The Liberalism which observers were soon to call ‘historic’, the doctrine which Mill announced, Gladstone embodied and ‘which Lord Morley define[d] in his beautiful “Recollections”’, was neither completely dead nor yet very much alive in 1914. That perspective of Liberal history which once led posterity to believe that the doctrine and the party representing it had been doomed in the face of intractable pre-war problems or ‘rotting at its roots’ in the constituencies is one which has rightly been challenged. A more plausible interpretation of the years before 1914 is one in which the difficulties of the Liberals are seen to be severe but not insuperable. The problems posed by the constitutional crisis, Ireland, the suffragettes, industrial unrest and a trembling international situation were not problems with which Liberalism, as understood by those who professed to practise it, was unfitted to cope. For eight years Liberals had been running away (sensibly) from contentious issues, and there was nothing in the discernible context of Asquith's government after 1910 to prevent them from running and trimming as they had done in the past.