Much has been written about the Methuen Commercial Treaty and its influence for good or bad. Rather less has been said about the negotiations which related to it, though Sir Richard Lodge wrote a good summary of the three Methuen treaties in Professor Prestage's Chapters in Anglo-Portuguese Relations and there is an excellent and much fuller account in German by Johann Albrecht. Some of the facts relating to these negotiations are still little known and there may, therefore, be scope for the following article, which attempts to set out some of the difficulties with which John Methuen had to contend and to place the commercial treaty in perspective.

The intention of this paper is to inquire into Burke's doctrine of traditionalism—as it may be termed—from a point of view not quite identical with that usually adopted. The aspect of Burke's thought thus isolated may or may not be the most important or the most characteristic, but it is the most familiar and that with which the student first becomes acquainted. Burke held—to summarize what may be found in a hundred text-books on the history of conservatism—that a nation's institutions were the fruit of its experience, that they had taken shape slowly as the result, and were in themselves the record, of a thousand adjustments to the needs of circumstance, each one of which, if it had been found by trial and error, to answer recurrent needs, had been preserved in the usages and established rules of the nation concerned. He also held that political knowledge was the fruit of experience and that reason in this field had nothing to operate on except experience; from which it followed that, since the knowledge of an individual or a generation of individuals was limited by the amount of experience on which it was based, there was always a case for the view that the reason of the living, though it might clearly enough discern the disadvantages, might not fully perceive the advantages of existing and ancient institutions, for these might contain the fruits of more experience than was available to living individuals as the sum of their personal or reported experience of the world. It also followed that since the wisdom embodied in institutions was based on experience and nothing but experience, it could not be completely rationalized, that is, reduced to first principles which might be clearly enunciated, shown to be the cause of the institutions' first being set up, or employed to criticize their subsequent workings. There was, in short, always more in laws and institutions than met the eye of critical reason, always a case for them undiminished by anything that could be said against them.

The Yorkshire Association of the early 1780's marked the first effective extension of modern political radicalism in Great Britain from the metropolitan region into the provinces. During what may for convenience be described as the first—the Wilkite—phase of British radicalism, in the early 1770's, the focus of the radical movement had lain in and around London. Attempts to stir up the country provoked only a brief response in a very few constituencies. There was little trace anywhere of sustained radical activity. Provincial apathy at the general election of 1774 caused acute disappointment to the metropolitan radicals. Six years later the situation had changed remarkably, and from 1780 till 1784 politics in Yorkshire were dominated, and in the rest of England considerably affected, by that remarkable political phenomenon, the Yorkshire Association. Starting in December 1779, an extraordinary, widespread upsurge of discontent among the members of the ‘upper class’ in the county, provoked by the North ministry's inept handling of the American crisis, first produced the well-supported petition of 1780 for economical reform, and was then channelled and organized into an instrument of agitation for reform of the parliamentary system. The association proper came into being between its adoption at a county meeting on 28 March 1780 and the middle of the following August, when the parchment copies which had been circulated for signature were gathered in and the roll of some 5800 names was compiled from them.

The repeal of the corn laws in 1846 has generally been regarded as the result of a clash between the old agricultural order and the rising industrial and commercial classes of the era. Whether or not this view is altogether correct, it is certain that there was another side to the story that deserves a closer scrutiny than it has hitherto received—namely that of the difficulties which took place within the ranks of the agriculturists of the Conservative party. The outcome involved an event that was just as interesting and perhaps more important than the fate of the corn laws. In bringing about the downfall of Sir Robert Peel, it radically altered the fortunes of Benjamin Disraeli, who could never have found any considerable place in Peel's Conservative party. On the disruption of that party, he was able to make himself indispensable in the building of a new one and thus ensure for himself a destiny that it had seemed might well elude him. How closely he concerned himself with the early stages of the agricultural intrigue that ended in the downfall of Peel it is not intended here to inquire. Suffice it to remember that he had been involved in agricultural conspiracies long before 1846 and had doubtless been for some time aware of the possibilities of the kind of rupture which eventually occurred. At all events he always seems to have kept a very calculating eye on the differences that sprang up between Peel and his agricultural following.

British opinion in the East became sensitive to propaganda against slavery and the slave trade surprisingly early. Thus in 1772 the Committee of Circuit in Bengal, when recommending the enslavement of the families of hereditary dacoits, thought it necessary to explain that slavery in India involved only a mild domestic subordination, since ‘the ideas of slavery borrowed from our American colonies will make every modification of it appear to our countrymen in England a horrible evil’. In 1789 Cornwallis prohibited the collection of slaves for export, and was contemplating a gradual abolition of slavery in Bengal.2 David Scott, a hard-headed East-India merchant and a Director of the East India Company, wrote in a private letter in 1796 that the salt workers in Bengal must be freed from compulsory labour, ‘for slaves cannot work so cheap as free men, besides we ought to give all our subjects liberty‘. In 1804 Wellesley ordered proposals to be made for the prohibition of slavery on Penang, since there could be no great difficulty about it on so recent a settlement.