Welsh Journals

Gladstone desired the Conservatives to pass Home Rule is almost completely lost sight of in the discussion of 1885 and 1886. The actual reasons why faddism gained ground in the 1890s never really get explained. For all his interest in leadership, Hamer scarcely ever gets down to assessing the impacts of its good and bad practitioners. Wales gets due mention. It is here that remissness in defining terms arises in an acute form. To speak of'Welsh nationalism' at this time in the same breath as Irish is downright foolish. All the data shows how men like Stuart Rendel thought within a context of British nationality, whereas those like Parnell did not. Those who pushed for separate Welsh dis- establishment did not do so for nationalistic reasons, but because the narrower attack in a clearly delimited area where the Anglicans were a minority made good tactical sense. Overall, Hamer only clouds issues Kenneth Morgan made clear some time ago. In fact, the book as a whole is a well-intentioned yet rather inadequate affair. The labour behind it has been considerable. Sources are accurately presented. For all that, it cannot be deemed a success. MICHAEL HURST St. John's College, Oxford. UNIONISTS DIVIDED: ARTHUR BALFOUR, JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN AND THE UNIONIST FREE TRADERS. By Richard R. Rempel. David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1972. Pp. 236. £ 4.75. To the average man nothing is drier or more remote than tariff policies ­~except perhaps when he is facing H.M. Customs at Dover or Heathrow. Yet from Bate's Case, through the Corn Laws, to the Common Market, tariffs have made and broken governments and great political parties. This is not really a paradox because, technical though they may be, tariffs affect the whole economic structure of a country and its day-to-day standard of living. In the middle of the nineteenth century Britain, with a comfortable industrial lead over all her competitors, committed herself to a completely free trade policy-with certain necessary reservations for the sake of revenue. By the end of the century she was in a completely different situation. Major competitors had arisen, notably Germany and the United States, which were in many ways better placed than Britain to assume the economic leadership of the world. To many contemporary continental politicians the response would have been obvious, a return to at least moderate protection. For British leaders the solution was not so simple. Free trade had ceased to be a mere convenient economic device, to be abandoned if necessary. It had become an absolute good, synonymous with healthy international trade and peaceful co-operation between nations. Its opposite was 'dear bread', the social and economic unrest of the eighteen-forties and dangerous antagonisms between states. No other issue, except Ireland, was so destructive of British political parties and alignments in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.