If economists have been accused, like Oscar Wilde's cynic, of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, historians, on the other hand, often know the value of everything and the price of nothing. Since value and price are historically related, however, the historian who ignores the economics which both embodies and reflects a value-system and world-view does so at his own cost. Thus, the laws of the early Germanic tribes — and of the Anglo-Saxons in particular, to whom this study is confined — are dominated by virtual tables of prices and compensations for offenses and injuries. To the general historian, and even to the medievalist, these are perhaps the least fascinating elements of the laws. Certainly the more cosmic elements of Germanic society almost vanish here beneath the weight of numbers. Nonetheless, even these apparently raw economic sources reveal, upon investigation, not only societal structure and the relationship of church and state but a concept of kingship which is the key to both. Penalties and fines in Anglo-Saxon law will be analyzed here to illuminate these aspects of the early English world.

The two greatest influences on the actual codification of Anglo-Saxon law are Roman and ecclesiastical. Before the introduction of Christianity no Germanic written code is known, and the written formulation of law is largely stimulated by an attempt to cope with the new religion and with the status of its institution, the Church, in terms of Germanic society. In Kentish law, for example, dooms concerning the Church show less alliteration and consequently may be taken as newer.

Matthew Arnold

Perhaps it is somewhat less than fair that to one whose interests lie in earlier centuries than theirs, the recent exchanges between Donald J. Greene and Peter J. Stanlis should have called irresistibly to mind the closing lines of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. Unfair, indeed, admittedly unfair, but not wholly without its moral. The strife has been ferocious and the crash of opposed artillery truly deafening. But the smoke remains dense, the objectives obscured, and so many of the projectiles hurled have spent their force on phantom targets. And why is this so? In part, no doubt, because of disagreements about the very nature of Dr. Johnson's views — but a medievalist would be presumptuous indeed to contemplate even the most tentative of interventions on this score. More germane to his interests, however, and surely no less fundamental to the impasse, is the dangerously impoverished historical landscape against which these views have been measured.

This comes out very clearly in Stanlis's abuse of the label “Calvinist” — for which Greene correctly upbraids him. It comes out, too, in Greene's reliance on that shopworn tag “Augustinian,” with which Stanlis is rightfully uneasy — though, conceivably, for the wrong reasons. But it comes out most clearly of all in the assumption, common, it seems, to both parties, that it is safe and meaningful to speak of the Scholastic conception of natural law.

During the past sixteen years “administrative history” seems to have come and gone as a term of distinction in the historical study of Tudor England. In the later 1940's there were a number of scholars newly aware of the vast wealth of government records in the English archives and enormously impressed by the achievements of the medievalists — of Tout and his school — who deplored the absence of comparable studies for the post-medieval period and, for a time, came to seek salvation in an ever more stringent and particular investigation of the processes of government. But that phase did not last long. Now it can be said by Joel Hurstfield, himself a notable contributor to that flowering of administrative history, that “we have passed beyond recall the stage when the machinery alone, however intimately understood, can answer the questions.” The study of social history is all the rage now, by which is meant the history of a given society in its various aspects and manifestations — or rather, whatever may in fact emerge from that awesome ambition. Fashions change, and nowadays they change pretty rapidly; but one need not regret that not-so-distant dawn or believe that the evening has yet come. Let it be made clear, however, what is meant, or should be meant, by administrative history. Certainly this involves the analysis and description of past administrative processes, the discovery of principles implicit or explicit in the conduct of government, and an understanding of the manner in which the theoretical mechanism operated in practice.

“In normal times the guillotine, luckily, is not at the disposal of historians.”

Paul Valéry

History is a humanly necessary mode of knowing. Every poised epoch is knit together by the imaginative language it uses to expropriate an organized past from whose qualitative contours it then silently, habitually infers its own nature. History as a fact of communal psychology thus maintains a many-layered referential manifold. This referential manifold must have some kind of emotional legibility and be formally intelligible if it is to serve to subordinate the threatening welter of the no longer relevant. A great deal of meritorious historical research and writing is merely propaedeutic or precritical to the maintenance of this self-validating mirror of each poised epoch. When the mirror no longer throws back usefully intelligible images it must be renewed by honest appraisal of the imaginative syntheses of prior epochs. Such enquiry nowadays tends to bewilderment and to the tenebrous by reason of the richness of the available record. In these latter days the historian is a modifier of pre-established images, his fundamental renovations of vision are few. The mirror stands there; it is bequeathed to us; we need it; it is a strenuous, intellectual task to preserve it at a working level of provocative clarity.

