In a theoretical sense it may be said that the Revolution of 1688–9 established the supremacy of Parliament in the English constitution, but from a practical point of view the result of the Revolution was a –mixed and balanced’ constitution, in which power was shared between Crown and Parliament, and exercised within a framework of law. Although the doctrine of a ‘mixed and balanced’ constitution was an old one, the Revolution made clear the need for Crown and Parliament to work together, and in the reign of William III a new definition of their relationship was achieved. In this process the question of finance was crucial, for Parliament saw in control of finance the most effective instrument to limit the power of the Crown, while the Crown insisted that monarchy could not maintain its proper place in the constitution without some degree of fiscal independence. The outcome was, like most aspects of the Revolution Settlement, a compromise, in which the Crown received an independent income for the Civil List, while Parliament assumed responsibility for the military forces and the debt. The Civil List compromise of the reign of William III resolved the conflict between the Stuarts and their Parliaments for control of finance, and was an important step in the achievement of political stability within the ‘mixed and balanced’ constitution.

By 1811, just a year after the annexation of their national territory to the French Empire, the Dutch had organized the most effective and comprehensive system of elementary education in Europe. How had this been accomplished? Not, at any rate, in emulation of their former neighbours. At the zenith of its power, Imperial France had nothing to show for years of speculation and derelict legislation except the return of responsibility for the ‘écoles primaires’ to the Church. The respective condition of the two states made this contrast still more emphatic. France commanded financial and administrative resources which the most absolute of her monarchs would have coveted; the Dutch were exhausted by fiscal penury and torn by bitter political division.

The history of social and political ideas is often brilliantly illuminated by personal intellectual confrontations. Our understanding of the concept of progress is enhanced by consideration of the divergences between Diderot and Rousseau; our attitudes to revolutionary change cannot fail to be influenced by the debate between Burke and Paine; our appreciation of communist and anarchist ideals is refined by contemplating the dispute between Marx and Bakunin. Similarly our view of certain questions important to mid-nineteenth-century social philosophy may be sharpened by an examination of another confrontation, less famous though scarcely less revealing than the foregoing, embodied in the exchange of letters between Alexis de Tocqueville and Arthur de Gobineau. The present discussion of some aspects of their correspondence makes no attempt at a full-scale comparison of the two figures. Rather, it places an emphasis upon him who is now the lesser known—a stress which is all the more defensible in view of much of the debate's previous treatment at the hands of historians. Into such historiographical questions there is no need to venture—at least, not beyond stating the two broad considerations which seem to justify an essay in reinterpretation along the lines suggested here.

The field of Anglo-Irish administrative history, comprehensively surveyed by Dr R. B. McDowell, has been subjected to little detailed analysis. This article attempts to fill the gap in one important respect. It sets out to examine the role of the Irish Board of Works during the famine years. In 1846–7, at a time of grave national crisis, the Board of Works tackled the near-impossible task of providing public works for the relief of almost every family in Ireland. Despite the Treasury's efforts to control abuses, the Board of Works proved unequal to the task, and had to be replaced as the main tool of government policy.

On 3 August 1914 a short-lived Radical body of intellectuals, the‘Neutrality Committee’, issued a statement to the press calling upon Britain not to depart from a policy of strict neutrality. A similar organization, which went under the title of the British Neutrality League, and supported by an imposing array of Liberals—Lord Welby, the Lord Provost of Glasgow, the Lord Mayor of Manchester, the Bishop of Hereford and C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian—did much the same. It implored the nation not to take part in a Continental war, since no British interest was involved: ‘the violation of Belgian neutrality was insufficient to bring us into war’. Other spokesmen of moderate and left-wing Liberal opinion followed suit, among them a fairsized number of Cambridge scholars. Meetings and demonstrations were held throughout the country to protest against possible British intervention. Organized by the socialists in Trafalgar Square, these were of impressive proportions. In Parliament, too, a small group of dissenting M.P.s withstood the gathering war hysteria and urged the Government to accept the German guarantee of Belgian ‘integrity’, though this might mean a temporary invasion of her frontiers. All in all this last-minute spectacle of opposition to British involvement in the 1914 War has sometimes led to the historical assessment that the Radicals, together with their socialist allies, were men of an insular mind and isolationist in their approach toward European politics.

Possession is nine-tenths of the law. Diplomacy confirms the fact. As an illustration no incident is better than the Italian retention of the Southern Sporades or Dodecanese group of Aegean Islands in the years immediately preceding the First World War. Italy, last and weakest of the Great Powers, was able to defy the expressed wishes of Britain, the dominant naval power on whose patronage Italy traditionally relied. Defiance of Britain was not accompanied by a corresponding surrender to Italy's Central Power allies. It triumphed through Italian skill at exploiting the above dictum: possession is nine-tenths of the law.

Until August 1914 the European powers dominated the Far East. Japan was growing rapidly in stature and strength following her victories over China in the war of 1894–5 and over Russia in the war of 1904–5 but she was not in a position to challenge the European powers. Britain was concerned primarily with maintaining the status quo in the Far East and in particular with defending British commercial supremacy in China, especially in the great Yangtze valley. These objectives had involved her in growing friction with her ally, Japan, for Japanese leaders wished their country to play a more effective political and economic role in China. The outbreak of war in August 1914 transformed the situation in the Far East. The European powers were divided and interested principally in winning the conflict in Europe. War spread to the Far East, however, as a result partly of German naval strength necessitating a British request to Japan for assistance but essentially because of Japanese determination to seize the opportunity to extend Japanese power in the region. The German fortress at Tsingtao in Shantung province of China and the German islands in the Pacific north of the equator were in Japanese hands by November 1914. The next Japanese objective was to replace European hegemony in China with Japanese hegemony and in January 1915 a list of twenty-one demands was handed to the president of the Chinese republic, Yuan Shih-k'ai. Yuan had become president after the revolution of 1911–12 which had terminated the ancient Chinese empire.

The best chances of a negotiated peace during the First World War lay with the President of the United States. Woodrow Wilson's efforts were abortive, but he made some very interesting moves. The most sensational was his note to the belligerents in December 1916, requesting them to state their peace terms—a move which seemed all the more provocative in Allied countries because it followed upon the heels of the German Chancellor's proposal to negotiate. The main purpose of this article is to examine the British Government's reactions to the President's note. A secondary purpose is to criticize some important points of interpretation made by Professors A. S. Link and Ernest May.

The countries of south-eastern Europe at the beginning of the last war were caught, as they themselves put it with as much self-deprecation as fear, between the Axis hammer and the Russian anvil. There was almost a touch of defiance in their description, as if the extraordinarily high odds against their survival confirmed in their eyes their claim to national independence and to world attention. In fact over the 20 years of their existence they had made a virtue of the politics of Kleinstaaterei, of the fact that their destiny was determined not by themselves but by the Great Powers surrounding them. The Balkan states were creatures of Great Power politics and, with an unerring appreciation of their dependence on powerful neighbours, they looked to London or Paris or Rome or Berlin or Moscow for sustenance and direction. And yet—and this is the crucial paradox—they continued to harbour, side by side with their acknowledged dependence on the Great Powers, a deeply felt longing for collective independence and for political self-sufficiency. This paper is concerned with the desperate attempts of the Balkan countries in the autumn of 1939 to harmonize these conflicting requirements by promoting collective independence in the form of a bloc of neutrals under the leadership of a Great Power.