If economists have been accused, like Oscar Wilde's cynic, of knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, historians, on the other hand, often know the value of everything and the price of nothing. Since value and price are historically related, however, the historian who ignores the economics which both embodies and reflects a value-system and world-view does so at his own cost. Thus, the laws of the early Germanic tribes — and of the Anglo-Saxons in particular, to whom this study is confined — are dominated by virtual tables of prices and compensations for offenses and injuries. To the general historian, and even to the medievalist, these are perhaps the least fascinating elements of the laws. Certainly the more cosmic elements of Germanic society almost vanish here beneath the weight of numbers. Nonetheless, even these apparently raw economic sources reveal, upon investigation, not only societal structure and the relationship of church and state but a concept of kingship which is the key to both. Penalties and fines in Anglo-Saxon law will be analyzed here to illuminate these aspects of the early English world.

The two greatest influences on the actual codification of Anglo-Saxon law are Roman and ecclesiastical. Before the introduction of Christianity no Germanic written code is known, and the written formulation of law is largely stimulated by an attempt to cope with the new religion and with the status of its institution, the Church, in terms of Germanic society. In Kentish law, for example, dooms concerning the Church show less alliteration and consequently may be taken as newer.

During the past sixteen years “administrative history” seems to have come and gone as a term of distinction in the historical study of Tudor England. In the later 1940's there were a number of scholars newly aware of the vast wealth of government records in the English archives and enormously impressed by the achievements of the medievalists — of Tout and his school — who deplored the absence of comparable studies for the post-medieval period and, for a time, came to seek salvation in an ever more stringent and particular investigation of the processes of government. But that phase did not last long. Now it can be said by Joel Hurstfield, himself a notable contributor to that flowering of administrative history, that “we have passed beyond recall the stage when the machinery alone, however intimately understood, can answer the questions.” The study of social history is all the rage now, by which is meant the history of a given society in its various aspects and manifestations — or rather, whatever may in fact emerge from that awesome ambition. Fashions change, and nowadays they change pretty rapidly; but one need not regret that not-so-distant dawn or believe that the evening has yet come. Let it be made clear, however, what is meant, or should be meant, by administrative history. Certainly this involves the analysis and description of past administrative processes, the discovery of principles implicit or explicit in the conduct of government, and an understanding of the manner in which the theoretical mechanism operated in practice.

Now that the great bulk of papers relating to John Locke in the Lovelace Collection has begun to yield up its treasure, the life and character of John Locke, as well as the life and character of his work, can be seen more fully than ever before. John Locke has firmly entered into political history, as Peter Laslett's researches have demonstrated; and Locke himself has become firmly embedded in the amorphous discipline called the history of ideas, since the history of his own ideas can now readily be examined. The wealth of material relevant to Locke's work has by no means provided his ideas with greater logical consistency, for the lack of which Locke has always had his critics. In some ways, the philosophical coherence of his work presents even greater problems than it used to, since the papers leave even more ravelled ends than the published books did. But the papers have provided something which may prove even more useful in understanding Locke's thought than a logical key to his thought: that is, the spectacle of a man thinking, and thinking hard, over four decades. Locke himself comes to appear a particular illustration of his own preoccupation with process and with the philosophical ideas arising from the concept of process: the long processes of his thinking, along so many major lines, may also be seen more clearly now in their complementary relation to one another.

This paper, the heart excised from a longer study, deals with one line of Locke's thought, a line which has recently attracted serious scholarly attention, his views on language.

The art and mind of Jonathan Swift have been the objects of ever greater critical attention for the last twenty or thirty years. So thoroughly have the commentators discussed Swift's attitudes and their origins that there would seem to be little left to discover about the Dean's views or why he held them or how he applied them. In respect to the rôle played in Swift's thought by his reading in historiography, however, and the importance of history in the conceptual bases of his writings, critics have assumed more than they have demonstrated. In spite of some useful published disquisitions — by Herbert Davis and Irvin Ehrenpreis — the implications of the importance of Swift's historical outlook have not been fully explored, nor have the formation and configuration of his historically founded beliefs been clarified and documented. The present study will attempt to explain in some detail Swift's ideas of history, where he got them, and how they affected his non-historiographical compositions.

