For well over a century the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the so-called New Poor Law, has been die centre of controversy. Just as contemporaries were drawn into bitter conflict over die measure, modern scholars have continued to debate die degree of ‘cruelty’ engendered in this novel poor relief scheme. The records of die individual poor law unions, however, reveal so many variations in administrative practices as to render invalid nearly all generalizations regarding me operation of die Act. The most obvious difficulty arises over the disparity between Poor Law Commission policy, ostensibly founded upon the recommendations of the famous Royal Commission report of 1834,3 and its actual implementation by the commissioners at Somerset House and their assistants in the field. It is by now a commonplace of poor law history that the commissioners, despite opposition from their secretary, Edwin Chadwick, pursued different policies in various parts of England.4 As we shall see, moreover, the commissioners often held certain provisions of their directives in abeyance, leaving their implementation to the discretion of provincial administrators.

David Lloyd George was a great war-time prime minister. There seems to be little doubt about this, but his was leadership has been so extolled by his supporters that adverse criticism sometimes smacks of heresy. Nevertheless criticism is warranted which, whilst not attacking the man, will qualify the myth. What follows is a critical examiniation of Lloyd George and his Irish policy in 1918.

Although for most country girls in Victorian England the choice of work outside the home was limited to domestic service, there were certain areas to which this did not apply. In some cases the reason lay in the existence of competing employment in local factories or workshops - so that in Lancashire (taking rural and urban districts together) about one in four girls aged between ten and fifteen were employed in cotton manufacture at the time of the 1871 Census of Population. But in other places, the cause was the continued survival of a cottage industry in which child labour played a significant role and where ‘a wellordered family [could] obtain as much or more than the husband who [was] at work on [a] neighbouring farm’ This latter circumstance applied to the counties of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, where particularly during the first half of Queen Victoria's reign the pillow lace and straw plait trades were of considerable importance - the latter being organized primarily to meet the needs of the hat industry of Luton and Dunstable. Table 1 shows the size of the work force as recorded in the Census Reports of 1851,1861 and 1871. Nevertheless, these figures are probably an under-estimate of the true position, since many of the women and children working only on a part-time basis did not bother to declare their occupation to the Census enumerator.

In the January 1916 issue of the Nineteenth Century the Reverend Robert H. Murray contributed the first of two articles on Irish insurrectionary movements during the wars with France at the end of the eighteenth century. He prefaced his text with some homilies directed at the British government of his ow n time:

During the early months of the present War the prospects of the invasion of these islands by sea as well as by air were discussed and prepared for by naval and military authorities. As the struggle developed month by month there has been less discussion of such contingencies. The magnificent work of our Fleet has lulled us into a complete sense of security. We do not foresee an attack upon the East Coast of England: we have almost forgotten our fears with regard to the West Coast of Ireland.

It is well known that Gladstone's progress to the leadership of the Liberal party between 1859 and 1868 included the building of an alliance with Nonconformity which lasted, wim some interruptions, to the end of his life. This coalition was remarkable in view of the previous diversity of viewpoint between its participants. In the 1830s Nonconformists had already adopted a policy of disestablishment when Gladstone was airing a diametrically opposite opinion in The State in its relations with the Church; and Gladstone's High Churchmanship was disliked by the evangelical Nonconformists, one of whom wrote a pamphlet entitled The Ritualistic Movement in the Church of England, a reason for disestablishment. In view of these differences, how did there develop a firm and continually reviving political alliance, as intimate as that between Gladstone and Irish Home Rulers in the 1880s?

The Spanish Civil War, as Stanley Payne has recently pointed out, was also a civil war between Spanish Basques. On the side of the Spanish Republic was the tiny and shortlived Basque Republic of Euzkadi, limited to the coastal provinces of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa where Basque Nationalism had its stronghold; on that of the insurgents were the inland provinces of Álava and Navarre, dominated politically by the ultra-conservative, monarchist and rabidly Catholic Carlists. In a war notorious for the bitterness of its fighting, some of the most bitter took place along the front formed by the Basque mountains, now a political as well as a physical barrier dividing the Basque country. Basque Carlists seized in Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa were imprisoned and executed as enemies of Euzkadi; in Navarre and Álava, Basque Nationalists met a similar fate as traitors to Spain; and when Guipúzcoa was overrun by a predominantly Carlist invading army from Navarre, it was treated as conquered and occupied territory, part of its area actually being claimed for a Navarrese ‘corridor’ to the sea.