Therefore it is especially desirable that higher historiography escape gossip-mongering about the defenseless dead, or that other form of intrusive projection of current frustrations upon past behaviour, the romanticizing of energy potentials of other eras.

Now that the great bulk of papers relating to John Locke in the Lovelace Collection has begun to yield up its treasure, the life and character of John Locke, as well as the life and character of his work, can be seen more fully than ever before. John Locke has firmly entered into political history, as Peter Laslett's researches have demonstrated; and Locke himself has become firmly embedded in the amorphous discipline called the history of ideas, since the history of his own ideas can now readily be examined. The wealth of material relevant to Locke's work has by no means provided his ideas with greater logical consistency, for the lack of which Locke has always had his critics. In some ways, the philosophical coherence of his work presents even greater problems than it used to, since the papers leave even more ravelled ends than the published books did. But the papers have provided something which may prove even more useful in understanding Locke's thought than a logical key to his thought: that is, the spectacle of a man thinking, and thinking hard, over four decades. Locke himself comes to appear a particular illustration of his own preoccupation with process and with the philosophical ideas arising from the concept of process: the long processes of his thinking, along so many major lines, may also be seen more clearly now in their complementary relation to one another.

This paper, the heart excised from a longer study, deals with one line of Locke's thought, a line which has recently attracted serious scholarly attention, his views on language.

Among the major political upheavals which have been called revolutions, the English Revolution of 1688 is generally recognized as extraordinary. Long accepted among moderate Englishmen as “glorious,” a revolution to end revolutions, in more radical quarters it has not been regarded as constituting a true revolution. Contemporary Russian opinion, for example, refuses to bestow upon it this accolade, regarding it as a mere coup d'état. Its conservatism, its legalism, its bloodlessness, the absence of zeal to be found among its protagonists: all contribute to this point of view. That these are characteristics of the Glorious Revolution cannot be denied. More precisely, they characterize the actions of the leaders of the Revolution — of the councillors and legislators and soldiers whose names are known. Of popular opinion and aspiration much less is known, and it is probable that little can be discovered in the surviving evidence. But they can be assessed, to some degree, by following the actions of the mob — or, more accurately, the mobs — as they erupted in London and other parts of the Kingdom.

Mob disturbances, like the plague, were more or less endemic in Stuart England. Roger North, in his Examen, asserts that “the Rabble first changed their Title, and were called the mob” in the gatherings of the Green Ribbon Club. Regardless of when the term was first used, seventeenth-century Englishmen were well acquainted with various manifestations of mob activity. England's growing urban population augmented the mob, and before Shaftesbury, Pym had demonstrated that he was aware of the existence of this popular force and of the uses to which it could be put.

Apparently no systematic effort has been made to ascertain whether a relation exists between the aesthetic theory of Burke's The Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and his political ideas. This omission would be readily understandable if the book were an insignificant and immature effort, or if the author at some later time had drastically altered his views, or if he had lost his interest in the arts. But all the evidence seems to be to the contrary. The work has been appraised as “among the most important documents of its century” to which men of great stature were indebted, including Johnson, Blake, Wordsworth, Hardy, Diderot, Lessing, and Kant. Although Burke did write a first draft while he was an undergraduate in Trinity College, Dublin, he continued to work upon it six or seven more years. Except for the extensive revisions for the second edition of 1759, revisions which did not modify the basic thesis, Burke evidently made no textual changes in the numerous subsequent editions. Nothing that Burke said or wrote indicates that he had second thoughts about the substance of the argument. And to the end of his days he maintained his vital interest in the arts. He was an intimate of Oliver Goldsmith, David Garrick, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, the friend and patron of the two painters, George Barret and James Barry, and a member of the Royal Academy. Nor can the failure to consider the question of the connection between the aesthetics and the politics be due to the unfamiliarity of students of Burke's political thought with The Sublime and Beautiful.

The art and mind of Jonathan Swift have been the objects of ever greater critical attention for the last twenty or thirty years. So thoroughly have the commentators discussed Swift's attitudes and their origins that there would seem to be little left to discover about the Dean's views or why he held them or how he applied them. In respect to the rôle played in Swift's thought by his reading in historiography, however, and the importance of history in the conceptual bases of his writings, critics have assumed more than they have demonstrated. In spite of some useful published disquisitions — by Herbert Davis and Irvin Ehrenpreis — the implications of the importance of Swift's historical outlook have not been fully explored, nor have the formation and configuration of his historically founded beliefs been clarified and documented. The present study will attempt to explain in some detail Swift's ideas of history, where he got them, and how they affected his non-historiographical compositions.

