Customarily, the British Labour party has been regarded as the natural product of an advanced industrial society. Given a sufficiently developed economy, like Britain's in the early years of the twentieth century, it was assumed that a socialist working-class party was due to emerge as an increasingly large and effective force. In this democratized version of Marxism, the absence of such a party in the United States had to be explained as the result of the relative immaturity of American industrial society. Labor in the United States was on the same political road as labor in Western Europe, but well behind. Especially did it seem behind labor in Britain, “the country in which modern Capitalism first emerged to full growth — the country which was, therefore, the pioneer of Labour organisation.

That this entire approach needs to be reconsidered is now plain. Recent American political trends fail to support the expectation of a European-style working-class movement in the United States, and this type of party in Western Europe itself appears by this time to have had more of a past than it has a future. Socialism is hardly a thriving faith in advanced western nations, and the old class base for protest movements is being shaken as Western European societies share larger national products, assimilate increasingly their higher paid workers to bourgeois styles of life, decrease the proportion of manualists in the total work force, and provide wider educational opportunities. As Aneurin Bevan said deploringly of the new generation of British working-class voters, whose support Labour had failed to attract in the 1959 general election, “This section of the population has become thoroughly Americanized.”

In satire, as in lapidary inscriptions, a man is not upon oath. Shadwell is a better playwright overall than Dryden, and Theobald a far better Shakespearean than Pope; and if Colley Cibber is a more appropriate stand-in for Dullness, few would regard Pope's treatment of him as wholly without bias. With Swift the case is even more clear. The butts of his satire were often men of the first importance, national or even international figures whose reputations were not to be shaped by satire alone. While Pope may have succeeded in imposing his version of Lord Hervey upon history, Swift's Wharton, and even more his Marlborough, now exist only in the rhetorical world of Augustan humanism.

This somewhat tenuous relation between factual accuracy and artistic success, in satiric as in other portraiture, has long been appreciated, and critics now scarcely pause to defend the ground of literal truth before retiring to their prepared positions of literary tradition and rhetorical form. In general such strategy is sound, but occasionally it does the satirist less than justice. This is decidedly the case with one of the greatest of Swift's satiric portraits, that of William Wood, the unhappy victim of the Drapier's Letters.

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 cooperative communal side of peasant life in the Middle Ages has been discussed widely, most often in the context of open field agriculture as being the basis of village solidarity. Although such writings state, or imply, the important truth that economic reality necessitated a degree of cooperation among peasants, they tend to offer little or no evidence to justify the romantic notion that the medieval village possessed a spiritual cohesiveness, that it represented a harmonious society with close emotional bonds between neighbors.

For example, one scholar suggests the romantic view of community life in the Middle Ages when he states:

Another writer presents a similar perspective in a discussion of the pre-industrial village:

… living together in one township, isolated, spatially, from others of comparable size, of very much the same structure inevitably means a communal sense and communal activity ….

One wonders about the meaning of the terms “solace” and “communal sense,” and also about the evidence which supports the above positions. The nature of the ties within the medieval peasant community represents a major question which should not be answered with the kinds of a priori assumptions quoted above.

In this way Sir Edmund Verney, the patriarch of an old Buckinghamshire gentry family, explained his decision to side with the King in the Civil War, a choice which cost him his life at the battle of Edgehill. In 1642, many English gentlemen were confronted with a similar choice. It is significant that Verney attributed his choice of King over Parliament to “honour and gratitude.” In Sir Edmund's explanation we may find the basis on which many English gentlemen supported the King in 1642.

The political behavior of the Royalist gentlemen in the 1640s is part of a problem which has long plagued historians of the English Civil War. The economic interpretations proposed by both R. H. Tawney and H. Trevor-Roper stimulated much interest because they seemed to provide what had long been sought — a theory that could consistently account for the political choices of upper class gentlemen in the 1640s. When tested, however, neither theory proved satisfactory. Careful studies of key institutional bodies like the Civil Service and the Long Parliament revealed no significant social or economic differences between Royalists and Parliamentarians.

Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the British authorities, both in London and Calcutta, were becoming progressively more concerned about the security of India's undefined northern border along which the empires of Britain, Russia and China and the kingdom of Afghanistan met. Although the Russian capture of Francis Younghusband in 1891 and the consequent danger of war had forced the British and Russians to the conference table, Russia, China and Afghanistan were still on a collision course in those reaches of the Pamirs beyond the purview of Anglo-Russian bilateral border talks. Consequently, when the Russians forced the Chinese to withdraw from Ak-Tash and defeated an Afghan force encamped at Somatash, the nightmore vision of Russian armies poised at the gates of India suddenly appeared both real and terrifying.

