‘Let the past bury its dead, but for God's sake let us get down to earnest endeavour and hold this line until … the end.’ No other words can more adequately express, after four years of war, the sheer agony of the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert L. Borden. These words also suggest both his attitude to the war in general and his intense frustration with die supreme direction. Like Lloyd George, Borden was an exponent of total war and of victory. His proclamation that Canada was ‘fighting not for a truce but victory’, was strikingly similar to Lloyd George's own declaration that ‘the fight must be to a finish—to a knockout’. The objective, proclaimed at die conclusion of the Somme battles, seemed no less remote in the middle of 1918. Over the last two, and most critical, years of the First World War there was constant contention within Britain over how the objective was to be secured. One aspect of the contention was the direct involvement of Dominion leaders, especially Sir Robert Borden.

Between 1885 and 1891, the Liberal statesman William Ewart Gladstone debated the scientific status of the Book of Genesis with the natural historian Thomas Henry Huxley in a series of articles published in the Nineteenth Century. Viewed in isolation, this episode has been seen as a case of a professional scientist dismissing an amateur interloper. This article repositions this familiar dispute as one chapter in Gladstone's lifelong engagement with the concept of historical ‘development’, the unfolding or evolution of Providence to human reason over time, a concept which came to prominence in the 1840s, in both Tractarian theology and in natural history. Gladstone consistently advocated an accommodation between transmutation and natural theology based on a probabilist ontology derived from the eighteenth-century Anglican churchman Joseph Butler (1692–1752). That understanding of historical truth to which Gladstone credited his ability to discern when political issues became ripe for agitation demanded a humble, Christian moral temper that embraced doubt and salutary suffering, rather than certainty and whiggish celebration of progress.

The attempted introduction of a new rationalist Lutheran hymnal into Brandenburg-Prussia in 1781 was largely a failure due to the successful popular opposition towards it. This opposition was inaugurated by four parishes in Berlin. They petitioned the monarch in January 1781 with the request to continue using the old hymnal. Similar petitions were submitted from the Landstände of Pomerania, Magdeburg and East Frisia. Frederick II immediately granted this concession to all parishes in Brandenburg-Prussia. The strength of this opposition – which also occurred in other German lands where new hymnals were introduced – indicates the limitations of the religious Aufklärung as a popular movement. Traditional religious beliefs could not be easily replaced by more rationalist doctrine that stressed only Christianity's ethical tenets. While Frederick was indifferent to questions of doctrine, he would not allow any religious reforms to be imposed upon his subjects. For the first time this central feature of his religious policy was influenced by the force of public opinion. He was persuaded to halt the implementation of a measure that enjoyed the support of both enlightened clergy and laymen.

The Comité de l'Afrique française, founded in 1890, is often regarded as the epitome of colonial nationalism. On closer examination, however, the Comité and its signature policy, the Chad plan, can be shown to have acted as instruments of choice for financial and commercial lobbies with particular interests in the Congo. The Chad plan and its successor and complement, the Upper Nile policy, were primarily intended to advance the interests of King Leopold and his French sympathizers. The unavoidable clash with British strategic and commercial interests in the region that ensued helped to unleash the forces of nationalism and led, ineluctably, to the Fashoda crisis and the conquest of Chad.

The eighteenth century was a great age of pamphleteering. Subjects were legion and authors innumerable. Every question of substance – and many of none – attracted writers to such a degree that in the world of politics one is tempted to establish the scale of pamphleteering as one of the yardsticks against which the importance of an issue should be measured. The American revolution fully conforms to this criterion, for during a twenty-year period beginning in 1763 it stimulated the publication of well over a thousand pamphlets in England alone. A good number of those pamphlets originated in America and their subsequent reappearance in England was a matter of considerable significance; some were written by Americans resident in London. This paper will examine the mechanics by which American revolutionary tracts were published and distributed in England, and their circulation among the radicals who proved themselves to be the patriots' best English friends during the difficult years of the revolution. They included among others Thomas Hollis, John Wilkes, Major John Cartwright and Granville Sharp; the Dissenting ministers Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and one of the most brilliant women of her generation, Catharine Macaulay. Such an examination is not only an integral component in the analysis of the English side of the revolution; it also serves as a useful case-study in the mechanics and function of political propaganda.

Rebels against British governments could always maintain themselves far more easily at sea than on land; a guerre de course was indeed their natural resource. They could use as bases the small islands so conveniently situated athwart British trade routes in the Channel and the Irish and North seas, or the nearby ports of foreign powers; even more important, the chances of profit which a trade war held out invariably won them support not only from numbers of English seamen (especially Irish and Channel ports men), but from the cosmopolitan armateurs and floating riff-raff of the ports of France and the Low Countries as well. Yet because merchant support was vital to domestic stability and British seamen were precious, no de facto government could postpone for long a vigorous attempt to clear the seas of rebel ships.

The neutralization of the Black Sea was, perhaps, the most important single result of the Crimean War. Regarded by the western allies as a valuable new element in the security of Turkey, it was resented by the Russians as an intolerable insult to their national honour. It rapidly became the object of a diplomatic struggle. Whilst allied—and especially British—diplomacy watched with a jealous eye over its observance, the Russian Government left no stone unturned to secure its early abrogation. With treaty revision the principal object of Russian diplomacy, any European issue between 1856 and 1870 regardless of its origin, became entangled in some form or other with the Black Sea Question. On more than one occasion, the problem forced itself on the attention of the cabinets.

General Diebitsch's victory at Kulevcha on 11 June precipitated a series of events which brought the Russian army to the gates of Constantinople and Turkey to the verge of dissolution early in September. The maintenance or the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in Europe suddenly became the issue in St Petersburg. Was the maintenance of that empire more advantageous to Russia than its dissolution?

Secret diplomacy is inevitable in wartime. I once heard Lord Grey denounce “secret treaties and bombing from the air”, as its two most evil effects. But between 1815 and 1914 England was only engaged in a major war for three years, and thus secret diplomacy had seldom the excuse pleaded by Grey. How far then is it inevitable in peace time? A careful examination of England's methods during this century, which ended in democracy, leads to some remarkable conclusions. Canning and Palmerston were less secretive than Gladstone, and Salisbury was infinitely less secretive than Lansdowne and Grey. Indeed it seems to be actually the case that our diplomacy became more secret as our constitution became more democratic. The purpose of this paper is to gather up the hints and traces of secret diplomacy, scattered through nearly a century of official papers. For, if these conclusions are to be established, it can only be by surveying long periods and estimating tendencies through several generations of diplomats.

History in a literary form was a remarkably late growth in Roman letters. Cicero declares several times in unmistakable terms that in his day “History is absent from Roman literature.” Twice he discusses the previous writers of Roman history, the annalists such as Fabius Pictor, Cato and Piso. He makes it clear that he found them very unpalatable because of their jejuneness: “erat enim in historia nihil aliud, nisi annalium confectio…unam dicendi laudem putant esse brevitatem.” Only Coelius Antipater stood out from the rest as one who made some attempt to achieve a pleasing style, but even he “ut homo, neque doctus, neque maxime aptus ad dicendum, sicut potuit, dolavit.” It is obvious that the basis of this criticism is purely literary and not historical, and that the demerits which Cicero censures in the older school of annalists, when considered as literature, may to a certain extent be considered as merits, if their historical value is to be weighed amongst the sources of Livy.