The problem of paramilitary organizations in Germany after 1918 forms an interesting and crucial chapter in the story of the ill-fated Weimar Republic. The organizations which gained the most notoriety stood on the far political right, unreconciled and unreconcilable both to military defeat and to the republic which was the child of that defeat. But the republic did have its militant defenders, who were recruited on the democratic left and organized in the Reichsbanner. The history of the Reichsbanner not only vividly demonstrated “the sharpness of political antagonisms” in the republic, but also reflected several developments during Germany's so-called golden years after 1924: the balance of political forces, Catholic-socialist and bourgeois-socialist relations, and in no small degree the disintegration of the Weimar Coalition (Social Democratic Party, Democratic Party, and Center Party).

The British General Strike of 1926 was one of the turning points of the inter-war years. The defeat which the trade unions suffered at the hands of the Government successfully discredited the idea of widespread industrial action as a method of obtaining the demands of labour. It did much to ensure the relatively quiescent acceptance by labour of the persistent unemployment of the thirties. It removed the threat to the established order which had existed since the turbulence of the immediate post-war years and provided the necessary preliminary to the increasing respectability of trade unions as a pressure group. The definitive history of the general strike has yet to be written, and that the subject remains open to differing emphasis and interpretation is evidenced by the most recent writing on the subject by A. J. P. Taylor and John Saville. The Public Records Act of 1967, by making available a large collection of Cabinet and Departmental papers, has opened up the possibility of a revision of our view of the strike and provided much important additional detail, notably about the Government's role in the events of 1925-26. Of the matters which still exercise the minds of historians of the General Strike, four main questions have been selected for consideration. First of all, there is the intriguing problem of the 1925 industrial crisis when the Government averted an embargo on the movement of coal by granting a subsidy to the coal industry and appointing a Royal Commission to enquire into the future of the industry.

In 1883 the Spanish public became acquainted with a series of crimes committed in the provinces of Cádiz and Sevilla by the Mano Negra. Rooted in the agrarian South, this organization was accused of attempting to bring down the Spanish government and to sweep away the landed aristocracy of Andalusia, even by resorting to the most extreme and violent means.

The Conseil d'Etat of the Second Republic was dissolved on 2nd December 1851. A letter of protest, signed by eighteen of the forty Conseillers, was sent to Boulay de la Meurthe, Vice-President of the Republic. The Conseil was distrusted by Louis Napoleon; although initially well-disposed towards him after his election, it had generally sided with the Legislative Assembly in its clashes with him. Less than a month before the coup d'état, the Conseil clearly demonstrated where its sympathies lay; in November 1851, a large majority backed the Assembly and not the President over the project of law on “la responsibilité des dépositaries de l'autorité publique” (the “Loi des Questeurs”).

Die Vier Fragen beantwortet von einem Ostpreussen (1841), die Johann Jacoby zu einem der berühmtesten Männer Deutschlands gemacht hatten, brachten ihm einen aufsehenerregenden Prozess ein, der beinah zwei Jahre dauerte. Die Anklagepunkte lauteten: Hochverratsversuch, Majestätsbeleidigung und frecher, unehrerbietiger Tadel der Landes-gesetze. Von dem Vorwurf des Hochverrats wurde Jacoby in erster Instanz freigesprochen, der übrigen Punkte wegen aber zu zweieinhalb Jahren Festungshaft verurteilt. Die zweite und letzte Instanz sprach ihn dagegen völlig frei.

No socialist since Robert Owen has had any excuse for being unaware of the relationship between educational reform and social and political change, and a perception of this relationship was a feature of nineteenth century socialism and liberalism. The attention which the educational principles and policies of socialist, labour, and radical movements in Europe have recently received has thus been well deserved. The socialists have however come off better than those organisations which have been designated as merely “labour”, and two valuable contributions to the literature dealing with Great Britain – Professor Simon's Education and the Labour Movement, 1870–1920, and Dr Reid's article on the Socialist Sunday Schools – are concerned with the programmes and beliefs of left wing socialist bodies, rather than with those of the ideologically more diffuse but politically more important Labour Party. Both these contributions may perhaps profitably be placed in a new perspective by an examination of the attitudes adopted within the Labour Party and within its industrial half-brother the Trades Union Congress, to the problems raised by the content and character, as opposed to the structure and organisation, of the education available to the working class.

