Welsh Journals

His duplicity soon became apparent to the Liberals; it must have been apparent to the Conservative leaders even as they read their newspapers the next morning. Some could forgive him, others could not. The remark- able thing was how many men found they could not do without him or without his extraordinary ability and energy. 'I've fought him as hard as anyone,' C. F. G. Masterman told his wife, 'but I have to confess, when Lloyd George came back to the party, ideas came back to the party.' On only one central issue is Wilson's account perhaps not entirely satisfying. There is one way in which it is possible to reconcile the 'inevitablist' and the wartime split theories of the Liberals' decline (or at least certain versions of them). This is by saying that what happened during the war was analagous to what happens when a diamond cutter taps a rough diamond: the jewel breaks apart but along a fault that already existed. In other words, it may have taken the war to cause dis- ruption but the Liberals were already split in such a way that sooner or later some incident or set of circumstances was bound to lead to disaster. Wilson deals with this hypothesis in an appendix to his chapter on 'Lloyd George and the Coupon'. He concludes that the 1916-18 split did not so much divide the party as shatter it: the split bore no neat relationship, indeed no obvious relationship at all, to earlier party divisions. Now Wilson may well be right. He probably is. But one would feel happier if his analysis were less impressionistic, if he had undertaken the sort of 'namierization' of Liberal M.P.s which, as he tells us in his Preface, he deliberately foreswore. He might, for instance, have attempted to relate the 1918 split to some of the pre-1914 divisions in the House of Commons, which had revealed sharp differences in the party. It is worth noting that as late as 1914 party lines in the House were still sufficiently fluid to be susceptible of factor analysis, Guttman scaling, multi-dimensional scaling, and other techniques of modern data analysis. One suspects that historians as well as political scientists will soon be forced to become numerate. The fact that Wilson has not taken this plunge in no way detracts from his achievement. His is an excellent book. ANTHONY KING University of Essex CONTEMPORARY ENGLAND, 1914-1964. By W. N. Medlicott. Longmans, 1966. Pp. 614. 42s. Professor Medlicott, as editor, and Messrs. Longmans, as publishers, are to be congratulated on their rare boldness in carrying their History of England past those conventional stopping-points, World Wars I and II, and bringing it down virtually to the present day. Professor Medlicott is