¹ Elton, G. R., The Tudor Revolution in Government (Cambridge, 1953).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² Namier, L. B., The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III (1929), 1, 164.Google Scholar

³ Cf. ‘Society is not made by men though social laws are nothing but laws of human behaviour. Because it is true that society is nothing except men and their habits and laws, and that all social institutions are the product of human activities, it does not follow that men make societies. For to make is to contrive for a purpose, and implies a conscious end and a knowledge of means. It is only because we use words that suggest purposes to describe nearly all the consequences of human activities that it comes natural to us to describe social and political institutions as if they were made by men.... Men are always trying to adapt their institutions to their desires, and to some extent they succeed. But all this makes it no less true that these, institutions are not the realizations of human purposes, and that they affect these purposes just as much (and perhaps much more) than they are affected by them’, Plamenatz, J., The English Utilitarians (Oxford, 1949), 151.Google Scholar

⁴ Foord's, A. S.‘The Waning of the Influence of the Crown’, English Historical Review, LXII, 484–507CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is, of course, the sort of work referred to here. But the point may apply equally to ‘administrative’ historians, who, quite legitimately, confine their attention to a single concrete event or series of events, e.g. E. Hughes, ‘Sir Charles Trevelyan and Civil Service Reform, part i’, Ibid. LXIV, 53–67.

⁵ Prouty, R., The Transformation of the Board of Trade 1830–55 (1957), published since this article was written, throws some interesting light upon the growth of the Board of Trade's activities, especially in the regulation of merchant shipping.Google Scholar

⁶ Dicey, A. V., Lectures upon the relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (1905).Google Scholar

⁷ Finer, S. E., The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (1952).Google Scholar

⁸ Lewis, R. L., Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement 1832–54 (1952).Google Scholar

⁹ There is a very brief but interesting mention of the question in Greaves's, H. R. G. The Civil Service in the Changing State (1949). Mr Greaves distinguishes three stages of development, the ‘oligarchic maladministration and interfering paternalism’ of the eighteenth century, ‘the regulatory state’ of the nineteenth, and ‘the social service democracy of the twentieth century’; and argues that the last was born before the first was dead, and that the second never existed except in men's minds. It is certainly true and pertinent to observe that on occasions ‘eighteenth century’ forms of government merged imperceptibly into ‘twentieth century’. But it seems misleading to draw a fundamental distinction between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concepts of the State, except in so far as notions of efficiency in, and methods of, conducting State business are concerned. However, Mr Greaves does not define his categories or elaborate his thesis in any detail.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Whether or not Dicey himself intended it, his work has commonly been taken to offer such an explanation. The preface to the first edition says, rather vaguely, ‘It has been written with the object... of drawing from some of the best known facts of political, social, and legal history certain conclusions which, though many of them are obvious enough, are often overlooked, and are not without importance’, Dicey, op. cit. viii-ix.

¹¹ Public Record Office, C.O. 384/30, unmarked memorandum, Stephen, to Elliot, T. F., 31 July 1832.Google Scholar

¹² Cf. Willis, J., The Parliamentary Powers of English Government Departments (Cambridge, Mass., 1933), 13–15 Mr Willis observes that the appointment of preventive officers was ‘fundamentally at variance with the general principles of the Common Law, which like the nineteenth-century God waits for you to commit the sin and then pounces’. However, he also makes the assumption that the ‘new era’ did not set in until 1906.Google Scholar

¹³ For a detailed working out of this type of process in a particular field, see MacDonagh, O., ‘The Regulation of Emigrant Traffic from the United Kingdom, 1842–55’, Irish Historical Studies, ix, 162–89; ‘Emigration and the State, 1833–55: an essay in Administrative History’, Trans[actions of the] Royal Hist[orical] Soc[iety], 5th series, v, 133–59; and sections v and vi of ‘Irish Emigration to the United States of America and the British Colonies during the Famine’, The Great Famine, a symposium (Dublin, 1956), 359–76.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Burn, W. L., ‘Free Trade in Land: an Aspect of the Irish Question’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc. 4th series, xxxi, 68Google Scholar. See also Black, R. D. C., ‘The Classical Economists and the Irish Problem’, Oxford Economic Papers, new series, v, 26—40.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Dicey, op. cit. (2nd edn. 1914), 44.

¹⁶ Cf. ‘The most significant thing about this discovery of a note in Gladstone's own hand of the cabinet voting, on 24 January 1854, on the proposal to abolish patronage is the fact that the Whig leaders were solidly opposed to reform while the Peelites, and the one time radical, supported it’, Hughes, op. cit. 62.

¹⁷ Morley, J., The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (1903), 511.Google Scholar

¹⁸ On this point, Professor A. Briggs appears to cite and use a quotation wrongly (one cannot speak certainly since Professor Briggs gives no references in his work) when he writes, ‘In an age when the shadow of democracy was already looming on the horizon, men like Vaughan, Jowett and Trevelyan realized the need for a plentiful supply of informed gentlemen. “Our people are few compared with the Multitudes likely to be arrayed against us”, Trevelyan had written to Delane, “and we must prepare for the trial by cultivating to the utmost the superior morality and intelligence which constitute our real strength”, Victorian People (1954), 171. In fact, the sentence quoted occurs in Trevelyan's Thoughts on Patronage, and it is preceded immediately by a sentence which runs as follows, ‘We’ are apparently on the threshold of a new era pregnant with great events, and England has to maintain in concert with her allies the cause of right and liberty and truth in every quarter of the world’, Hughes, op. cit. 70. Thus, ‘Our people’ would seem to refer, not to the ‘gentlemanly’ classes, but to the English people as a whole; while ‘the Multitudes’ would seem to refer, not to the working classes, but to foreign powers.

¹⁹ The commission to Trevelyan and Northcote in 1853; the appointment of the select committee of 1860; the Order in Council of 4 June 1870 and the appointment of the Ridley and Playfair commissions of 1874 and 1886. The Order in Council of 21 May 1855 (when, incidentally, Gladstone was out of office) represented, in the circumstances, a retrograde rather than a progressive step. Its ‘actual effects... were (a) to limit the Commissioners’ certificate to the junior situations in the civil establishments; (b) to make competition a permissive but not a compulsory method of selection for such certificates; and (c) to leave the power of appointment in all cases where it had previously rested—with the political heads of the departments’, Royal Commission on the Civil Service: fourth report, Parl. Papers, 1914, xvi [Cd. 7338], 5–6.

²⁰ For the practical consequences of Fitzjames Stephen's Benthamism (a ‘Benthamee Lycurgus’, he described himself), see J. Roach, ‘James Fitzjames Stephen (1829–94)?’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Apr. 1956.

²¹ P.R.O. CO. 384/81, 1694 Emigration, 30 Aug. 1848; 384/84, 4584 Emigration, 22 May 1849; Purcell, R. J., ‘The New York commissioners of emigration, 1847–60’, Studies, xxxvii, 28—42Google Scholar; Twentieth Report New York Commissioners of Emigration (New York, 1866). Hitchens's, F. H.The Colonial Land and Emigration Commission (Philadelphia, 1931), 148–50, is misleading on this point, as he confuses the project for a central station at Liverpool with the depots for Australian emigrants, which had been in existence for some time.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²² Oakeshott, M., Political Education (Cambridge, 1951), 10.Google Scholar