Swift's vital interest in historiography is now commonly acknowledged. The post in government he most actively tried to get was that of Historiographer Royal. Between 1714 and 1720, he devoted a good deal of time to composing his “histories” of political activities during the Tory ministry. He essayed a history of England. His letters as well as his other works are packed with references to a multiplicity of historians drawn from disparate ages and cultures. In his library, which numbered about five hundred separate works at the time of his death, at least three fifths were historical opera, including diaries, memoirs, and chronologies.

The present paper is concerned with “political history” — with the problems of the statesman who looks at the situation from above and has to make decisions about it. Granted that conditions are of a given sort and that society has a certain form — granted that men are what they are and events have produced a predicament that calls for action — there are people who have a presiding position and an over-all responsibility; and their strategies and decisions are themselves an object of study. A crucial question of “political history” is the question of the kind of statesmanship that was necessary for operating the constitution as it existed in the early years of George III's reign. On this subject one who does not speak with the authoritarian voice of the expert may claim that the experts should be carefully scrutinized, especially in a world now terribly subject to intellectual fashion. But one who has always valued originality (and has been reproved even for measuring historians by this quality) is in a predicament — calling, now, for the reverse of this, and wanting, rather, to recover continuity with an earlier stage of historiography. Whereas at the present time new evidence, manuscript sources, and the thrill of the hitherto-undiscovered fact are always prized, this paper must take on the dull work of making sure that some old material is not neglected, material which, if it appeared in print long ago, did so only because its importance was so obvious from the first.

The late Victorians popularized several ideas which have tended to obscure what was actually going on in intellectual matters in the early part of the nineteenth century. One of these is the notion that, whenever science and religion came into contact, some degree of scientific excellence was sacrificed, if only because the scientists themselves believed in the theological ideas. Another is the judgment that Dean Stanley, a “passive peaceable Protestant” always seeking compromise, was the typical Broad Churchman. And a third is the acceptance of Leslie Stephen's description of an arid “Cambridge rationalism” not only as enlightening (which it is) but also as complete.

These and other similar misconceptions could be propagated because the later Victorian intellectual “aristocracy” or “self-reviewing circle,” as described so well by Noel Annan, was not continuous with that of the earlier period. Such physical descendants as did remain, notably Matthew Arnold and Leslie Stephen, played quite different roles in the new circle from those which their fathers had filled in the older, looser, grouping. The founders of the new aristocracy selected their mythic figures with an eye to current usefulness rather than with strict attention to the history of the earlier generation. This was to be expected. One could not expect Thomas Huxley to emphasize the great abilities of the geologist Adam Sedgwick when it was just such a reputation which supported “the old Adam” in his attack on Darwin's theories.

In order to indicate the inadequacy of the three conceptions listed above, and others like them, it is the purpose of this article to use the indirect method of sketching the coming together of those men who were the mentors not only of Darwin but also of Stanley, of Tennyson, of Frederick Denison Maurice, of Lord Kelvin, and of James Clerk Maxwell.

In the current revision of Victorian history — shattering the stereotypes of parties and classes and emphasizing instead the unpatterned variations of individual and factional bargaining — political history tends to reduce itself to the social history of special groups. Among these groups are the religious sects and movements, whose effective political activity is a notable feature of the nineteenth century. One such group, however, the Roman Catholics of England (as distinct from those of Ireland), seems to be a special case: as an unpopular minority, alien both to the Establishment and to Nonconformity, they were slow to be assimilated into the mainstream of English life, and their political activity was relatively feeble. Nonetheless, a study of the political behavior of the English Catholics may illustrate the process whereby the members of this religious minority made their adjustment to the society in which they lived.

In the 1850's, the English Catholics represented about three and one-half per cent of the religious population of England and Wales — over 600,000 persons. Their political strength, however, was less than this figure would indicate. One reason for this was that twothirds of the Roman Catholics in England were Irish, immigrants or the children of immigrants; very few of these possessed sufficient property to qualify for the suffrage. In a few places they might be sufficiently numerous and enfranchised to affect an election. This was the case in Preston, where, in 1852, they turned out an anti-Catholic member.

