“The biscuit is certainly exceedingly dry; but at any rate there are no weevils in it,” Lytton Strachey wrote, praising slightly one “scientific” historian that he might more thoroughly attack another. Strachey's amusing, contorted, perceptive, and sometimes ignorant burlesques of Victorian behaviour have lost favor; but they remain, more brightly outlined and self-mocking versions of common prejudices. Certainly the belief that the “scientific” historians produced dry biscuit is still commonly held even among those who one would suppose had read them; and the belief is probably held more clearly and widely about William Stubbs than about either Mandell Creighton or S. R. Gardiner, because as an historian his name is more eminent, more people have heard of him, or more people who have heard of him know that he is a “scientific” historian from the authoritative, the “dry” period. He was born in 1825 and died in 1901.

In fact the problem with Stubbs is in quite a different direction. Stubbs is more compelling than his evidence demands and more fascinating than his subject would predict. F. W. Maitland, before he was forced by profession to that sort of reading, found Stubbs's Constitutional History “in a London club, and read it because it was interesting.” Even at his weakest and dullest Stubbs is interesting; at his strongest and most flamboyant, as in his Benedict of Peterborough and Walter of Coventry introductions in the Rolls Series and in parts of his Constitutional History, he is dazzling. The problem is not overcoming Stubbs's dullness but explaining his brilliance.

By his skillful use of England's resources, more than by his generalship in the field, Edward I became one of the most effective military commanders England produced between the Conqueror and Oliver Cromwell. King of a country rich in men, money, and resources, he was well provided with raw materials, but it was Edward's accomplishment to use them to create and support a large and tenacious army. He called for fighting men from all classes of the population, regardless of tenure; he required all sections of the realm to send provisions; and he required all people in his kingdom to support his wars by granting subsidies. Organization of this nature called all of Edward's political acumen into play, for it implied the existence of a corporate nature for England, one where the people not only must approve measures that touched them, they must also contribute to them. When the matter touching them was the defense of the realm, they responded to royal leadership by forming a proto-national army.

In spite of the importance and implications of this subject, there has been sparse treatment of it by historians. A handful of articles and a few books deal with the subject of military organization directly, while it forms a small part of a number of general works. William Stubbs described the make-up and use of both the militia and the mounted forces of England as pieces in the great game between king and barons and as evidence for the growing sense of nationality in England. J. E. Morris's Welsh Wars of Edward the First is a careful analysis of Edwardian armies based largely upon Exchequer sources.

The Instrument of Government was England's first and, if we except the Humble Petition and Advice, its only written constitution. It lasted only a little over three years, from 1653 to 1657, and was soon cast aside and all but forgotten in the rapid sequence of events which followed Cromwell's death: the restoration of the Rump, then of the Long Parliament, and finally of the King himself. Thus it is definitely an aberration so far as English constitutional development is concerned, but to an American, in whose country the principle of the written constitution and its concomitant principle of the limitation of legislative sovereignty have won out, the Instrument is of much greater interest.

In order to comprehend fully why the Instrument was made and what it was designed to achieve, the role of the New Model Army and its relation to Parliament must be considered. This army had become a quasi-political body as far back as the summer of 1647 when it first assumed the role of champion of political reform. In its Declaration of the Army it declared that it was not “a mere mercenary army, hired to serve an arbitrary power of a State, but called forth and conjured by the several declarations of Parliament to the defense of their own and the people's just rights and liberties.” From there it had gone on to submit various proposals for the settlement of the kingdom, such as the Heads of the Proposals and the Agreement of the People.

