Welsh Journals

This relative amorphousness is compounded by the book's chronology: it begins with Lord Elcho at mid-nineteenth century and ends with the Anti-Socialist Union's campaign against the Attlee government. Nevertheless, all of the essays have interest. A number deal with men and organizations not otherwise easily accessible, and all discuss problems of central importance in contemporary history. There are excellent essays on laissez-faire ideologues and their institutions-on Lord Elcho (Christopher J. Kauffman), on the Liberty and Property Defence League (N. Soldon), and on Thomas Mackay of the Charity Organisation Society (J. W. Mason) and W. H. Mallock (D. J. Ford), whose writings provoked, amongst other things, Shaw's Socialism and Superior Brains. Edward Bristow has written a neat piece on 'Profit-Sharing, Socialism and Labour Unrest', on what Dr. Brown in his introduction calls 'almost the only positive policy which anti-socialists did develop'. The indifference of most of the Labour movement to profit-sharing underlined the difficulties the 'anti-socialists' faced then and face now, particularly in the Liberal Party. There are four 'political' pieces, ones that consider the more recent history of the Liberal Party. Dr. Cline has rehabilitated Sir Eric Geddes's reputation, but as an experiment 'businessmen in government' offered little hope for the Liberals. Dr. Douglas ('Labour in Decline') restates the case-one strongly argued by Dr. Clarke in his Lancashire and the New Liberalism-for the continuing (and increasing) political weakness of the Labour Party before 1914, and Chris Wrigley has written on John Burns and Battersea, though that is an area from which one cannot easily generalize. Dr. Morgan's essay on the 'New Liberalism' in Wales (a reprint of an article in this journal) suggests that in Wales it was traditional Liberalism that was asserting itself, and this seems to me a forceful rejoinder to Dr. Douglas. In the first two essays of the collection Mr. Edward David looks at the intellectual development of C. F. G. Masterman, and Dr. Bentley argues that it was the intellectual disintegration of Liberalism that prevented its recovery after 1918. As a pair these essays do not really hang together, and Dr. Bentley seems to overstate his case; on the other hand, both together well illustrate the ideological confusion of Liberalism. Dr. Brown has a useful introduction, which is also a general review of the literature, but he has had (not surprisingly) some trouble in giving unity to this heterogeneous collection. But the lack of unity in the book points, of course, to a debilitating lack of unity in Liberalism, both as a body of ideas and as a political party. R. I. MCKIBBIN St. John's College, Oxford KEIR HARDIE: RADICAL AND SOCIALIST. By Kenneth O. Morgan. Weiden- feld and Nicolson, 1975. Pp. xii, 343, and 16 plates. £ 8.00. Biography is bourgeois history. Its subjective approach, as well as its obvious marketability, has tended to conform to an essentially