In order to understand why Tsar Peter and King Augustus II of Poland fell into one another's arms when they met at Rawa in August 1698, and why they parted such bosom friends, we must first of all briefly consider the relations between Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Sweden in the last three or four decades of the seventeenth century. After the peace of Oliva with Poland in 1661 and that of Kardis with Russia in 1669, Sweden's possession of Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and Karelia debarred both the Polish Republic and the tsar from the Baltic, thereby furnishing them with a common grievance and object of envy. Sweden's granary and her bulwark against Russia and Poland, Livonia with the port of Riga— ‘the most valuable jewel of the crown of Sweden’ — was a particularly invidious token of predominance in the Baltic and one whose lustre still outshone the growing importance of Narva in Estonia.

Until about fifteen years ago, most modern scholars saw Edmund Burke's thought largely as a reaction to the philosophical and political rationalism of his time: to them, although Burke was reactive, his revolt was original. When scholars did seek the historical ‘origin’ of his thought, it was generally found in Whiggery and that convenient catch-all ‘the’ British tradition of empiricist philosophizing. Of late, two groups of scholars have sought and found other ‘origins’: the first group, larger and perhaps better-known, finds Burke's thought to be rooted in the principles of ‘the’ natural law and, perhaps, also in the dictates of scholastic prudence; the other group, tiny and less well known, finds in Burke's traditionalism a partial continuation of the traditional way of thinking of seventeenth-century common lawyers. One consequence of undertaking this disinterment of Burke's ‘origins’ has been the burial of Burke's originality.

The influence of British Indian example on the Irish Land Act of 1870 has received some notice in recent years. Dr E. E. Stokes, for one, has commented that it was men with an Indian background like J. S. Mill and George Campbell who educated the Liberal party to think ‘that the State might justly lay hands on the sacred institution of private landed property’. It is argued here that the general influence was very much less than has been suggested. Nor did Indian example point to a single course of action by the state on the Irish problem. Mill and Campbell, the two leading advocates of Irish land reform to draw on India, put forward solutions which, if intended to secure practically the same end, differed significantly in their approach.

The remarkable gains made by the Conservatives in the general election of December 1868 in Lancashire have lately been widely recognized. Their extent may have suggested to some, either that there was a general movement of opinion in the area towards the Conservatives between the general election of 1865 and that of 1868, or that the newly enfranchised electors were more favourable to the Conservatives than the old constituency had been, or that some combination of the two elements was at work. It is the purpose of this article to ascertain what grounds exist for these explanations.

The unity of the Unionist party had been destroyed by Joseph Chamberlain's momentous speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, a speech described by one of his disciples as ‘a challenge to free thought as direct and provocative as the theses which Luther nailed to the church door at Wittenberg’. It was a particularly apt simile. Chamberlain's speech demanded a new Reformation and men soon found themselves ‘hating Free Trade with all the intensity with which any Calvinist ever hated the Church of Rome’.

Ernst Nolte in his Die Epoche des Faschismus writes that Hitler undoubtedly in principle had wanted war ‘but hardly that war at that time’, meaning the war of 1939. This somewhat muddled thesis conceals two distinct issues, namely the argument that in 1939 contingencies were not entirely to Hitler's liking and the argument that in 1939 contingencies were so little to his liking that we must conclude that Hitler took no conscious steps to risk a general war.