It has been said that the Civil War was won by committees. Recent writers on this subject have begun to show how parliamentary policy and its execution was forged in the committee chambers rather than on the crowded floor of the House of Commons. This article is concerned with the personnel of these committees, in particular with those men who were not famous for their political activities and attitudes. Obviously, a core of leaders was needed in order to direct the business of the committees, to give continuity to their proceedings and to ensure that their work was in accord with the policy of the Commons. But the political ‘parties’ were relatively small, and with all the enthusiasm in the world their members could not attend personally to all aspects of government, civil and military. This study is concerned with the men who had no known political views but who contributed a great deal of time and effort to the running of parliamentary affairs. Because of their relative obscurity in the House it will be useful to ask why they were chosen to serve on certain committees, how their background and activity compared with that of their more ‘political’ colleagues, and how they reacted to situations where they were required to take a political stand. Above all, it will be possible to judge whether these men formed a coherent group rather than a random collection of individuals. These men owed their positions to their administrative skill rather than to their political affiliations. As administrators they were responsible to the legislature, and during a time of intensified state intervention, they became analogous to a non-political civil service, ready to execute the policy decisions of the party leaders.

Over the so-called ‘Jew Bill’; of 1753, the Opposition press was to wage one of the most extraordinary propaganda campaigns in English history. The Bill itself was a comparatively minor measure introduced by the Pelham ministry t o relieve at least some of the disabilities under which the Jews then laboured. Although there was probably no country in Europe in which the Jews received better treatment, and Jewish merchants and financiers had attained positions of very considerable wealth and influence in England, a number of irksome restrictions remained. This was particularly the case in the matter of naturalization, which gave to aliens the rights of natural-born Englishmen, such as the right to own land and ships, and to trade with the colonies. The Jewish Naturalization Bill–to give it its proper title—was designed to remove this disability, by providing that individual Jews who had been resident i n Great Britain or Ireland for three years might be naturalized by Act of Parliament without taking the Sacrament. It was a very modest measure. It certainly did not confer on all Jews in the country the rights of British citizens, and would, in fact, have applied only to a very small number of extremely wealthy Jews, for a private Act of Parliament was a very expensive proceeding indeed. Nor did it relieve Jews of religious disabilities. Yet this Bill was to produce a quite remarkable clamour on the part of the Opposition press, in which it was to be denounced as a blasphemous attack upon Christianity, and the unfortunate Jews were to be accused of every imaginable vice and enormity. There were few political issues in the early eighteenth century to arouse the emotions of Englishmen: but the ‘Jew Bill’; was certainly one of them.

The Government which Lord Russell formed on Palmerston's death in October 1865 met Parliament first on 6 February 1866. On 12 March it introduced a Reform Bill, the chief objects of which were to lower the Borough Franchise of 1832 from £10 rental to £7 and the County Franchise from £50 to £14, and to give votes to £50 Savings Bank depositors, £10 lodgers and certain others (enfranchising altogether about 400,000 new voters). On 7 May it introduced a Seats Bill which provided for grouping of boroughs with populations smaller than 8000 and removal of second seats from small towns with two members; and which proposed to distribute the 49 seats thus freed so that Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Salford and London would have 10 new seats between them, Scotland 7, London University and a number of new boroughs 1 each and the English counties 26 in all. These measures were recommended by Gladstone, as Leader of the House of Commons, in the hope, which the Queen shared, that they would put an end to the reform question for a generation. Their authors, Russell and Gladstone, intended them to wind up the line of abortive measures which had been presented to Parliament in the previous seventeen years: they expected, innocently as it turned out, that a degree of enfranchisement which the Cabinet had accepted, however reluctantly, which had been tailored in order to pass through Parliament and ‘which we had so much cut down…from the standard of the Palmerston measure of 1860 would be accepted by the Liberal majority in the House of Commons.

The future of Morocco was not an issue which suddenly began to agitate international politics at the beginning of the twentieth century, as a sort of left-over of imperialism belatedly brought to mind. ‘We are living… on the crater of a Volcano’ was neither a new, nor untypical view of the situation as seen from Tangier in 1881. Britain had already made an attempt to regenerate the ‘sick man of the West’, before he could cause as many complications as the fellow Muslim invalid to the East, by taking the initiative which led to the Madrid Conference respecting the right of Protection of Moorish Subjects in 1880. But this was not a success. Nor did the attempts which followed to persuade the so-called Shereefian Empire, in its vital strategic position at the entrance to the Mediterranean, to provide itself with the revenue, tools and incentive necessary for reform by the conclusion of a liberal commercial treaty, gain their objective. France also was concerned with Morocco, and the Algerian military point of view, which stressed the security danger of allowing any other power to establish preponderant influence there, was gradually gaining ground. One French minister at Tangier, Ordega, had gone as far as to try and present his government in 1884 with the fait accompli of a revolution in Morocco, with a French protégé on the Moorish throne. But the Paris authorities were not willing, or at this stage even able, to sanction such a forward policy. Spain was the power which, at official level, had long considered it had the right of reversion to the Moorish heritage. But internal weakness precluded direct action, and Spanish governments were reduced to other approaches. The negative one, associated with the conservative statesman Cánovas del Castillo, stressed the need to ‘prolong the dying agony of Morocco’, until Spain had recovered sufficiently to claim her rights. Others, however, argued for a more active policy, and they had an opportunity in the ‘Liberal’; ministries of the 1880's. It is in this context that the activity of Segismundo Moret, Minister of State from November 1885, was of relevance in bringing Morocco further into the international arena.

One of the basic points of the National Socialist programme was the promise of the ‘Liberation’; of German nationality groups who had come under the control of neighbouring states through the peace treaties of 1919. Accusing a country of maltreating its German minority became a classic Nazi gambit in opening aggressive operations in the late 1930's. In most instances Nazi propaganda charges were vastly exaggerated, but if ever there existed a situation which might have provided some justification for Hitlerian wrath, it was Fascist repression in South Tyrol.