“Shortest damn age in history” was The New Yorker's comment on this little gem; and the phrase, which for some decades did manful duty among writers of school textbooks and “popular historians” like the Durants and Sir Harold Nicolson as a substitute for study and thought, deserves no better epitaph. To the serious historian, these questions of labeling — “Shall we call the Dark Ages the Age of Faith, or shall we call the Age of Faith the Dark Ages? Shall we call 1660-1800 in Britain the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment or the Neo-Classical Age or the Augustan Age?” — seem only tedious pseudo-problems, better left for journalists — and professors of literature — to play with if it amuses them and their readers; for his purposes, it suffices to call 1660-1800 “1660-1800.” He knows too well that such labels represent not only naive oversimplifications and distortions of history, but sometimes even reversals of the historical actuality. “The Age of Reason” is certainly one of these latter. Nothing is easier than to demonstrate that “reason,” as signifying the power of the human mind, without external aid, to arrive at valuable truth, was, together with its handmaid “logic,” seldom in worse repute than in Britain from 1660 onward. The whole tendency of the ruling empiricist philosophy of the time, that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume — “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions” — is to minimize it and exalt experience in its place.

When Miss Himmelfarb published “The Politics of Democracy: the English Reform Act of 1867” in this journal in November 1966, she drew one courteous protest, the substance of which, on W. E. Gladstone as “Utilitarian,” she has silently admitted in the essay as republished in Victorian Minds.

Nevertheless, some important misinterpretations survive in the new text. It appears with several notable essays on Victorian thinkers, and the collection is likely to be widely read; given the confidence of Miss Himmelfarb's style and footnote polemic, both alluring to undergraduates, it seems worthwhile to correct four main props in her argument. Miss Himmelfarb is concerned to establish that Benjamin Disraeli (the Earl of Derby is virtually ignored with four minor references) throughout 1866 and 1867 believed in a “national” inclusive electorate and that this faith permitted him an ease of manoeuvre and a hardheaded realism in the power struggle denied to the “Utilitarian” Whigs, Liberals, and Radicals. This ideological difference, she insists, is the key to the Liberals' failure and the Conservatives' triumph in 1866-67. The argument may well be true, but at two central points the evidence she adduces does not establish it.

Her view involves Miss Himmelfarb in attempting to show that both parties were committed to reform in 1866 and had been so committed at least since 1858. One would never know from her account that between 1851 and 1864 these Disraelian Conservatives attacked and repulsed three unofficial motions for extension of the franchise and three Whig Government reform bills, apart from seven motions for the ballot.

Since G. C. Homans first published his accounts of inheritance customs in medieval England, there has been some revival of interest in this aspect of English social history. It has been found that arrangements were less rigid, and hence more varied, than once thought, while it is now clear that regional patterns can often be recognized only as broad generalizations — different practices were sometimes followed in close proximity, even within a single township. Recent work has concentrated on forms of partible inheritance, emphasizing apparent differences between the effects of this and impartible inheritance, and stressing the practical advantages of partibility. In comparison, there are few detailed studies of customs of single son inheritance as followed in a peasant community. The present paper is an attempt to reduce this gap by examining succession to property in the Chiltern Hills, an area of primogeniture, during the thirteenth and early fourteeenth centuries, that is, the period for which adequate documentary evidence is available before the widespread depopulation and social disruptions of the mid-fourteenth century. Chiltern custom was similar to the third of the three main forms of impartible descent outlined by Homans in that it “preserved the principle that a tenement ought to descend to only one son of the last holder, while allowing the holder himself to choose which one of his sons was to be heir.” Apart from the actual mechanism of inheritance and succession, considerable interest attaches to the practical implementation of Chiltern custom — how, in fact, descent of property was related to the general economic situation — and especially to an examination, in the Chiltern context, of the contention that partible inheritance tended to favour an increase in population whereas impartibility meant stability of population.

This trimmer's prescription, with its blast of the breath of experience over the unguarded optimism of theory, is crucial to an understanding of More's Utopia and an appreciation of its unity. Was Thomas More seriously recommending the accommodational approach to politics here put forward by the fictional “More” in Book I of the Utopia, and what was the relationship between this approach and the ideal state described in Book II?

The various answers given to these questions can be seen as hinges on which the various interpretations of the Utopia have turned. The accommodational argument stands at the crux of the debate on counsel, which takes up almost the whole of Book I. Upon the interpretation of this debate can depend the view taken of More's intention in depicting the fictional society of Utopia, and involved in this interpretation is the knotty problem of whether the real More's opinions are voiced by Hythlodaeus or by the fictional “More.”

An examination of the two approaches most frequently adopted will reveal the importance of the problem. The first approach is that which sees the real More's views as expressed by the fictional “More” of the Utopia.

The controversy over the respective merits of free trade and protection was an old one in 1903 when Joseph Chamberlain launched his campaign for tariff reform which became a dominant theme of Edwardian polities. Workingmen, with the exception of those in the Conservative workingmen's clubs and the National Free Labour Association, had not generally been very receptive to the ideas of fiscal reform mooted in the last years of Victoria's reign. In 1887, for example, J. M. Jack, chairman of the Trades Union Congress, had claimed that although there existed a “somewhat hazy conviction that the depression we are suffering from is in some way attributable to the fiscal system of the country,” it was well known that in protected countries “trade depression existed in an equal, if not greater degree.” The Social Democratic Federation took its opposition to fiscal change even further, organizing counterdemonstrations against the meetings held by the Fair Trade League in the 1880s. One such demonstration attracted an audience of thirty thousand in February 1886.

