4 - Upper and nether millstones
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2010
Summary
[I]n Europe, Liberalism ha[s] been crushed between the upper and nether millstones of privilege and revolt.
C. F. G. Masterman, The New Liberalism (1920), 48.We seem to have polled over three million votes, which is not bad for a dying party set between the upper and nether millstones.
Asquith to Hilda Harrisson, 31 October 1924, quoted in H. H. Asquith, Letters to a Friend, 11 (1934), 107.[I]t is going to fight against the view that the Liberal party is a middle party and for the view that it represents one of the angles of a triangle, each of which is quite definitely opposed to the other two, but at the same time has points of contact and sympathy with the other two.
Ramsay Muir writing about the Nation, which he prematurely believed he was going to be allowed to edit. Muir to Fisher, 9 February 1923, Fisher MSS.Images are not to be despised by those wanting to understand a frame of mind, and these two images of Liberalism – as grist to a Conservative/Labour mill, or as one angle of an ideological triangle – offer effective comment on two ways in which Liberals tended to view their position in the political spectrum of the 1920s. There were, naturally, other images such as Sir Geoffrey Shakespeare's tattered sheet mentioned in the first part of this study; but the positions described in these quotations may be taken to symbolize the two most important moods which three-party politics created.
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- The Liberal Mind 1914-29 , pp. 119 - 159Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1977