The Government of India's reaction was prompt. The governor general, Lord Lansdowne, determined to strengthen the garrison at Gilgit, the British station to the north of Kashmir. But the position in Gilgit was viable only if Chitral, to the west, were secure. This mountain satrapy was, in the eyes of Calcutta, the key to the defense of the whole northern border, and while Mehtar Aman-ul-Mulk occupied the throne of the state, British influence was paramount. But in September 1892, this venerable and crafty autocrat died, opening a Pandora's box of succession controversy that had remained largely sealed during the deceased ruler's lengthy hegemony.

The immediate consequences of the mehtar's death gave little indication of what was to follow.

In the current revision of Victorian history — shattering the stereotypes of parties and classes and emphasizing instead the unpatterned variations of individual and factional bargaining — political history tends to reduce itself to the social history of special groups. Among these groups are the religious sects and movements, whose effective political activity is a notable feature of the nineteenth century. One such group, however, the Roman Catholics of England (as distinct from those of Ireland), seems to be a special case: as an unpopular minority, alien both to the Establishment and to Nonconformity, they were slow to be assimilated into the mainstream of English life, and their political activity was relatively feeble. Nonetheless, a study of the political behavior of the English Catholics may illustrate the process whereby the members of this religious minority made their adjustment to the society in which they lived.

In the 1850's, the English Catholics represented about three and one-half per cent of the religious population of England and Wales — over 600,000 persons. Their political strength, however, was less than this figure would indicate. One reason for this was that twothirds of the Roman Catholics in England were Irish, immigrants or the children of immigrants; very few of these possessed sufficient property to qualify for the suffrage. In a few places they might be sufficiently numerous and enfranchised to affect an election. This was the case in Preston, where, in 1852, they turned out an anti-Catholic member.

In the spring of 1884 shortly before his viceroyalty came to an end, Lord Ripon wrote in an urgent manner to Lord Kimberley, then Secretary of State for India, about one of the more critical questions of policy confronting the Government of India: “You may rely upon it that there are few Indian questions of greater importance in the present day than those which relate to the mode in which we are to deal with the growing body of Natives educated by ourselves in Western learning and Western ideas.” Ripon was pointing to the existence of a new class of English-educated Indians within British-Indian society and to the failure of the Government of India to acknowledge this class and to absorb its talents and influence within the structure of British-Indian administration. That this problem begged for a realistic solution by 1884 and that it would continue to do so in the years ahead, he had no doubts whatsoever; it had been left too long to fester in a mode both damaging to the class itself and dangerous to British rule. In short, the English-educated Indian class had become a question of policy.

Simply stated, as the opportunities for Western collegiate education expanded and the avenues leading towards entry into the East India Company's service became available, the doors either failed to open or were placed out of the reach of the educated Indians seeking entry. By 1850, with the new class in existence in limited numbers in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Delhi and with additional graduates appearing annually to swell its ranks, frustrations began to emerge as the graduates found themselves unable to secure the public employment which the Charter Act of 1833 had implied was to be their just right.

Edwardian England has become an increasingly significant period for scholarly research. One of the more carefully examined subjects is the interrelationship between politics and army reform. The debacles of the South African War forced the governments to examine England's army, and reforms emerged after 1901. Historians have concentrated on the efforts of Balfour's administration of 1902-05 and Haldane's sojourn at the War Office from 1906 to 1912; these periods witnessed the emergence of the Committee of Imperial Defence and the reorganization of the War Office, the shaping of the General Staff and the development of the British Expeditionary Force. All of these have been subjected to detailed examination — notably, the C. I. D. in recent works by Peter Fraser and Nicholas d'Ombrain, and the War Office by W. S. Hamer.

There is, however, at least one gap in the historical literature on politics and army reform: St. John Brodrick's term as Secretary of State for War, 1901-03. An understanding of Brodrick's activities is necessary, since he was, of course, the first War Secretary to attempt reforms as a response to the obvious shortcomings of the army in the South African War. A careful examination will explain why he failed in many of his programs, the political consequences of these failures, and some of his more positive contributions.