The followers of King Charles I in the Civil War, long among the whipping boys of English history, have been receiving better treatment since the Whig interpretation of the seventeenth century lost its pristine vigour. This is particularly true of their constitutional position as set forth in the great outpouring of manifestoes and pamphlets during the war. Edward Hyde, perhaps the key figure in this aspect of royalism, has recently profited from a capable defence of his opinions and policy. Similarly, pamphleteers such as Henry Ferne, Dudley Digges, and John Bramhall are now fairly well known, thanks largely to J. W. Allen's pioneering study of their writings. From work like this it is clear that the royalist spokesmen accepted the increased importance of Parliament, the end of prerogative courts and nonparliamentary taxation, and the supremacy of common and statute law. Like their armies in the field, they were defending the monarchy as overhauled in 1641, not as the Tudors left it, much less as James I may have conceived it. Indeed the classical doctrine of the mixed or balanced constitution, glorified by Blackstone and widely accepted until nearly 1830, is now credited, not to Philip Hunton, but to the royalists. Such rehabilitation has done much to remove the patronizing label of “wrong but romantic,” which was once the best which they could hope for from historians or the general public.

Allen and those who followed him naturally concentrated on the legal and constitutional analysis of the origins of authority, the veto power, sovereignty, nonresistance, and so forth.

The notion that parliamentary politics in the days of William III and Queen Anne revolved around the conflict of the Whig and Tory parties is deeply rooted in the historiography of the later seventeenth century. Nourished by the many contemporary references to the existence and activities of the Whig and Tory parties, the “two-party concept” had its first flowering in the nineteenth century and came to full blossom in the early decades of the twentieth in the works of W. C. Abbott, K. G. Feiling, W. T. Morgan, and G. M. Trevelyan.

The canons of orthodoxy of one generation of historians, however, have often proved to be little more than the cannon fodder of their successors. In this case, it was one of Abbott's own students, Robert Walcott, who has led the way in the task of reinterpretation. As early as 1941, Walcott — remarking upon the obscurity enveloping accounts of party groupings in the period 1689 to 1714 — advanced the hypothesis that “the description of party organization under William and Anne which Trevelyan suggested in his Romanes Lecture on the two-party system is less applicable to our period than the detailed picture of eighteenth-century politics which emerges from Professor Namier's volumes on the Age of Newcastle.”

Walcott's invocation of Sir Lewis's studies of mid-eighteenth-century politics was, of course, a testimony to the advance in historical methodology that had gained prominence with the appearance in 1929 of The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III.

“The country towns are grown poor,” declared Hugh Boscawen, member for Tregony, to his colleagues in the House of Commons in November 1670, “the inlands grow generally poor. The trading people abroad deal only with London.” Sir Robert Howard agreed: “It was ever said by the wisest men he could meet with that the greatness of London … would be the ruin of the country.” But in 1670 the complaint was hardly new. For well over a century English men and monarchs alike had watched with an anxiety increasingly acute as London, already a giant among English towns, continued to add to her size and population. Many in the country had feared, as did Boscawen and Howard, the effects of such growth upon the rest of England, while those close by tended to be aware of the special economic, political, and social problems which the unhealthy and crowded conditions in the overgrown old city presented.

On March 12, 1564, Queen Elizabeth had issued a proclamation stating “Rules to prevent crowding, in plague ridden Westminster, close by London.” And on July 7, 1580, she proclaimed from Nonsuch Palace that

English literary history is full of the colorful individualists variously referred to as “characters,” “personalities,” or “eccentrics”; and the literary scene in eighteenth-century England had its full share of “originals,” to use Tobias Smollett's term. They ranged from the tendentious clergymen (Conyers Middleton, William Warburton, William Stukeley) to the Grub Street hacks (John Dennis, John Trenchard) to profligate rakehells (Charles Churchill, John Wilkes) and artistocratic dilettantes (the Duke of Chandos, the Earl of Eglinton, and scores more). Though some of these men wrote prodigious amounts — notably Middleton, Warburton, and Dennis — most of them are known today largely because they drew the anger of Alexander Pope and were amberized in The Dunciad or because Dr. Johnson dissected their opinions or because Boswell encountered them in his serendipitous career and recorded the fact in his Journals. A few of them, like Wilkes, were famous or infamous within political or social contexts; these have survived in historical works dealing with Georgian politics. For the most part, however, intellectual historians of the twentieth century are inclined to treat the Warburtons and the Monboddos as a rather bizarre species, now extinct: the overspecialized freaks thrown out by the current of ideological evolution.

