The failure of the Popular Front government of 1936–1937 was at least two-fold: from the national standpoint it was able neither to formulate a foreign policy of anti-fascism nor to bring France out of the economic crisis; from the narrower political perspective it was unable to prevent a growing sense of disillusionment and recrimination among its constituents. Both aspects have received increasing attention from historians in recent years, although not always with sufficient regard for the extent to which the two problems might be separable. Greater intervention on behalf of the Spanish Republicans, for example, might not have saved the Spanish Republic, but even so would have gone far toward satisfying Blum's constituents and blunting communist criticism of his government. Abandonment of the forty-hour week, on the other hand, while adding to the deceptions of the left, might have permitted the achievement of the economic upturn upon which the hopes of the Popular Front ultimately rested. Spain and finances – war and economics, the twin chief concerns of western civilization in our century as A. J. P. Taylor has facetiously suggested – are the issues in terms of which most analysts of Blum's double failure have proceeded. But there is another which may have been equally important, and which appears to have been of greater significance in the eyes of contemporaries. This was the question of the relationship of the Blum government and the French administration. The increasingly blurred distinction between politics and administration characteristic of contemporary Gaullism, as well as the rigidity and resistance to innovation typical of the crisis-prone French bureaucratic style, suggest in any case a re-evaluation of the recent past in terms what Michel Crozier has aptly called “the bureaucratic phenomenon”.

The myth or reality of widespread social unrest in Britain in the period immediately before the First World War has attracted increasing attention among historians in recent years. Debate has centred upon two main themes, namely the character and impact of contemporary labour unrest, and the situation and prospects of the Liberal Party. Was British labour fundamentally disaffected from existing forms of industrial relations and from Parliamentary democracy? Was the pre-1914 Liberal Party already in decline and unable to withstand the advance of the Labour Party? Several recent writers have returned sceptical or largely negative conclusions to questions of this kind. In so doing they have sought to dispel a popularly held notion of incipient social breakdown and imminent social change, proposed amongst others by Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England.

The purpose of this essay is to examine the emergence and development, between 1904 and 1914, of the Association of Teachers in Technical Institutions. A main conclusion is that the ATTI, in being mainly concerned with its members' employment interests, was implicitly a trade union despite continual protestations by both officers and members that the Association was a professional body and would not “degenerate into a mere trades union […]. For people of education, like teachers, […] it is wrong to begin at the salary end”. In the first place, therefore, this paper is an investigation into certain aspects of the early history of a white-collar union, in this case the organization whose membership was drawn initially from among a small group of teachers in local authority technical institutes in England at the beginning of this century. Secondly, however, insofar as the technical teachers of this period saw themselves as professional people for whom trade unionism was inappropriate, the case-study also, in passing, illustrates the common conflict over the goals sought by most teachers' organizations at some time during their evolution as to whether they “should be concerned only with professional matters or should also fight for better salaries”.

Lassalles Testament ist das entscheidende Zeugnis dafür, wie ganz persönlich Lassalle den ADAV als seine eigenste Schöpfung auffaßte, wie sehr er die Organisation mit seiner Person identifizierte. Obwohl der Lassalle unwandelbar wohlgesinnte Franz Mehring die von Lassalle ausgesetzten Legate und Renten als dem Parteiinteresse dienend interpretierte, konnte er doch nicht umhin, das Testament als verhängnisvoll für die Weiterentwicklung des ADAV zu bezeichnen. Im zweiten Kapitel des vierten Buches seiner Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie findet sich dazu die folgende Passage: „Verhängnisvoller erwiesen sich die Bestimmungen des Testaments, die sich unmittelbar auf den Allgemeinen Deutschen Arbeiterverein bezogen. Lassalle empfahl dem Vereine, den Frankfurter Bevollmächtigten Bernhard Becker zu seinem Nachfolger zu wählen, und diesem band er auf die Seele, an der Organisation festzuhalten, die den Verein zum Siege führen werde, Verfügungen, die sich als Reflexe der Vahlteichschen Opposition erklären, aber, statt alte Verwirrung zu schlichten, nur neue Verwirrung angerichtet haben.”

Everybody imagines he knows about working conditions in Victorian England, particularly the excessively long hours resulting from the use of machinery to which the workers became increasingly enslaved. In the famous words of James Philip Kay, “Whilst the engine runs the people must work – men, women and children are yoked together with iron and steam. The animal machine – breakable in the best case, subject to a thousand sources of suffering – is chained to the iron machine, which knows no suffering and no weariness.” It is equally well-known that the worst aspect of employment was the exploitation of women and small children in textile factories and mines. Factory conditions were causing disquiet as early as the 1780's, and the revelations of the witnesses before a succession of committees and commissions in the early part of the nineteenth century are too familiar to need repeating here. The same may be said of conditions in the mines. Who has not been moved by that description of girls at work in the mines of the West Riding – “Chained, belted, harnessed, like dogs in a go-cart, black, saturated with wet, and more than half naked […] they present an appearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural”? Yet it is also common knowledge that factory and mine workers were only a minority among the working classes at the mid-century, numbering about 1¾ millions compared with the 5½ millions employed in non-mechanised industry. Agriculture and domestic service, in fact, employed twice the number of those working in manufacture and mining at this time.

Students of institutional charity must sometimes share Walter Bagehot's melancholy doubt “whether the benevolence of mankind does most harm or good”; but they do not dispute that philanthropists were ubiquitous in England by the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Sir James Stephen called the period the age of charitable societies. “For the cure of every sorrow […] there are patrons, vice-presidents, and secretaries. For the diffusion of every blessing […] there is a committee.” Many issues raised by the expansion of philanthropy have been treated with considerable insight. But at least one question has largely escaped the historian: the role of charitable women among the “Fathers of the Victorians”.