Swift's vital interest in historiography is now commonly acknowledged. The post in government he most actively tried to get was that of Historiographer Royal. Between 1714 and 1720, he devoted a good deal of time to composing his “histories” of political activities during the Tory ministry. He essayed a history of England. His letters as well as his other works are packed with references to a multiplicity of historians drawn from disparate ages and cultures. In his library, which numbered about five hundred separate works at the time of his death, at least three fifths were historical opera, including diaries, memoirs, and chronologies.

The present paper is concerned with “political history” — with the problems of the statesman who looks at the situation from above and has to make decisions about it. Granted that conditions are of a given sort and that society has a certain form — granted that men are what they are and events have produced a predicament that calls for action — there are people who have a presiding position and an over-all responsibility; and their strategies and decisions are themselves an object of study. A crucial question of “political history” is the question of the kind of statesmanship that was necessary for operating the constitution as it existed in the early years of George III's reign. On this subject one who does not speak with the authoritarian voice of the expert may claim that the experts should be carefully scrutinized, especially in a world now terribly subject to intellectual fashion. But one who has always valued originality (and has been reproved even for measuring historians by this quality) is in a predicament — calling, now, for the reverse of this, and wanting, rather, to recover continuity with an earlier stage of historiography. Whereas at the present time new evidence, manuscript sources, and the thrill of the hitherto-undiscovered fact are always prized, this paper must take on the dull work of making sure that some old material is not neglected, material which, if it appeared in print long ago, did so only because its importance was so obvious from the first.

“Imperialism,” an eminent historian has written, “is no word for scholars.” But the study of European political expansion in Asia, the Pacific islands, and Africa in the last quarter of the nineteenth century certainly merits scholarly attention, and recently has been receiving it. Since 1960 an impressive array of books and articles has appeared which present new insights into aspects of the “scramble,” particularly the motives for British action. Most of these studies have been concerned with Africa, and a possible deficiency in the analysis of one of the most notable of them has been that in its preoccupation with Africa it has not taken sufficient account of relevant developments elsewhere.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly after 1870, European influence advanced with a new aggressiveness into the under-powered areas of the world. In the halcyon days of the Pax Britannica, British governments had sought to avoid annexations as unproductive and expensive. This policy continued to be the creed in the 1870's, but some statesmen found it increasingly difficult to apply without serious risk to major British interests. These officials were motivated largely by fear of future challenges rather than of demonstrated peril. But there was a growing conviction, particularly evident in the permanent staff of the Foreign Office, that Europe had entered a new era of great-power rivalries in which Britain must either pursue a more active imperial policy or risk the loss of commerce, prestige, and world power. There was widespread apprehension that expansion into overseas areas by the militant and protectionist German Empire, Spain, and other European states might be ruinous to British trade and dangerous to Imperial security.

By any measure, the National Insurance Act of 1911 ranks among the major legislative achievements of the Liberal administration that held office in Great Britain before World War I. One section of the act founded the world's first national system of compulsory unemployment insurance. Another section brought government-sponsored health insurance to five sixths of the families of the nation and established the precedent of state concern for the physical welfare of the individual citizen, of which the National Health Service Act of 1946 would be only an extension. By requiring beneficiary contributions toward welfare programs, the act settled the financial pattern for most of Britain's present social legislation. In a less crowded period, the National Insurance Act would rank as an imposing parliamentary monument, comparable, for instance, to the Education Act of 1902. Sandwiched between the Parliament Act and the Home Rule Act, it has been lost from sight. The measure is not mentioned in the standard biography either of Asquith or of Balfour. It earns one sentence in G. M. Trevelyan's History of England in the Nineteenth Century, where through successive editions and revisions it is called “the National Health Insurance Act of 1912.” R. C. K. Ensor's England, 1870-1914 gives it a couple of paragraphs.

This study is an examination of an important, perhaps crucial, aspect of the evolution of the health insurance section of the National Insurance Act that has remained unnoticed for half a century: the lobby activity of the British commercial insurance industry by which the companies modified health insurance proposals for their own benefit.