For a very long time Horace Walpole has been viewed by many scholarly critics as a similar sort of oddity. His literary productions were so varied, so numerous, and so uneven in quality that he defied placement in a single area of interest. Walpole's own account of his writings in the Short Notes of his life provokes in the reader wonder at a mind at once interested in making Latin verses on the marriage of the Prince of Wales, parodies of Macbeth with political overtones, Fontainesque fables about little white dogs, catalogues of oil paintings, bagatelle verses, vehement periodical essays and pamphlets, scores of cenotaphs for deceased acquaintances, and Historic Doubts on Richard III.

It is now more than a decade since John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson first challenged the conventional interpretations of nineteenth-century imperial history and employed the term “The Imperialism of Free Trade” to describe the “ever-extending and intensifying development of overseas regions” — a term which characterizes British imperial policy in the middle decades of the last century. The general validity of this thesis has been illustrated by reference to British policies in India in this period. There was the extensive program of railway construction, financed by British capital at favorable rates of interest guaranteed by the Government of India. There was the manipulation of the Indian tariff in response to pressure from the Lancashire cotton manufacturers. There was the cotton improvement program, the object of which was to relieve Lancashire's dependence on the United States as the major source of its raw cotton. In this case, the desired object was not achieved, despite considerable effort and expenditure sustained over more than a decade. But the approach of civil war in America revived interest in India as an alternative source of supply, notwithstanding the many difficulties that stood in the way. Indian cotton was raised on small holdings as a secondary crop every third or fourth year; its quality was poor; climatic conditions were uncertain; demand was irregular; communications between the cotton-producing areas and the ports were bad; and trade was hampered by lack of a contract law and a bankruptcy act. The Lancashire cotton manufacturers demanded energetic action from the state in overcoming these difficulties.

The Reform Act of 1867 was one of the decisive events, perhaps the decisive event, in modern English history. It was this act that transformed England into a democracy and made democracy not only a respectable form of government (the United States was never quite respectable), but also, it was soon taken for granted, the only natural and proper form of government. To be sure, the act had to be supplemented by others, household suffrage in the boroughs, as provided by the Act of 1867, being several steps removed from universal suffrage. But once this first step was made, no one seriously doubted that the others would follow. The Act of 1867, perhaps more than that of 1832, deserves the title of the Great Reform Bill. For while 1832 had no necessary aftermath in 1867, 1867 did have a necessary aftermath in 1884, 1918, 1928 — the later acts that genuinely universalized the suffrage, not only for Britain but for all those countries that took Britain to be the model of a parliamentary government.

It is all the more bewildering, therefore, to inquire into the history of this act and to find it so meandering, purposeless, fortuitous, so full of what Herbert Butterfield has called “the most useless things in the world” — useless, that is, if one expects meaning or sense in history. John Morley, trying to make sense of an affair that struck him as “one of the most curious in our parliamentary history,” wistfully concluded: “When we have made full allowance for blunder, caprice, chance, folly, craft, still reason and the nature of things have a share.”

The inscription on Robert Owen's monument in Kensal Green cemetery, London, begins: “He originated and organized infant schools.” This claim, though disputed during his lifetime, is now generally acknowledged and has become part of the familiar story of Owen. For fifty years after his death in 1858, however, Owen was remembered chiefly as a cooperator, secularist, and Utopian socialist, and Frank Podmore in his definitive biography of Owen published in 1906 observed that “the name of Robert Owen is little known to the present generation as an educational reformer.” Thanks to Podmore's work and later that of another Fabian, G. D. H. Cole, Owen's role as an educator became more fully recognized. Subsequent biographies and educational dissertations elaborated (or, perhaps more accurately, repeated) details of Owen's educational activities and ideas. More recently A. E. Bestor, through a brilliant examination of the American material, showed the close relationship between education and Owenite communitarianism.

