‘Thanks to thy sublime merits the times in which we live may be freely compared with the greatest days of Antiquity.’ So, in 1490, wrote Politian to the king of Portugal, casting a hopeful eye over something like a century of Portuguese imperial endeavour.1 Sixty years later, in a significantly different style, a Spanish chronicler surveying his own country's even more spectacular achievements saw them as ‘the greatest event since the making of the world, apart from the incarnation and death of him who created it’. Since then the idiom may have changed, but not the conviction, and at some time or other almost everything from the unshackling of man's mind from the bonds of medieval superstition to the rise of a capitalist economy has been attributed to the discoveries. Recently we have been invited to see Lisbon as the second Byzantium, and from the Sorbonne there has come the grand apocalyptic message of the birth of ‘un humanisme technique’ manifested in a new and seminal ‘sens du réel, sens du chiffre et de la précision’.

It is increasingly becoming a commonplace to assert that non-political activities engaged in during childhood play determinative roles in shaping individuals' attitudes toward and perceptions of the political order. A large part of this early ‘political socialization’, as it is now called, takes place within the family, which, in the words of one commentator, ‘incubates the political man’, whether or not there is a conscious attempt to inculcate political beliefs. As T. D. Weldon remarked, ‘Basic political creeds may not be actually imbibed … with mother's milk: but children are none the less indoctrinated in practically every other way.’ This socialization plus later experiences (including reading, conversations, and direct encounters with government) will help to implant notions of political legitimacy; that is, the grounds on which a political authority is held to be entitled to rule. Legitimacy and the consequent public acceptance of government are among the very foundations upon which politics rests. In the words of David Easton,

If a government…is to be capable of performing its tasks, the member of the [particular political] system must be prepared to support the particular norms and structures that organize the way in which all political activities are performed. That is, they must be willing to support the 'constitutional order' or regime. Hence, we are identifying the fundamental rules of the game, as they are often described, regulating participation in political life and the particular way of organizing political power in a given society.

On 23 November 1801 Henry Addington addressed the House of Commons on the financial affairs of the nation. The prime minister, in the course of his remarks, alluded briefly to the government's intention of selling certain Crown properties in the West Indies. The measure was planned, he explained, as a means of reducing arrears charged upon the Civil List.1 Although Addington hoped to effect the sales without parliamentary opposition, the question soon became entangled in the meshes of political intrigue. With remarkable cunning the young Pittite, George Canning, sought to use the issue as a means of driving William Pitt into opposition to Addington's government and of creating a new opposition party with Pitt as its leader.

Of the making of books on the women's rights movement there is no end, but detailed study of the ways in which the role of women changed in the second half of the nineteenth century has by comparison hardly begun. Yet it is clearly such investigations alone which can show how far the conventional stress upon feminism has been well judged. The religious activities of nineteenth-century British society are admittedly very far from being the area in which the greatest changes occurred in this connexion. Nevertheless for two reasons their investigation seems well worth while. In the first place, when ‘the woman question’ first attracted widespread attention among the British middle classes, the churches were still the great arbiters of public attitudes towards social issues, and the social influence of religious beliefs, practices and institutions was undoubtedly far more extensive than, for example, that of John Stuart Mill or the National Society for Women's Suffrage.

Cardinal Manning in old age wanted his successor to follow his lead into the temperance movement: ‘I pray God that my successor will humbly and with his whole heart go into the midst of the people as I have tried to do’, he wrote in 1890, ‘and will give to the League of the Cross a warm and encouraging countenance.’ He also wanted his successor to join the prohibitionist United Kingdom Alliance as ‘the only real power outside of Parliament to hold the Drink Trade in check’. When Herbert Vaughan attended a dinner of Manchester publicans who advocated winter-gardens and light beers as the agents of temperance, Manning was furious and excluded him from the list of his executors. In many statements from the 1870s onwards Manning expressed his passionate enthusiasm for the temperance movement. His temperance speeches show that he took great trouble to keep his arguments up to date, and that he read widely in temperance literature. Here, then, was no passing enthusiasm, but a cause to which Manning devoted his life after 1868, and for which he laboured through literature as heavy as Dr F. R. Lees' Alliance Prize Essay and the report of the 1853–54 Select Committee on Public-Houses. He travelled about the country on temperance tours, gave evidence before a parliamentary committee on the drink question, and braved much hostility from within the Catholic world by creating the League of the Cross, an association of Catholic abstainers.

Between 1867 and the end of the nineteenth century the Irish question was one of the major issues in British politics. Between 1880 and 1893 in particular it achieved the status of the predominating issue, the great and abiding preoccupation of politicians. There would appear to be little difficulty for the historian in explaining why this was so. There were obviously abundant reasons in the Irish situation itself why politicians should have devoted so much of their time and effort to dealing with it—the urgent nature of Ireland's social problems, especially in relation to land-holding; the growth of Irish agrarian agitation so much better organized and supported than had hitherto been the case that it had to be met by a large and extremely time-consuming amount of coercion or land reform or a combination of both; the growing hold in Ireland of nationalism and of the demand for home rule; the new strength and cohesion of the Irish parliamentary party and its impact on British politics, both within the House of Commons and through the mobilisation of the votes of Irishmen in the non-Irish constituencies. Ireland clearly needed, and had the means of exacting, a very considerable amount of attention to its problems. The nature of the preoccupation with Ireland seems equally clear. The issues of land and local government reform, home rule, and coercion predominate in the thought and action of politicians with regard to the Irish question.

The negotiations leading up to the Treaty of London of 27 April 1915 afford a classic illustration of Grey's complaints concerning the difficulties of conducting diplomacy in wartime. Though manifold they may be reduced to two headings. In the first place diplomacy was dependent, hopelessly so, upon victory in the field. ‘A diplomacy which was suitable when the Allied armies were having success’, Grey wrote, ‘was hopelessly unsuitable when the Germans seemed to be winning.’ Whereas before the war the Foreign Office had exercised some influence upon the development of British naval and military strategy, now the boot was upon the other foot. Words could not compensate for military defeats: ‘in war words count only so far as they are backed by force and victories. Up to the end of 1916…Allied diplomacy had little enough of this backing’.