Welsh Journals

Within the boundaries which he has set himself, Mr. Hardie's book is lively and readable. It draws attention to, if it does not finally solve, many controversial points. He wrestles with the difficult question of how conservative Victoria was in her later years, and whether her attitude to various ministers was determined by political or personal considerations. He may well be right in concluding that Victoria's dislike of Gladstone originated in Gladstone's attitude to the Eastern crisis in 1876 and was not the result of Disraeli's machinations. Victoria's failure to understand the Irish situation also emerges. Mr. Hardie very properly points out that it is usually unhelpful to ask whether Victoria acted unconstitutionally, since the constitution was still fluid and the role of the monarchy changing. The same may be said of Edward VII and George V, particularly as regards their attitude to the Parliament Act of 1911 and the Irish question. There was no single 'proper' course of action, especially in 1910 when, on the evidence of the two elections, the nation was divided down the middle and the two major parties were exactly equal in the House of Commons. Mr. Hardie accepts Magnus's view that Edward VII's role in foreign affairs was more 'conspicuous' than significant, although he concedes that he was a very effective public relations man especially in creating the right climate for the Anglo-French entente of 1904. George V emerges as a humane man who disliked the forcible feeding of suffragettes or the imprisonment of conscientious objectors in Dartmoor. He adjusted easily enough to accepting Labour ministers, remarking after a conversa- tion with John Wheatley, a left-wing member of the 1924 government, 'I should have felt exactly as he does if I had had his sort of childhood'. Mr. Hardie's self-imposed terms of reference prevent him, however, from analyzing in any depth the relationship between the monarchy and the British people at large-which is unfortunate. M. E. CHAMBERLAIN Swansea KEY PROFESSION: THE HISTORY OF THE ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY TEACHERS. By Harold Perkin. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969. Pp. 268. £ 2-25. The A.U.T. are fortunate in their historian. Professor Perkin, who holds a chair of Social History, is an expert on the growth of Britain's professional elite. His account of the Association's first fifty years is never shallow. The judgements are admirably fair. The closing passage on student unrest, for instance (pp. 244-46), could not be bettered. It is not the author's fault that in some passages the crucial facts are lacking. Until well into the 1950s British universities were highly resistant to attempts at discovering, and still more at publishing, what they were doing. A speaker at the 1962 Gulbenkian Discussion on Research into