions. Regarding some of the more important problems of the early history, in articles, monographs, and in books dealing with the national constitution, much good work has already been accom- plished. Even for those times, however, there exists no authoritative or sustained " local constitutional history " based on a full use of the sources ; while for the modern development the only general treatise has been Dr. H. Rudolph von Gneist's Self government, Communalverfassung und V erzvaltungsgeschichte, first published in 1857 and finally revised in 1871. It is highly significant of the extreme indifference of English scholars to one of the richest fields of research that this important book has found no translator. Yet, able and erudite as is Gneist's celebrated work, in reality it is merely a legal history based mainly on the public statutes and parliamentary papers. Little use has been made of the private acts and none at all of the manuscript records of the various administrative and governing bodies. The present volume represents an enormous amount of labor. With the aid of a number of trained assistants, the authors were engaged upon