Little has been written about the Foreign Office reforms of 1919. Contemporaries hoped that war-time experiences would lead to a massive overhaul of the whole diplomatic machine. Radical critics, in particular, were vehement in their insistence that the diplomatic and foreign-policy-making process and the diplomatic services should be subjected to ‘democratic’ oversight and control. Even the less radical reformers believed that the transition from war to peace would provide the opportunity for modernizing and rationalizing the existing administrative system. Yet the changes introduced in the years of peace proved to be less decisive than any of these men intended. The difficulty arose from the sheer number of problems to be solved, a confusion of aims among those responsible for reform, financial considerations and a sharp diminution in public interest and pressure after 1919.

Any account of religious controversy in nineteenth-century Britain must mention Essays and Reviews, the collection of essays published in i860 by a group of distinguished and liberal Anglicans.1 The volume was a deliberate challenge to the great body of Anglican opinion in the name of reason, science, and Biblical Criticism. The challenge was taken up eagerly, and the essayists suffered a mild persecution. Frederick Temple's position as Headmaster at Rugby was threatened, Benjamin Jowett, Professor of Greek at Oxford, had the increase in his professorial stipend withheld. Rowland Williams and H. B. Wilson were tried for heresy.

The anti-socialist legislation enacted in great haste in 1878, following attempts on the life of Kaiser Wilhelm I, lapsed in the autumn of 1890. To an innocent observer, the Wiihelmine State thus appeared to be divesting itself of one of the most hated and socially divisive acts of political legislation. One of Kaiser Wilhelm II's first grand ideas, his suddenly-awakened passion for becoming an ‘Arbeiterkaiser’, which produced in its wake a spate of minor social reforms - factory inspection, regulation of child and female labour and guaranteed Sunday rest – suggested moreover that the much-heralded new course might envisage a share in a joint future for the luckless and despised Social-Democrats.

The debate over the reasons for the establishment of the Coalition Government in May 1915 continues to resist a conclusion despite the use of new collections of private papers. Unless the papers not so far available to researchers happen to contain an unusually convincing letter in the hand of one of the three mens responsible for the decision, this question seems well placed to defy solution indefinitely. It is the purpose of this article, therefore, to attempt a clarification of the immediate causes by taking a slightly wider perspective than is normally done. In this way one can recognize the Coalition of 1915 for what in essence it was, an attempt to avoid a ‘ Khaki Election ’ on the pattern of 1900.

Over seventy years ago J. A. Hobson put forward the theory that the Anglo-Boer War had been created by the Rand mining magnates and their financial allies, in their search for increased profits. Subsequently this interpretation was extended to the immediate post-war period of British Crown Colony administration, for it was argued that the politics of the post-war period were equally dominated by the Rand mining magnates. More recently, increasing doubt has been cast on this interpretation, for it has been found, inter alia, that the idea of the mining industry engaged in politics as a coherent and monolithic group did not accord with the great variety of behaviour to be found in practice amongst the mining magnates. In the 1960s, however, an attempt was made to overcome this weakness and to return to a strictly economic interpretation of the period, by grafting on to Hobson's basic interpretation the concept of financially-based rivalry between conflicting groups of mining magnates as the key to Transvaal political divisions.

The death of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo galvanized the Habsburg monarchy into its most fateful decision: the initiation of local war against Serbia. His demise, among other things, ensured Berlin's fidelity to its alliance commitment, convinced (mistakenly) the decision-makers in Vienna that monarchical solidarity would keep Russia in check, and allowed the Hungarians to breathe more easily. But the heir apparent's death may also have had an importance generally overlooked in analyzing the crisis of July 1914.1 Put simply, his disappearance suddenly altered the decision-making processes of the Habsburg monarchy. The elaborate consultative procedures involving the archduke, his military chancellery, and advisers were abruptly terminated. No longer did the joint ministers, the national ministers, the military hierarchy or the emperor's court officials have to consider the archduke and his strong, often peaceful, views on foreign policy. Even Franz Joseph was now spared the irritation of having to explain a decision to his insistent nephew. Sarajevo thus not only supplied the occasion for Vienna's decision for war, it helped, by drastically revising the political process, to accelerate that decision.