“Imperialism,” an eminent historian has written, “is no word for scholars.” But the study of European political expansion in Asia, the Pacific islands, and Africa in the last quarter of the nineteenth century certainly merits scholarly attention, and recently has been receiving it. Since 1960 an impressive array of books and articles has appeared which present new insights into aspects of the “scramble,” particularly the motives for British action. Most of these studies have been concerned with Africa, and a possible deficiency in the analysis of one of the most notable of them has been that in its preoccupation with Africa it has not taken sufficient account of relevant developments elsewhere.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly after 1870, European influence advanced with a new aggressiveness into the under-powered areas of the world. In the halcyon days of the Pax Britannica, British governments had sought to avoid annexations as unproductive and expensive. This policy continued to be the creed in the 1870's, but some statesmen found it increasingly difficult to apply without serious risk to major British interests. These officials were motivated largely by fear of future challenges rather than of demonstrated peril. But there was a growing conviction, particularly evident in the permanent staff of the Foreign Office, that Europe had entered a new era of great-power rivalries in which Britain must either pursue a more active imperial policy or risk the loss of commerce, prestige, and world power. There was widespread apprehension that expansion into overseas areas by the militant and protectionist German Empire, Spain, and other European states might be ruinous to British trade and dangerous to Imperial security.

By any measure, the National Insurance Act of 1911 ranks among the major legislative achievements of the Liberal administration that held office in Great Britain before World War I. One section of the act founded the world's first national system of compulsory unemployment insurance. Another section brought government-sponsored health insurance to five sixths of the families of the nation and established the precedent of state concern for the physical welfare of the individual citizen, of which the National Health Service Act of 1946 would be only an extension. By requiring beneficiary contributions toward welfare programs, the act settled the financial pattern for most of Britain's present social legislation. In a less crowded period, the National Insurance Act would rank as an imposing parliamentary monument, comparable, for instance, to the Education Act of 1902. Sandwiched between the Parliament Act and the Home Rule Act, it has been lost from sight. The measure is not mentioned in the standard biography either of Asquith or of Balfour. It earns one sentence in G. M. Trevelyan's History of England in the Nineteenth Century, where through successive editions and revisions it is called “the National Health Insurance Act of 1912.” R. C. K. Ensor's England, 1870-1914 gives it a couple of paragraphs.

This study is an examination of an important, perhaps crucial, aspect of the evolution of the health insurance section of the National Insurance Act that has remained unnoticed for half a century: the lobby activity of the British commercial insurance industry by which the companies modified health insurance proposals for their own benefit.

Most historians of the Jameson Raid and Rhodes's most recent biographer draw attention to the significance of W. T. Stead's semi-fictional account of the Raid, The History of the Mystery, in deeply implicating Joseph Chamberlain and the Colonial Office in the intrigues which led to Jameson's disastrous foray. There still remains the question as to how Stead came to write his story. It is possible to reconstruct the origins and setting of Stead's work from his papers and those of his associates, especially among the Rhodes group. Of these papers, the most important is a private memorandum of thirteen pages entitled “The History of the Mystery” which Stead, anticipating a controversy surrounding the publication of the book, dictated on November 26, 1896 “to put on record … the salient factors connected with its genesis.” Yet, the story must be understood in the context of Stead's personality and his relationships with Rhodes, Chamberlain, and Rhodes's solicitor, Bouchier F. Hawksley.

Stead, son of a Congregationalist manse, distinguished himself as a bold and highly skilled editor of the Darlington Northern Echo and of the Pall Mall Gazette, who used sensationalism as a powerful instrument to influence Government policy. As a devout Nonconformist, Stead's work was marked by a moral fervor which often made him appear more “a revivalist preacher” than a journalist. Tenacious in his convictions and sometimes vindictive and lacking in judgment, Stead was idealistic, generous, and intensely loyal in friendship.

Two political campaigns in the Scottish Lowlands mark the beginning and the end of the half century during which the Liberal party rose, had its era of greatness, and fell. They are Midlothian and Paisley. In the first, William Gladstone made use of the new democracy of the Reform Act of 1867 by giving many speeches to vast crowds in a concentrated, spectacular campaign. He also broke new ground by setting out in these speeches the whole sweep of a political point of view, providing both contemporaries and historians with a convenient study in depth of its assumptions and goals. Midlothian was a legend before the cheers had subsided. It began a new era in British politics.

The second of these landmark campaigns, that at Paisley, saw Herbert Henry Asquith, the last of Gladstone's protégés as well as the last Prime Minister of a Liberal government, stumping the streets of that industrial town in the first weeks of 1920. It, too, was the object of intense national interest and resulted in important political changes. Similarly, Asquith's speeches covered the whole range of national problems, thus supplying once more a convenient presentation in depth of Liberalism as the leader of the Liberal party conceived it. Paisley provides both a window into the political mêlée which saw the collapse of the Liberals and the rise of Labour, and a reference point in the history of Liberal thought in Britain. In brief, this is consensus Liberalism as it stood at the end of its half century of power and influence.