Few habitual activities of government engender more dissatisfaction than conscription for military service. Complaints about taxation are, perhaps, more frequent but only because governments wage war more spasmodically than they collect revenues. From the perspective of the twentieth century, which has seen more men pressed into military service than any other period in the known past, the history of conscription and its impact on the political and social order ought to be of some interest.

The seventeenth century, like the twentieth, was wracked with continuous warfare, naked power struggles for international hegemony and fierce ideological combat. As a consequence, while at the beginning of the century no major European state had a standing army, at its end all had. In England, as in the rest of Europe, the century echoed to the banging of the recruiter's drum. Our view of the recruiting process under the Stuart monarchs is framed at each end of the century by two brilliant and brutally satirical portraits, Shakespeare's Falstaff and Farquahar's recruiting officer Captain Plume with his ever present Sergeant Kite. What they tell us is that the crown was horribly served, getting for soldiers the Feebles of mind and body, that providing men for military service (whether pressed or “recruited”) was a dirty, unfair and corrupt process and that the situation under good Queen Anne was the same as it had been under good Queen Bess. This “Falstaffian perspective” on the early Stuart period has never been challenged or examined in detail.

The revival of the Foxite opposition from the demoralizing effects of its rupture of 1792-1794 and the subsequent secession of 1797 is an important and not fully understood episode in Great Britain's political history. The central feature of that recovery was the alliance struck in January 1804 between Charles James Fox and William Lord Grenville. It was not only to provide the foundation for the “Ministry of All the Talents” of 1806-1807, the whig opposition's sole tenure of office between 1783 and 1830, but it was to have profound effects on the activities of the whig party for at least a decade after the fall of that ministry. The arrangement and reception of the “cooperation,” as it was termed, illuminates the condition and the preoccupations of the Foxite opposition during Henry Addington's tenure in power. The alliance involved the most important political decisions Fox made in the last decade of his life, and the history of its establishment explains many of the workings of his mind after the secession. The actual proposition of association was one of the key incidents in the career of its initiator, Grenville, and it provides much information on a man who remains one of the least understood major politicans of George III's reign. The alliance has as well its own interest as a study of how two opponents with differing aspirations and ideals could form a successful union, each with motivations more complicated than the mere desire for office.

Ireland in the eighteen-fifties was quiescent through exhaustion. The great famine of the eighteen-forties had resulted in heavy population losses through death and emigration and demoralized tenant farmers had offered but a feeble resistance to wholesale evictions. The failure of the Irish Confederate risings of 1848-49, the collapse of tenant-right agitation and the disintegration of the Independent Irish Party at Westminster, had left the country sunk in political apathy. The trade union movement did not escape the general paralysis and the Regular Trades Association, a central organization that had developed in Dublin during the eighteen-forties, disappeared. Not until 1859 was there renewed trade union activity in the form of a campaign to abolish night-baking; though it had only limited success, it helped to bring about the appearance in 1863 of a new grouping of Dublin trade unions, the United Trades Association. It was, however, not a trade union organization but the Irish Republican Brotherhood that aroused the country from political torpor.

The I.R.B., known in North America as the Fenian Brotherhood, was a secret oath-bound society pledged to establish an independent Irish republic. Its first leader was James Stephens, who had founded it in 1858 after his return from an exile following the 1848 rising. Its membership was drawn from the rural and urban working class – the sons of small farmers, mechanics, artisans, laborers and petty shopkeepers. In 1861 Stephens skillfully stage-managed the funeral of Terence Bellew McManus, a Confederate exile whose body was brought back for burial in Ireland, and thus aroused an unprecedented interest in “The Organization,” as its members called it.

In 1876, and again from 1894 to 1896, thousands of Christians in Bulgaria and Armenia, then provinces of the Ottoman Empire, were massacred by Turkish troops, local irregulars known with romantic barbarity as bashi-bazouks, and Moslem tribesmen. The victims were raped or mutilated, many were burned alive. Weeks later streets were littered with corpses. The Armenians, even in the best of times, were subjected to an almost systematic starvation: Moslem tribesmen were permitted to take the crops of Armenian farms when times were peaceful, and to burn them in periods of violence. Naturally such treatment provoked insurrections, which renewed the cycle of repression.