The period 1780-1850 marked the rapid industrialization of the British economy. This not only meant the creation of new industries. Profound changes took place within these industries. Engineering was one of these. During the period 1780-1850 the British engineering industry was transformed from a labour to a capital-intensive one. This was the result of technological change.

Leonard Horner was the most impressive and influential of the first English factory inspectors. For 26 years from 1833 to 1859 he administered the Factory Act mainly in the textile district of Lancashire. His work and that of his colleagues in the Factory Department made a success of this major experiment in legislative intervention in industry and despite the gloomy predictions of their early opponents they did not ruin the British economy in the process. The first generation of Inspectors laid the foundation for successive extensions of the Factory Act so that by the end of the 19th century working conditions and hours of labour for women and children were under legal regulation in all the major branches of manufacturing industry. Horner was acknowledged by his contemporaries to be the major figure among the early Inspectors; he even had the singular honour of being praised by Marx in Capital. This short biography will concentrate on Horner's work as Inspector of Factories since this is undoubtedly his major achievement. However it will also be concerned with other aspects of his life and interests, both because these have some importance in their own right and also in order to examine the extent to which Horner's life and thought form a coherent whole. Finally, an assessment will be made of Horner's place in social reform and in the development of English economic and social policy in the 19th century.

The notion that the leadership of industrial society must eventually be ceded to an educated elite of technical and administrative experts is an important theme in the social thought of the last two centuries. It can be found as early as Saint-Simon's plans for the Système Industriel. As a criticism of the supposedly anti-proletarian aspects of Socialism it is commonly thought to have originated with James Burnham's idea of a “managerial revolution” and appeared later with Milovan Djilas's “new class”. Actually the criticism of “State Socialism” in general, and of Marxism in particular, for an alleged tropism toward managerialism was also a weapon in the arsenal of nineteenth century anarchism. An integral part of Bakunin's criticism of Marx, whom he called the “Bismarck of Socialism”, was the contention that Marxism in power would organize society “under the direct command of state engineers who will constitute a new privileged scientific-political class”. This thesis has had its most consistent and rigorous formulation in the work of Jan Waclaw Machajski, a Polish-Russian revolutionary who based his theory on the conviction that Socialism was not the ideology of the proletariat but of what he called the “intellectual workers”, the new middle class of white collar employees generated by industrial capitalism. The most important antagonism in modern society, thought Machajski, was that between the educated – to whom he gave the inclusive term “bourgeois society” – and the uneducated manual laborers. He argued that a portion of educated society, the Socialist intelligentsia with Marxists in the forefront, was attempting to gain for itself a privileged position in capitalist society by turning the labor movement away from direct action for higher wages and toward a struggle for parliamentary power which could only benefit the intellectual workers.

The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 was a measure of major importance, both as an administrative innovation and because of its social effects. The Ministry of Health archives in the Public Record Office include in the Poor Law Papers a very large and valuable source for the social history of nineteenth century Britain. Much more work on this mass of evidence will be necessary before any very reliable assessment of the effect of the New Poor Law can be made. This paper is an attempt to use a small selection of these papers to discuss the way in which the system prescribed by the 1834 Act was introduced into Tyneside, already an important region of economic growth in these years.

Augustus Hardin Beaumont is known as a secondary figure of English radicalism during the 1830s. He came to England from Jamaica in the spring of 1835 and by the end of January 1838 he was dead. He was briefly associated with the London Working Men's Association in its early stages and then went to the Northeast where he founded the Northern Liberator. Historians of Chartism have noted him in passing and they have recognized his almost frenzied militancy in support of democratic reform. Most agree with Francis Place's judgment that “his eccentricities sometimes bordered upon insanity”, but beyond that they tell us little more about him.