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Presidential Address

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

C. H. Firth
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Extract

One result of the war has been to turn our attention from domestic to foreign affairs. For a long time the British electorate had been so wrapped up in our own constitutional struggles that it was almost completely blind and deaf to other issues. It has been brought back to the affairs of Europe as it were by an earthquake. People who never thought seriously about the relations of England and the Continent, and were content to leave foreign policy to our Foreign Secretaries, begin to form opinions of their own, and will in due season express them at the poll. A new period of our history has begun in which a democracy, hitherto indifferent to external problems and exceptionally ignorant about them, will demand information about these problems, and cannot, without great peril to national interests, be left as uninformed as it is.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 10 , December 1916 , pp. 1 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1916

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References

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