One of the difficult and important decisions which confronted Napoleon during his last days in Paris concerned the use of his fleet. Strategically there was overwhelming argument for its immediate and energetic employment. On land, Austria was starting the war with large advantages; in numbers, in preparation, in position, in geographical facilities of every kind. But on sea, she was nowhere. Never a formidable naval power, her small fleet was at the moment in a condition of more than ordinary decrepitude. That of France, on the contrary, had recently been raised by the Emperor to a size and efficiency which had attracted the uneasy attention of the British admiralty. Obviously, therefore, if Italy were indeed to be freed to the Adriatic, it was of the first importance that France should assert and use to the full her maritime superiority in the Adriatic. Only so could the famous Quadrilateral be taken in the rear, and Austria made conscious of her one geographical disadvantage: the inadequacy of her railway communications with her front. The Emperor had accordingly given detailed instructions for the sending of such a fleet, prepared to effect a landing at Venice. But now at the last moment the threatening attitude of England caused him to countermand them. For the Derby government not only dispatched a formidable fleet itself to the Mediterranean, but proceeded to advance an urgent request for the neutralization of the Adriatic. ‘Before the Emperor leaves Paris,’ wrote Malmesbury to Cowley on 2 May, ‘make a great effort to keep us out of the war by obtaining his consent to neutralise the Adriatic.’

Vaccination has an immediate, but still quite neglected relevance to the growth of state activity in the nineteenth century. As the one conclusive method of preventive medicine of the time ‘it had ripened to the point at which the Legislature had become able to expressly apply it’. Indeed, from the first decade government was directly involved in its promotion. Vaccination thus constitutes the first continuous public health activity undertaken by the state. It also became, after 1841, the first free, specifically non-pauperizing, medical service provided by the Legislature on a national scale. And—completing its triple pioneering distinctions—from 1853 it was the first preventive method to be compulsorily applied to each child born in England and Wales. In its national, free and compulsory character, this health service represents an early yet remarkably modern extension of government action.

On 12 January 1873 the British yacht Enchantress entered the harbour of Zanzibar. On board were a former Governor of Bombay and a suite of six government officials—the Resident in the Persian Gulf, two men from the Foreign Office, a military and a naval attaché and one of the country's foremost Arabic scholars. What had brought such an important group into such an unimportant eastern backwater? The answer is only partly to be found in the state of British public opinion on the slave trade question. The origin of the mission is to be sought not in Exeter Hall but in the Huṣns on the bare slopes of the Jabal Akhḍar.

The Ashanti expedition of 1873–4 provides a remarkable illustration of the use of military power in colonial policy. At a moment when the whole basis of Britain's West African policy was being questioned at home an Ashanti invasion of the states on the Gold Coast in 1873 brought about a calamitous decline in British prestige in the region. The tiny neglected British settlement on the Gold Coast, and the so-called ‘protectorate’, which even experts did not understand, suddenly received unwelcome publicity, which led finally to a reluctant exercise of military power. Sir Garnet Wolseley's march to Kumasi was one of the military dramas of the Victorian age.

As a result of recent studies English imperialism has come to acquire a somewhat surprising reputation for sobriety and restraint; that is English imperialism considered as a serious and responsible political movement in contrast to its occasional ally, jingoism, which Stead aptly termed ‘imperialism sodden with gin’. So far from being marked by ‘earth hunger’ and the lust for limitless expansion, the imperialist attitude is now regarded as primarily a defensive one, originating as an impulse of defiant self-assertion to safeguard existing British overseas interests from injury or extinction. The elements of exaggeration in the older picture have been carefully toned down. The swing in British policy is now held to have been more gentle, more limited in extent and duration, more seriously checked by the traditional regulators of Gladstonian finance and the priority of European affairs than was allowed for in the polemics of the older view. Just as the swing in British policy and opinion was less violent, so the distance that divided the Little Englander from the Big Englander is seen to have been much narrower than the party controversies of the nineties would suggest. Dr R. E. Robinson, who has been among the leading exponents of the new view, adopts the terms ‘forward school’ and ‘consolidationists’ rather than ‘imperialists’ and ‘anti-imperialists’. Certainly there were no voices among the prominent Radicals and Little Englanders prepared to advocate the liquidation of the Empire; their concern was rather to prevent its further extension in the form of subject tropical dependencies. Some indeed, like John Bright and Leonard Courtney, were willing to desert Gladstone over Irish Home Rule because they saw it as a measure striking at the integrity of the Empire. Courtney, who came to regret his assent to intervention in Egypt in 1882 and stood out as the most unflinching opponent of the Boer War, was nevertheless no disintegrationist. In 1887 he wrote to his friend, John Scott, in India: voter would think no more of giving up India than of giving up Ireland, not caring to inquire seriously what would be the fate of either when abandoned.

The bitter hostility with which Joseph Chamberlain was pursued by the sections of the Unionist party opposed to his policy of tariff reform, even after he resigned from Balfour's cabinet in September 1903 to conduct his campaign untrammelled by office, is a curious aspect of Unionist history. The party had seen its defeat clearly foreshadowed in a series of catastrophic by-elections, and yet it persisted in fighting its own internal fiscal battles instead of closing its ranks to meet the most formidable combination of Radical and Socialist forces that it had ever had to face. It knew that no viable proposals for fiscal reform would be put forward for several years, since its opponents were all committed to free trade. Why then did it perversely continue to dispute a remote contingency, thus encouraging its opponents to drive wedges into the divided Unionist leadership by well-chosen parliamentary motions in the sessions of 1904–5, and ensuring that in 1906 it was a demoralized as well as a defeated party that emerged from the polls? After every allowance is made for the purely human impulses that might account for these fiscal quarrels—the hopelessness of defeat, weariness of office, uncertainty in new and alarming political circumstances, and the suspicion that Chamberlain's ‘new departure’ was a bid to salvage his own political fortunes from the wreck of the party—it is still necessary to adduce some more convincing explanation for this seeming folly. For such an explanation, one must appreciate the full significance to contemporaries of Chamberlain's tariff movement, and his determination to make tariff reform and its attendant social and economic policies ‘the great question of the future, and the one on which party divisions will ultimately settle themselves’. His Unionist opponents believed they were fighting to protect not simply free trade, vital as this appeared, but also the whole fabric of Conservatism, both as a historic creed, and as a practical movement.