In spite of its extravagant claims, however, it is doubtful whether the N.F.L.A. enjoyed a very wide influence; thus when Chamberlain left Arthur Balfour's Government in 1903 to concentrate on his national campaign, he knew that he needed the support of workingmen on a far larger scale than protectionists had hitherto been able to secure, a fact he openly admitted in October 1903: “If I do not convince the working classes I am absolutely powerless. I can do nothing.”

In recent years the received picture of contemporary English attitudes to the American Civil War has been considerably modified. It has been demonstrated that there were a great many more currents of feeling, cutting across both party and class lines, than the traditional version, sowed by pro-Northern propagandists, allowed. Liberals, Conservatives, and intellectuals were all divided among themselves to some degree. If there was a good deal more pro-Federal sympathy among the English ruling class than was once thought, there was more pro-Southern sympathy among the middle and working classes, at least before 1863. At the same time, the British Government was more sincere in its stance of neutrality than was formerly suggested. The purpose of this article is to examine responses to the Civil War in Bradford, a West Riding industrial town where opinions were strongly influenced by newspapers, chapels, and Radical politicians — in other words, the kind of town where the Federal cause could expect to obtain solid support.

II

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Bradford's population had grown from thirteen thousand to over 100,000. By 1861 Bradford was the ninth largest town in the country. Now almost the whole of Britain's worsted industry was concentrated in an area of the West Riding of Yorkshire around Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, and Huddersfield. Within this area Bradford had replaced Halifax as “the principal seat and emporium of the worsted manufacture.” The town was predominantly nonconformist in religion and Radical in politics; in fact the two were closely linked.

The return of James Ramsay MacDonald from the depths of defeat in 1918 to the leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1922 is a dramatic episode in twentieth-century British politics. It has added piquancy because the drama was played in reverse nine years later; indeed, MacDonald's behavior between 1918 and 1922 has usually been seen as a prelude to the “betrayal” of 1931.

He owed his election as leader to the support of the Left. Consequently he has been charged with hypocrisy; in the words of Philip Snowden:

Some standard modern accounts repeat Snowden's charge, or make it independently. Even those that do not accuse MacDonald of deliberate deception nevertheless portray the Left as having acted under a misapprehension. The Clyde Members, says Francis Williams, “mistakenly judged him to be much more to the Left than he was and assumed, because of his opposition to the war, that he shared their views of the nature of the class struggle.” G. D. H. Cole agreed: had the I.L.P. understood MacDonald's moderation, “they would not have played the part they did in reinstating him and holding him firm in the leadership of the Labour Party.”

The purpose of this article is to examine the assumption, encountered in some recent discussions of eighteenth-century English literary history and political and religious thought, that a belief in “natural law” is central to Samuel Johnson's political, social, and general moral thinking. In particular, one meets the assumption in the numerous recent attempts to demonstrate, first, that Edmund Burke's political thinking is based on this concept, and, second, that Johnson's political thinking was fundamentally that of Burke. The first of these propositions may be left for specialists in Burke to deal with; some of them have already dealt with it fairly unsympathetically. The second seems so paradoxical, in view of the amount of abuse Johnson and Burke are recorded to have hurled at each other's political attitudes — they appear never to have said a good word for each other's politics in their lives — that a formal answer to it hardly seems necessary. But quite apart from the nexus with Burke, the assumption raises some interesting and important questions, and deserves to be investigated.

The most obvious reason for skepticism about the importance of the concept of “natural law” in Johnson's political thought is the simple one that in the fairly voluminous political writings of Johnson, extending over a large part of his life, the expressions “natural law,” “the laws of nature,” and the like almost never appear; and this is striking in an age when few writers managed to compose a pamphlet on political theory, or even on a question of practical politics, without dragging them in in some form.

The reign of Charles II was described by Wodrow as “one of the blackest periods,” and by the late Hume Brown as “the most pitiful chapter” of Scottish history, The former attributed Charles's tyranny to the influence of popery; Hume Brown thought it stemmed from his desire to maintain his prerogative and to fill his purse. Doubtless the latter was more nearly correct. Nevertheless, a re-examination of the events of 1660-61 in the light of certain new materials suggests that the restoration of Scottish episcopacy was accomplished only after much hesitation by the King and his principal advisers, who were far less sanguine of success than the firebrands in Edinburgh. The interdependence of Scottish and English developments was also probably more important than has hitherto been supposed. In this paper the Erastian character of the restoration in Scotland has rendered necessary the inclusion of certain political questions, but its main purpose is to elucidate the ecclesiastical settlement.

The extravagant rejoicings at the restoration of monarchy afford ample proof of Scotland's relief at the prospect of the dissolution of the union with England. The nation eagerly looked forward to the withdrawal of the English forces, the end of the cess, and the re-establishment of the old government by King, Council, and Parliament. The King's return seemed so desirable that no one thought to impose any conditions as the price of his restoration, and no Declaration of Breda was issued for Scotland.

Popular enthusiasm temporarily concealed the deep divisions between the Protesters (or Remonstrants) and the Resolutioners, the two principal parties in both church and state.