By his skillful use of England's resources, more than by his generalship in the field, Edward I became one of the most effective military commanders England produced between the Conqueror and Oliver Cromwell. King of a country rich in men, money, and resources, he was well provided with raw materials, but it was Edward's accomplishment to use them to create and support a large and tenacious army. He called for fighting men from all classes of the population, regardless of tenure; he required all sections of the realm to send provisions; and he required all people in his kingdom to support his wars by granting subsidies. Organization of this nature called all of Edward's political acumen into play, for it implied the existence of a corporate nature for England, one where the people not only must approve measures that touched them, they must also contribute to them. When the matter touching them was the defense of the realm, they responded to royal leadership by forming a proto-national army.

In spite of the importance and implications of this subject, there has been sparse treatment of it by historians. A handful of articles and a few books deal with the subject of military organization directly, while it forms a small part of a number of general works. William Stubbs described the make-up and use of both the militia and the mounted forces of England as pieces in the great game between king and barons and as evidence for the growing sense of nationality in England. J. E. Morris's Welsh Wars of Edward the First is a careful analysis of Edwardian armies based largely upon Exchequer sources.

The followers of King Charles I in the Civil War, long among the whipping boys of English history, have been receiving better treatment since the Whig interpretation of the seventeenth century lost its pristine vigour. This is particularly true of their constitutional position as set forth in the great outpouring of manifestoes and pamphlets during the war. Edward Hyde, perhaps the key figure in this aspect of royalism, has recently profited from a capable defence of his opinions and policy. Similarly, pamphleteers such as Henry Ferne, Dudley Digges, and John Bramhall are now fairly well known, thanks largely to J. W. Allen's pioneering study of their writings. From work like this it is clear that the royalist spokesmen accepted the increased importance of Parliament, the end of prerogative courts and nonparliamentary taxation, and the supremacy of common and statute law. Like their armies in the field, they were defending the monarchy as overhauled in 1641, not as the Tudors left it, much less as James I may have conceived it. Indeed the classical doctrine of the mixed or balanced constitution, glorified by Blackstone and widely accepted until nearly 1830, is now credited, not to Philip Hunton, but to the royalists. Such rehabilitation has done much to remove the patronizing label of “wrong but romantic,” which was once the best which they could hope for from historians or the general public.

Allen and those who followed him naturally concentrated on the legal and constitutional analysis of the origins of authority, the veto power, sovereignty, nonresistance, and so forth.

The notion that parliamentary politics in the days of William III and Queen Anne revolved around the conflict of the Whig and Tory parties is deeply rooted in the historiography of the later seventeenth century. Nourished by the many contemporary references to the existence and activities of the Whig and Tory parties, the “two-party concept” had its first flowering in the nineteenth century and came to full blossom in the early decades of the twentieth in the works of W. C. Abbott, K. G. Feiling, W. T. Morgan, and G. M. Trevelyan.

The canons of orthodoxy of one generation of historians, however, have often proved to be little more than the cannon fodder of their successors. In this case, it was one of Abbott's own students, Robert Walcott, who has led the way in the task of reinterpretation. As early as 1941, Walcott — remarking upon the obscurity enveloping accounts of party groupings in the period 1689 to 1714 — advanced the hypothesis that “the description of party organization under William and Anne which Trevelyan suggested in his Romanes Lecture on the two-party system is less applicable to our period than the detailed picture of eighteenth-century politics which emerges from Professor Namier's volumes on the Age of Newcastle.”

Walcott's invocation of Sir Lewis's studies of mid-eighteenth-century politics was, of course, a testimony to the advance in historical methodology that had gained prominence with the appearance in 1929 of The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III.

It is now more than a decade since John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson first challenged the conventional interpretations of nineteenth-century imperial history and employed the term “The Imperialism of Free Trade” to describe the “ever-extending and intensifying development of overseas regions” — a term which characterizes British imperial policy in the middle decades of the last century. The general validity of this thesis has been illustrated by reference to British policies in India in this period. There was the extensive program of railway construction, financed by British capital at favorable rates of interest guaranteed by the Government of India. There was the manipulation of the Indian tariff in response to pressure from the Lancashire cotton manufacturers. There was the cotton improvement program, the object of which was to relieve Lancashire's dependence on the United States as the major source of its raw cotton. In this case, the desired object was not achieved, despite considerable effort and expenditure sustained over more than a decade. But the approach of civil war in America revived interest in India as an alternative source of supply, notwithstanding the many difficulties that stood in the way. Indian cotton was raised on small holdings as a secondary crop every third or fourth year; its quality was poor; climatic conditions were uncertain; demand was irregular; communications between the cotton-producing areas and the ports were bad; and trade was hampered by lack of a contract law and a bankruptcy act. The Lancashire cotton manufacturers demanded energetic action from the state in overcoming these difficulties.

The Reform Act of 1867 was one of the decisive events, perhaps the decisive event, in modern English history. It was this act that transformed England into a democracy and made democracy not only a respectable form of government (the United States was never quite respectable), but also, it was soon taken for granted, the only natural and proper form of government. To be sure, the act had to be supplemented by others, household suffrage in the boroughs, as provided by the Act of 1867, being several steps removed from universal suffrage. But once this first step was made, no one seriously doubted that the others would follow. The Act of 1867, perhaps more than that of 1832, deserves the title of the Great Reform Bill. For while 1832 had no necessary aftermath in 1867, 1867 did have a necessary aftermath in 1884, 1918, 1928 — the later acts that genuinely universalized the suffrage, not only for Britain but for all those countries that took Britain to be the model of a parliamentary government.

It is all the more bewildering, therefore, to inquire into the history of this act and to find it so meandering, purposeless, fortuitous, so full of what Herbert Butterfield has called “the most useless things in the world” — useless, that is, if one expects meaning or sense in history. John Morley, trying to make sense of an affair that struck him as “one of the most curious in our parliamentary history,” wistfully concluded: “When we have made full allowance for blunder, caprice, chance, folly, craft, still reason and the nature of things have a share.”

There is a West Indian proverb, “If you kill me, bury me, too.” The concept of a West Indian federation has been killed, but it refuses to be buried and may, phoenix-like, rise out of the ashes at some future date. Perhaps this is the case because it is so much more difficult to bury ideals than it is to kill off their immediate results. As a factual reality, the Federation of the West Indies expired almost at the very moment of its birth. The funeral rites were without ceremony. Friends of the deceased grieved, while others grinned, and all shared in the paltry inheritance. Yet, as an ideal, it is enshrined in the hearts of many West Indians who continue to look beyond their very narrow geographical limits for a bond that will unite them with others for the greater glory of the entire West Indian community.

If the Federation of the West Indies becomes a reality — and the initial failure may be a necessary step in its ultimate success — it will be but another demonstration that the spirit of nationalism cannot be checked by the facts of geography and economics. In politics, vision and the sense of mission often enable men to climb mountains even if they are unable to move them. Man's indomitable spirit, which enables him to deny God and nature, is exemplified in the nationalistic movements so characteristic of the last hundred years and more, which are reaching new heights of intensity, if not frenzy, in our own day.