Page:American Historical Review, Volume 12.djvu/254

 FRENCH REPORTS OF BRITISH PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Among the documents classified under the head " Correspon- ■dance Politique, Angleterre," in the records of the French For- eign Office are included numerous reports of debates in the Brit- ish Parliament, chiefly of the eighteenth century. These reports, some mention of which is to be found in the Invcntairc Sommaire issued by the department in 1903, do not appear to have formed at any time an unbroken series ; a certain number, alluded to in de- spatches sent at the same time, have been mislaid or destroyed since. Most of them give but short abstracts of the speeches, which are not to be compared with the verbatim reports of the present day. Their historical value would be rather slight if we were in posses- sion of a version both complete and reliable of the parliamentary debates previous to the nineteenth century. But such a version, as it would be easy to show by conclusive arguments, does not exist at present, and we do not even see the way to compile a satisfactory one.^ Therefore any document which is likely to throw a ray of light into the surrounding darkness, any report which can give fair evidence of its own accuracy, even if insufficient in itself, must be marked out and compared with the other sources. Be it ever so short and scanty, it may fill up a gap ; it will at any rate help us to control our antecedent knowledge, to put its worth to the test, to mete out the ground which we may hope to know with some degree of certainty, and the space beyond, which we nuist make up our mind never to explore. I. The writer did not, while perusing the volumes of the Corre- spondance Politique, meet with any parliamentary report previous to the time of the Restoration. Even during the eventful period when the Parliament of England, then in the heat of its great struggle with the sovereign, practically ruled the country, there ' On the history of parliamentary reporting in England, see the prefaces of vols. VIII.. X., and XI. of the Parliamentary History of England: William Co.e, Memoirs of the Life and Administration of Sir Robert IValfole. I. xx ct seqq.: George Birkbeck Hill, appendix to Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. I. 501 cl seqq.; Dictionary of National Biography, art. "Guthrie"; and P. Mantoux, .'otes sur les Comptcs-rendiis des Seances dii ParlemenI Anglais an XVIIIo. Sii^cle, PP- 2-34. (244)