The breakdown of the British army in the first few months of the South African War, which began in October 1899 and ended in May 1902, shocked and dismayed both the public and the Government.

The late Victorians popularized several ideas which have tended to obscure what was actually going on in intellectual matters in the early part of the nineteenth century. One of these is the notion that, whenever science and religion came into contact, some degree of scientific excellence was sacrificed, if only because the scientists themselves believed in the theological ideas. Another is the judgment that Dean Stanley, a “passive peaceable Protestant” always seeking compromise, was the typical Broad Churchman. And a third is the acceptance of Leslie Stephen's description of an arid “Cambridge rationalism” not only as enlightening (which it is) but also as complete.

These and other similar misconceptions could be propagated because the later Victorian intellectual “aristocracy” or “self-reviewing circle,” as described so well by Noel Annan, was not continuous with that of the earlier period. Such physical descendants as did remain, notably Matthew Arnold and Leslie Stephen, played quite different roles in the new circle from those which their fathers had filled in the older, looser, grouping. The founders of the new aristocracy selected their mythic figures with an eye to current usefulness rather than with strict attention to the history of the earlier generation. This was to be expected. One could not expect Thomas Huxley to emphasize the great abilities of the geologist Adam Sedgwick when it was just such a reputation which supported “the old Adam” in his attack on Darwin's theories.

In order to indicate the inadequacy of the three conceptions listed above, and others like them, it is the purpose of this article to use the indirect method of sketching the coming together of those men who were the mentors not only of Darwin but also of Stanley, of Tennyson, of Frederick Denison Maurice, of Lord Kelvin, and of James Clerk Maxwell.

The Scottish role in the English Civil War, although generally recognized by historians to be a major one, has never been investigated in depth. Every student of the period knows how the resistance in Scotland to the English prayer book impelled Charles to summon first the Short and then the Long Parliament, thereby setting in motion the events leading to the Great Rebellion. Yet the Scots did more than help to precipitate the conflict: just a year after the actual fighting between the King and his Parliament began, they entered the fray as allies of the latter and remained active combatants in the first Civil War until its conclusion. Military aid was just one facet of this alliance. Scottish commissioners in London became embroiled in parliamentary politics, influencing positions taken by the two houses, while Scottish ministers stimulated the religious debate which characterized these years and assisted (despite their annoyance with the outcome) in the establishment of a new church government in England. Quite obviously the English Civil War was never exclusively an English matter.

The Scots' intervention in their neighbors' affairs is also recognized to have resulted in disaster. Not only did they fail to realize their original ambitions; they were eventually forced to endure the humiliation of a military occupation. How then did Scotland manage to become involved in the upheaval taking place in England? The answer usually given by historians is a simple one: the Scottish Kirk, desiring to export Presbyterianism, worked successfully for an alliance with Parliament as a first step toward making England a Presbyterian nation.

At the time of the Restoration, Charles II seemed to give every indication that his first and most important alliance as King of England would be with Spain. Contemporary circumstances were such that this policy would have been logical, and Charles's behavior in 1660 encouraged Europeans to expect it. Yet, within a year of his return, Charles had not only failed to forge the Spanish alliance, he had entered into a marriage-alliance with Spain's rebellious province, Portugal. The events surrounding this apparent change of attitude encouraged the Spanish government and others to misinterpret Charles's intentions. At best, the new King was seen as a weak monarch who was lured into a comfortable dependence on Spain's natural enemy and self-appointed protector of Portugal, Louis XIV, King of France. At worst, Charles was accused of duplicity, of falsely courting Spain while maneuvering into an anti-Spanish coalition being constructed by France. In both interpretations, Charles was believed to have been seduced by the French King very early in his reign. The Portuguese alliance raises the question of the nature of Charles's foreign policy immediately after the Restoration. What were his relationships with France and Spain? What did he intend by the Portuguese alliance? The key to understanding his behavior lies in his treatment of Spain, and from an examination of his Spanish policy in light of the controversial alliance, it is possible to see both reason and consistency in Charles II's initial diplomacy.

