Welsh Journals

endured, albeit on a smaller scale, in Lancashire and parts of Wales and Scotland. Yet in 1960 even George Thomas, M.P. for Cardiff West, was forced to confess that to be a temperance worker seemed 'a funny thing in this House'. There is little of particular interest in the book for the student of Welsh history apart from a few interesting statistics concerning Sunday closing in Wales; but, of course, any analysis of the English temperance move- ment has its bearing on contemporary Welsh affairs. The book is a lengthy one, yet some passages are far too heavily congested with detail: the style, therefore, is rather tightly compressed. One would perhaps have liked to have seen more use made of literary evidence; for instance, George Eliot's Felix Holt has a valuable account of the role of drink in electoral corruption, while the 'industrial' novels of Mrs. Gaskell are also fruitful sources for this kind of study and would have suitably seasoned the text. Yet these are minor criticisms of a scholarly and definitive study of the Victorian temperance movement. W. R. LAMBERT Delegacy of Local Examinations, Oxford. ENGLAND'S MISSION: THE IMPERIAL IDEA IN THE AGE OF GLADSTONE AND DISRAELI, 1868-1880. By C. C. Eldridge. Macmillan, 1973. Pp. xii, 288. £ 6.00. In 1924 Professor C. A. Bodelsen published his Studies in Mid- Victorian Imperialism. Despite its title, much of the book was an examination of the strength of separatist and anti-colonial feeling in England between the loss of the American colonies and the advent of Gladstone's first administration in 1868 and it helped to establish the orthodox view that, until the 1870s, most Britons thought that their empire was a burden to be discarded rather than an asset to be cherished. Bodelsen's classic study was reprinted as recently as 1960. Nevertheless, a new approach to the whole question had already been suggested in Professors Robinson and Gallagher's article, 'The Imperialism of Free Trade', which appeared in the Economic History Review in 1953. They pointed out the paradox that in fact Britain had clung to and even extended her empire during the free trade era of the mid-nineteenth century and had only reluctantly expanded her formal commitments during the 'new imperialism' of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This necessarily cast doubt on the proposition that there had been any significant change in British attitudes about 1870. Although Robinson and Gallagher's thesis has been criticized and amended by other scholars, notably by Professor D. C. M. Platt, their emphasis on the continuity of British policy and their suggestion that Britain was never indifferent to empire, but preferred to defend her interests by informal influence rather than by formal control wherever possible, has proved a very fruitful one and has been widely accepted.