In modern evaluations of Owen and his work a large place has thus been rightly accorded to education. The spectacular nature of the experiment at New Lanark, the advocacy of a nonviolent and widely acceptable method of social change, and Owen's repeated emphasis on the importance of education in character formation all contributed to a focusing of attention on this aspect of his achievement. “The basis of Owenism,” wrote Cole, “was his [Owen's] theory of education.” Evidence for this view came from Owen's statements on the relation between education and social reform and from descriptions of the detailed workings of his infant school.

There is a West Indian proverb, “If you kill me, bury me, too.” The concept of a West Indian federation has been killed, but it refuses to be buried and may, phoenix-like, rise out of the ashes at some future date. Perhaps this is the case because it is so much more difficult to bury ideals than it is to kill off their immediate results. As a factual reality, the Federation of the West Indies expired almost at the very moment of its birth. The funeral rites were without ceremony. Friends of the deceased grieved, while others grinned, and all shared in the paltry inheritance. Yet, as an ideal, it is enshrined in the hearts of many West Indians who continue to look beyond their very narrow geographical limits for a bond that will unite them with others for the greater glory of the entire West Indian community.

If the Federation of the West Indies becomes a reality — and the initial failure may be a necessary step in its ultimate success — it will be but another demonstration that the spirit of nationalism cannot be checked by the facts of geography and economics. In politics, vision and the sense of mission often enable men to climb mountains even if they are unable to move them. Man's indomitable spirit, which enables him to deny God and nature, is exemplified in the nationalistic movements so characteristic of the last hundred years and more, which are reaching new heights of intensity, if not frenzy, in our own day.

In the annals of European diplomacy the year 1934 belongs to Louis Barthou. Coming to office in the Doumergue ministry formed in the wake of the bloody rioting of February, Barthou brought to the Quai d'Orsay a combination of clear vision, steady purpose, and nicely judged audacity which gave to French policy in the 1930s almost all the little luster it can fairly claim. Put shortly, Barthou's plan was to safeguard the French against the menace of German nationalism by reconstituting as nearly as possible the Triple Entente of prewar years. The spirit which animated him may be traced to his former mentor, Raymond Poincaré, but the design was his own, and the approaches to Britain and Russia which it entailed demanded far more insight and finesse than Poincaré had showed in the years of his postwar premiership.

Historians, faced by the whole horrific record of the Hitler regime, have tended to treat Barthou's effort approvingly despite its eventual ill success. The accounts they have produced so far, however, have been focussed on Franco-Soviet or Anglo-French relations. The Anglo-Soviet side of the diplomatic triangle, never a match for the other two in prominence, has not come in for much sustained attention. Yet relations between Britain and Russia, developing in the context powerfully shaped by Barthou's initiative, were never more cordial and hopeful than over the years 1934-35; in view of the fateful consequences of their later deterioration, it is surely worth inquiring closely into the circumstances and implications of their original improvement.

(In this commentary all titles mentioned may be assumed to be available in paperback unless explicitly stated otherwise.)

According to E. J. Hobsbawm in an article in the Times Literary Supplement in the spring of 1966, the number of history titles published in Britain in 1965 increased by 15 per cent over 1964, and in the United States by 24 per cent. Just where paperbacks figure in this rise, it is impossible to say, but for the United States the Bowker catalog, Paperbound Books in Print, for February 1965 lists 30,700 titles; the catalog for June 1966 lists 38,500 titles. The February 1966 issue of Paperbacks in Print … and on Sale in Great Britain, published by J. Whitaker & Sons, Ltd., incorporates 18,000 titles; the catalog for October 1966, 22,000 titles. Thus far have paperbacks come since July 30, 1935, the day of birth of Penguin Books, London, with ten titles.

American booksellers, generally speaking, are less articulate than English. It is not difficult to get an English dealer to talk about the boon of the paperback. And some talk lyrically. I. P. M. Chambers, director of the Bryce Bookshop, Museum Street, London W.C. 1, may be taken as representative. “Paperbacks have been a conveyor belt to prosperity,” were approximately his words, “for without them many a bookshop in this country would have closed after the war. The paperback has done more for education than any institution.