Bentham has been the subject of much controversy in recent years, a controversy which has illuminated an important area of English social history but has left obscure an essential part of Bentham himself. The main point at issue has been his influence as a social reformer — the extent to which he was personally or ideologically responsible for the reforms of the nineteenth-century, ultimately the extent to which any person or ideology was responsible for those reforms. But a prior issue has been largely ignored. This is the question of his character as a social reformer, the character and quality of the reforms which he proposed and which are presumed to have inspired, or not to have inspired, the reforms later adopted. The only aspect of this question which has been raised is the hoary one of whether he was primarily a laissez-fairist or government-interventionist. And even here his general pronouncements have been quoted more often than his actual proposals for reform. For the rest, it has been assumed that his reforms were humane, benevolent, philanthropic, enlightened, rational, progressive; the words recur with tedious predictability in one account after another. Even those critics who have found his philosophy unsatisfactory have been content, and more than content, with his practical efforts to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But while we are often called upon to admire and emulate “the humble, rational, humanitarian spirit of this great man,” we are rarely shown the actual working and practical results of that spirit — the reforms themselves.

The reissue after twenty years of G. H. Guttridge's study, English Whiggism and the American Revolution, is very welcome. In many of its judgments this lucid, aseptic dissection of the ideas, attitudes, and policies of the opposition groups in British politics during the period of the Revolution bids fair to stand the test of a much longer period of time than has elapsed since its first appearance in 1942. The virile political traditions (some still traceable in modern British practice) which Hanoverian England inherited from the whiggism of the seventeenth century contained not one but several potentially competing principles; and the great strength of this study lies in the author's exposition of the ways in which these divergent principles were taken up by different political groups, with the effect of determining the stand taken by each, both on the American question and on concurrent issues of domestic politics. In Locke's writings radicals found justification for the creed of personality as the basis of political rights. All groups drew from them a belief that Parliament had an essential role in maintaining “the contractual obligation of monarchy to preserve certain fundamental rights,” but more than one principle followed from this premise. In the minds of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and his friends, it was combined with pre-Lockeian concepts of fundamental law as an element in the constitution beyond the power of Parliament to alter. For the leaders and members of the Rockingham connection, Parliament's role was seen in, and secured by, its supremacy.

Whatever our differences, I am grateful to F. B. Smith for what must surely be the best academic news of the year: that undergraduates somewhere, if only in Australia, can still find alluring such things as “style and footnote polemic”; our own undergraduates, alas, have headier tastes. In other respects, however, I must confess to finding Mr. Smith's communication disappointing. One of the longer footnotes in my essay in Victorian Minds is a rather detailed critique of his own book, The Making of the Second Reform Bill, a major work on the subject but one that seems to me – and I gave examples of this – to typify at several crucial points the standard “Whig interpretation.” The present discussion would be more fruitful had he addressed himself to those points instead of countering with a critique based on a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of my argument.

The extent of this misrepresentation is exemplified in his opening paragraph. The courteous critic to whom Mr. Smith refers (Robert Kelley) might be discomfited by the suggestion that the “substance” of his quarrel with me concerned my description of Gladstone as a utilitarian. This was only an “example,” as Kelley presented it, of one of his objections; his other objections involved nothing less than my interpretation of half a century of Tory history and of the relationship between intellectual and political history. In my response the issue of utilitarianism occupied one item out of six.

In 1909, two years after his retirement as British Consul-General in Egypt, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer — knighted in 1883, he was created Baron Cromer in 1892, viscount in 1899 and earl in 1901 — was invited to be the President of the Classical Association. It was a duty which he took very seriously and he prepared his Presidential address on “Ancient and Modern Imperialism” with immense care. In the course of this preparation he consulted many of the most distinguished scholars of the times, among them Gilbert Murray, then Professor of Greek at Oxford, J. B. Bury, then Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, F. J. Haverfield, the Camden Professor of Ancient History at Oxford, Sir William Ramsay, the Regius Professor of Humanity at Aberdeen University, Edwyn R. Bevan, a Hellenistic scholar much interested in Indian questions, Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist and expert on the Near East and Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace, one of the most famous journalists of his day and an authority on Russia. After he delivered the address in January 1910 Cromer entered into further correspondence with the Conservative leader, A. J. Balfour; John Buchan who, although he is probably best remembered today as a writer of adventure stories, had been Alfred Milner's private secretary in South Africa, 1901-03 and was subsequently to be Governor General of Canada, James Bryce, the author of the classic The Holy Roman Empire, a former cabinet minister and at this time British Ambassador in Washington; and Sir William Ridgeway, the President of the Royal Anthropological Institution.