In their use of the term ‘mob’, historians of the eighteenth century have generally neglected to define and to analyse it and have often shown a tendency to confuse the uses to which it might reasonably be applied.

Dr Elton has now written at length (Historical J. I (1958), 21–39) to support his view that Henry VII's reputation for rapacity was undeserved, while the idea that this ‘policy turned from just to unjust exactions was based only on insufficient knowledge of the facts’. He may have shown that Henry's actions were legal; he has not shown that they were just.What is unpopular is not necessarily unjust, but the opinions of subjects merit as full and sympathetic treatment as the policies of kings. Dr Elton's argument is of a type with those which claimed that, since Hitler's was a legally constituted government, it was sentimental to complain that its persecution of the Jews was unjust.

There is a sense in which all naval history is general history, since the structure and preoccupations of a State influence both the services which it demands of its fleets and the type of naval organization appropriate to their performance. This relationship is most obvious in periods of social and political revolution when the navy, like other institutions, finds itself out of harmony with the principles of the new order. Such a situation arose in France in 1789 when the Constituent Assembly set about the transformation of so many aspects of French society. The study of naval politics in the period 1789–91 consequently helps towards a fuller understanding of the Revolution as a whole. The changes introduced into the French navy form a not unimportant part of the general reconstruction of France while the debates on naval policy often throw a revealing light on the political attitudes of the protagonists.

Without question constitutional and democratic principles demand that the permanent officials of this country, even the most important and intelligent of them, must be content to deserve the proud title of servant. The Ministers of the Crown who are responsible to Parliament and enjoy their places because they have been chosen by the electorate, must, while they retain power, have an absolute control of the whole machinery of state, and that includes the unstinted service of the experts who alone can work that machinery. Of course a loyal servant has no need to be servile, nor in the right context dumb. The civil servant must give his counsel freely, and his criticism boldly; but the policy he must put into effect must obviously be that of the ruling political party and not his own. He must give order and practicability to the programme to which ministers are pledged, if that is at all possible. If he is in a position in the service for his opinions to affect his work then his opinions must be unknown to the public, and he must avoid public controversy and eschew party politics. Discreet, anonymous and uncommitted he must be free to serve equally effectively any party, to carry into action any policy, which the sovereign people in its wisdom has favoured at the polls.

It was the fortune of Thomas Babington Macaulay to be born into a chaotic world; to grow to manhood amidst constant wars, revolutions, counterrevolutions and reform movements scarcely distinguishable from revolutions; to take a leading part in some of these movements at home and in India, and to be an eye-witness of others in France; to live long enough to see the gradual return of stability on a foundation holding out the brightest hopes for the future, and to die early enough to escape even the first faint indication that these hopes were not to be fulfilled. He was born (on the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt, as he loved to recall) between the fall of the republic in France and the rise of Napoleon to despotic authority. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, with which he and his family were to have so long and so distinguished an association, between the battle of Waterloo and the battle of Peterloo. He attained his majority amidst the revolutions of 1821, entered Parliament amidst the revolutions of 1830, and published the first two volumes of his History amidst the revolutions of 1848. He was still at the height of his powers when the Great Exhibition of 1851 was hailed as ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity, and died eight years later, just in time to avoid witnessing the series of wars which marked the third quarter of the nineteenth century and the beginning of that bitter commercial rivalry and international tension which foreshadowed the eventual collapse.

The strength of the English ideal in France in the eighteenth century is well known, but its history in the nineteenth is far more obscure. Every reader of Montesquieu and Voltaire knows of their theoretical admiration for England and every student of French history has been told how their disciples were defeated at the Revolution. It is generally believed, nevertheless, that their day came at length with the fall of Napoleon, for then France seemed to follow in England’s footsteps with extraordinary fidelity. It emerged from a revolution and a military dictatorship as England had emerged in 1660 from the great rebellion and the rule of Cromwell; its restoration produced first a cautious king like Charles II and then a more violent one like James II; its glorious revolution of 1830, like that of 1688, ensured the victory of constitutional monarchy. The Jacobites found their counterparts in the legitimist conspirators; Walpole’s system of government by corruption and influence was reproduced by Guizot with his parliaments packed full of civil servants. France now conquered Algeria as England had conquered India: it underwent an Industrial Revolution as England had done, financed to a considerable extent moreover with English capital.

In 1868 the Birmingham Liberal Association won the first of a series of dazzling victories in parliamentary and municipal elections. Contemporaries immediately recognized the presence of a new phenomenon in English politics: disciplined control of a mass electorate by a tightly organized party apparatus. At first glance the Liberal machine seemed un-English, and the Tories gleefully imported an American epithet to describe it. The traditional interpretation of the caucus, as set forth by Ostrogorski, followed contemporary opinion in emphasizing the novelty of the institution. In his view, ‘the organization of the electoral masses’ by the Liberal Association represented a sharp break with the past. He traced its origin to the minority clause of the Reform Act of 1867, which gave each Birmingham elector two votes to divide among the candidates for three seats, thus challenging the Liberals to develop an organization capable of circumventing the Act. After their success in the ‘vote as you are told’ election of 1868, the Liberal politicians, according to Ostrogorski, continued to use the caucus as a contrivance for manipulating an electorate that otherwise might have exercised independent judgment. This interpretation remains of considerable value, particularly in its treatment of the oligarchic implications of modern democracy. Nevertheless, Ostrogorski’s analysis tends to be misleading and one-sided. The Liberal politicians, like the priests in Voltaire’s account of the history of religion, are depicted as consciously constructing an institution ex nihilo to meet their own needs and purposes. Ostrogorski attributes too much to calculation and too little to the historical process that created the materials out of which the caucus was built and the foundations on which it rested.

In 1852 a new British Colony, the Colony of the Bay Islands, was set up by Letters Patent. In 1859 Great Britain signed a Treaty, subsequently ratified in 1860 and put into effect in 1861, recognizing the Bay Islands as part of the Republic of Honduras. These facts are well known in the diplomatic history of the Central American question, and in the history of Anglo-American relations. The diplomatic historians have not, however, been able to find any convincing diplomatic explanation for the creation of the Bay Islands Colony in 1852; and, while they have fully explained the diplomatic reason for the cession of the islands in 1859, they do not seem to have considered it necessary to inquire how such a rare event in the history of the British Empire as the peaceful cession of a regularly constituted British colony to a foreign nation was brought about. This article seeks to explain the history of the Bay Islands Colony by showing that the colonization was effected by the Colonial Office without the Foreign Office being informed, and that the cession was effected by the Foreign Office without the Colonial Office being informed.