Much as late-Victorian Nonconformists were inclined to take a simplified view of national politics, which they saw as a perpetual conflict between the agents of darkness and the apostles of light, students of the period have tended to take a simplified view of political Nonconformity, which was as multifarious in its secular loyalties as in its theological variations. The self-appointed guardians of the Nonconformist Conscience spoke with many voices, rarely in unison. Indeed, the individual who gave currency to that catchphrase, the Rev. Hugh Price Hughes, was - much by his Wesleyanism as by his idiosyncrasy - among the least typical of those whom he was alleged to represent.

Joseph Chamberlain's speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, which began the tariff reform campaign, produced divisions within the Unionist party on a scale unknown since the repeal of trie Corn Laws. Announced to a party tired and jaded after its difficulties in the conduct of the Boer War, imperial preference offered an outlet for frustrated imperialist idealism, a cause to which the enthusiasts of the party could devote themselves, ‘… in a few hours England, indeed the whole Empire, was in a ferment of indescribable excitement’ Enthusiasm for the new cause rapidly developed into intolerance towards any other opinion. In the summer of 1903 supporters and opponents of the new policy organized themselves into rival leagues: ‘For a decade the Unionist party, the great exemplar of political pragmatism, was consumed by ideological passion’. The epitome of this intolerance and ideological passion was the Confederacy, ‘this extraordinary phenomenon in English politics — a secret society with all the trappings of oaths, threats and codes’,s ‘a secret society of extremist wholehoggers … [which] … saw itself as the inquisitorial arm of the tariff reform movement…’ and whose avowed object was ‘to drive the enemies of tariff reform out of the Conservative party’.

In Second Class, there was only my valet and two Italians on their way to Valona to buy from a Greek a wood, which, as far as they knew, did not belong to him. A frequent matter in the East

So sardonically wrote in his diary a second-rank Italian politician, the only passenger in first class, voyaging in 1902 across the Adriatic to Albania. The politician was Antonino di San Giuliano. His diary had a purpose, as it was destined to be published in Giornale d'Italia, Rome's new conservative daily. This paper had been founded only a year before by Alberto Bergamini and Sidney Sonnino in an effort to regroup those anti-Giolittian politicians scattered by the failure of the second, authoritarian, Pelloux ministry.

The general election of 1885 has been described as ‘the nearest point ever attained to the accomplishment of disestablishment in England’; and it is a curious fact that the very considerable part played by the Church question in this election has largely escaped notice. For this the suddenness with which the issue of Irish Home Rule came to dominate the political scene after the election is primarily responsible. Yet for all its brevity - it was effectively only during the last few weeks of an extended election campaign that the controversy over disestablishment became dominant — the agitation over the question was both fierce and ferocious; and was closely bound up with the name of Joseph Chamberlain.

Less than a month before Bismarck's dismissal as German chancellor, the Reichstag elections of February 1890 destroyed the parliamentary majority of the Kartell parties - National Liberals and Conservatives - with whose support he had governed. The number of Reichstag seats held by diese parties fell from 221 to 140, out of the total of 397; they never again achieved more than 169. To the multitude of problems left by Bismarck to his successors was therefore added one of parliamentary arithmetic: how was the chancellor to organize a Reichstag majority when the traditional governmental parties by themselves were no longer large enough, and the intransigently anti-governmental SPD was constantly increasing its representation? It was in this situation that the role of the Centre party in Wilhelmine politics became decisive, for between 1890 and 1914 the party possessed a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and thus held the balance of power between Left and Right.

‘The National Bank of Turkey was founded in 1909 with British Government encouragement and support to further British economic enterprise in the Ottoman Empire’ so we are told in all die standard and respectable works on the subject. This is correct in form but incorrect in substance, for one cannot accept the implications it carries with it, in some cases explicitly stated. These are that, in the first place, the Foreign Office was instrumental in actually starting the Bank, in the second place, that the Bank succeeded very far in its objects, and in the third place, that it ever received much Foreign Office support in what it sought to do.

At the close of his article on ‘The East Fulham By-election, 25 October 1933 C. T. Stannage was allowed extra space to attack the account of the 1933–5 by-elections given in K. Middlemas’ and J. Barnes’ Baldwin, to re-state the charge that Baldwin deceived the country at the 1935 general election over the need to re-arm, and to suggest that there was no essential difference between the government's position on rearmament and that of the Labour opposition. It is not my wish to rush to the defence of Messrs. Middlemas and Barnes (who are no doubt capable of looking after themselves). But Dr Stannage's account of the rearmament controversy seems over-simplified. And, as it has been accepted uncritically by no less a figure than Henry Pelling, it may be worth looking at the question in rather more detail.

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, the Germans poured out propaganda in the form of posters, leaflets and pamphlets, in an attempt to explain Germany's entry into the war and discredit the motives of the allies. The British government was greatly disturbed by the virulence of the German campaign, which was specially directed towards influencing the United States of America. At the end of August 1914, the matter was raised in the cabinet: ‘Mr Lloyd George urged the importance of setting on foot an organization to inform and influence public opinion abroad and to confute German mis-statements and sophistries.’ On 5 September the cabinet decided that steps were to be taken without delay to counteract the dissemination by Germany of false news abroad. Though there had been no peace-time precedent, the cabinet accepted the need for an organization to co-ordinate propaganda directed at foreign opinion for the duration of the war.

From August 1935 to July 1936 Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, the Chief Economic Adviser to the British Government, was away from Britain on an official mission to the Far East. While accepting that, as Hankey, the secretary to the cabinet, put it, after Leith-Ross had been away for several months, he was a ‘distinguished Civil Servant’ whose ‘services could, with difficulty, be spared from European problems’, the aim of this paper is not to describe in detail what Leith-Ross did during his lengthy Far Eastern sojourn: on that he himself wrote an account which was published just before his death. The purpose is rather, by studying the origins of the mission and the reactions to it in British Government circles concerned with Far Eastern policy, to cast light on that policy during Britain's last few years as a great power in the Far East.3 Within die Foreign Office itself, Far Eastern policy was to a large degree the preserve of die professional staff concerned with it. The most senior of these in 1935 were C. W. Orde, head of the Far Eastern department, Sir John Pratt and Sir Victor Wellesley.