These massacres drove a section of the English public to peaks of moral indignation. Nonconformist ministers and liberal academics, and their followers, were imbued with a reverence for the independent individual. High church clergy had rediscovered a religious affinity with the ancient Churches of the Near East. Humanitarian concern for the sufferings of one's fellow men – prison inmates and child laborers at home, for example, or slaves abroad – had been a steady force in the nineteenth century, and fortified these sectarian sensitivities. These Englishmen would have been distressed by the Ottoman massacres even if the British Government had been in no way involved. Since they believed the Government to be in fact gravely responsible, they conducted extensive political agitations.

Britain was the foremost defender of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire.

Ever since J. A. Hobson characterized financiers as monolithic and conspiratorial, particularly those who were supposed to have been responsible for manipulating decisively events which led to the outbreak of the South African war, historians have stressed the need to examine their financial activities. However, the South African goldmining financiers have not been as thoroughly scrutinized as the politicians (Chamberlain and Kruger) or the administrators (Loch, Rosmead and Milner). Rhodes, of course, has been much studied, but more as politician and imperial strategist than as a Randlord. One recent exception to this neglect is G. Blainey's study based on an examination of mining techniques and technology. He asserts that a certain sector of the mining industry was hard hit by the policies of the Transvaal government, and that it was Randlords from this deprived sector (the deep-level operators) who triggered the Johannesburg uprising. What follows, based on the records of the mining houses, attempts to answer several questions about the key Randlords in 1895 which have often been raised but not satisfactorily answered. How monolithic and conspiratorial were the Randlords? What devices did they use to generate capital and take profits? What in 1895 were precisely their financial requirements and expectations? Was there, as Blainey suggests, a common concern about capital wants and anticipated profits which distinguished Randlords who participated in the attempt to overthrow Kruger's republic in 1895 from those who did not?

II

Groups which search for profits are no more free of internecine disputes than groups which seek power.

At the beginning of the Edwardian period no young British politician appeared so assured of a bright future as Lord Hugh Cecil. A son of the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, he was not only of distinguished lineage but possessed great intelligence and eloquence. His parliamentary oratory was compelling despite his lanky, ungainly appearance and nervous gestures. He combined a logical approach with transparent honesty and courage. So sincere was he in his convictions, no matter how eccentric some might be, that even the most sophisticated (and cynical) in the Commons listened to him with respect. Even the normally reserved Annual Register commented admiringly on Cecil's performance in a debate on the 1902 Education Bill. Lord Hugh, it claimed, had made the “most striking speech” — one which “was recognized by the best judges as bringing him within the front rank of modern parliamentary orators.” Two years later that shrewd observer of the House of Commons, Sir Henry Lucy, predicted an even greater achievement for the young Conservative. Lucy asserted that by remaining with his party despite an aversion to Tariff Reform, Cecil would “in due time, succeed to the Premiership held by his father and in succession by his cousin.”

Yet by 1914 no one of prominence expected Lord Hugh to gain (or perhaps even to seek) high office. He remained, as the Guardian later stated, one whose speeches “would always fill the House,” but as a politician to be reckoned with in terms of power, his career was finished.

Political history is the record of the pursuit and exercise of state power. In a democracy the search for such authority usually begins with the contest of elections. Elections, as a consequence, are of great importance and their systematic analysis, particularly the extrapolation of conclusions about popular attitudes from their results, has achieved in the last few years the status of a separate scholarly craft.

Historians have their own way of explaining elections. Traditionally, they tend to concentrate upon comparisons of programs and of party leaders. They assume the electorate made a choice between platforms and personalities and they tend to explain observable results in terms of most easily demonstrable causes. In dealing with the British General Election of 1945, for instance, they argue that the Labor party won because voters found its program more believable than that of the other party. This explanation, of course, is tautological. One is reminded of Calvin Coolidge who explained his victory in the race for governor of Massachusetts by saying that he received the most votes.

Yet of all elections in the twentieth century, the poll of 1945 needs critical investigation. The importance of its results have obscured the complexities of the election itself; historians have been so fascinated by what Labor did in office that they have ignored how the party got there. Labor's victory was as unprecedented as it was unexpected. As neither Churchill nor the leaders of the Labor party could believe, even in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that the electorate would dismiss the man who had led Britain through the war, the mystery of the election derives not from the Labor victory but from the breakdown of understanding between the leaders of the nation and its citizenry.