In their use of the term ‘mob’, historians of the eighteenth century have generally neglected to define and to analyse it and have often shown a tendency to confuse the uses to which it might reasonably be applied.

Without question constitutional and democratic principles demand that the permanent officials of this country, even the most important and intelligent of them, must be content to deserve the proud title of servant. The Ministers of the Crown who are responsible to Parliament and enjoy their places because they have been chosen by the electorate, must, while they retain power, have an absolute control of the whole machinery of state, and that includes the unstinted service of the experts who alone can work that machinery. Of course a loyal servant has no need to be servile, nor in the right context dumb. The civil servant must give his counsel freely, and his criticism boldly; but the policy he must put into effect must obviously be that of the ruling political party and not his own. He must give order and practicability to the programme to which ministers are pledged, if that is at all possible. If he is in a position in the service for his opinions to affect his work then his opinions must be unknown to the public, and he must avoid public controversy and eschew party politics. Discreet, anonymous and uncommitted he must be free to serve equally effectively any party, to carry into action any policy, which the sovereign people in its wisdom has favoured at the polls.

The strength of the English ideal in France in the eighteenth century is well known, but its history in the nineteenth is far more obscure. Every reader of Montesquieu and Voltaire knows of their theoretical admiration for England and every student of French history has been told how their disciples were defeated at the Revolution. It is generally believed, nevertheless, that their day came at length with the fall of Napoleon, for then France seemed to follow in England’s footsteps with extraordinary fidelity. It emerged from a revolution and a military dictatorship as England had emerged in 1660 from the great rebellion and the rule of Cromwell; its restoration produced first a cautious king like Charles II and then a more violent one like James II; its glorious revolution of 1830, like that of 1688, ensured the victory of constitutional monarchy. The Jacobites found their counterparts in the legitimist conspirators; Walpole’s system of government by corruption and influence was reproduced by Guizot with his parliaments packed full of civil servants. France now conquered Algeria as England had conquered India: it underwent an Industrial Revolution as England had done, financed to a considerable extent moreover with English capital.

In 1852 a new British Colony, the Colony of the Bay Islands, was set up by Letters Patent. In 1859 Great Britain signed a Treaty, subsequently ratified in 1860 and put into effect in 1861, recognizing the Bay Islands as part of the Republic of Honduras. These facts are well known in the diplomatic history of the Central American question, and in the history of Anglo-American relations. The diplomatic historians have not, however, been able to find any convincing diplomatic explanation for the creation of the Bay Islands Colony in 1852; and, while they have fully explained the diplomatic reason for the cession of the islands in 1859, they do not seem to have considered it necessary to inquire how such a rare event in the history of the British Empire as the peaceful cession of a regularly constituted British colony to a foreign nation was brought about. This article seeks to explain the history of the Bay Islands Colony by showing that the colonization was effected by the Colonial Office without the Foreign Office being informed, and that the cession was effected by the Foreign Office without the Colonial Office being informed.