One of the difficult and important decisions which confronted Napoleon during his last days in Paris concerned the use of his fleet. Strategically there was overwhelming argument for its immediate and energetic employment. On land, Austria was starting the war with large advantages; in numbers, in preparation, in position, in geographical facilities of every kind. But on sea, she was nowhere. Never a formidable naval power, her small fleet was at the moment in a condition of more than ordinary decrepitude. That of France, on the contrary, had recently been raised by the Emperor to a size and efficiency which had attracted the uneasy attention of the British admiralty. Obviously, therefore, if Italy were indeed to be freed to the Adriatic, it was of the first importance that France should assert and use to the full her maritime superiority in the Adriatic. Only so could the famous Quadrilateral be taken in the rear, and Austria made conscious of her one geographical disadvantage: the inadequacy of her railway communications with her front. The Emperor had accordingly given detailed instructions for the sending of such a fleet, prepared to effect a landing at Venice. But now at the last moment the threatening attitude of England caused him to countermand them. For the Derby government not only dispatched a formidable fleet itself to the Mediterranean, but proceeded to advance an urgent request for the neutralization of the Adriatic. ‘Before the Emperor leaves Paris,’ wrote Malmesbury to Cowley on 2 May, ‘make a great effort to keep us out of the war by obtaining his consent to neutralise the Adriatic.’

On 12 January 1873 the British yacht Enchantress entered the harbour of Zanzibar. On board were a former Governor of Bombay and a suite of six government officials—the Resident in the Persian Gulf, two men from the Foreign Office, a military and a naval attaché and one of the country's foremost Arabic scholars. What had brought such an important group into such an unimportant eastern backwater? The answer is only partly to be found in the state of British public opinion on the slave trade question. The origin of the mission is to be sought not in Exeter Hall but in the Huṣns on the bare slopes of the Jabal Akhḍar.

The bitter hostility with which Joseph Chamberlain was pursued by the sections of the Unionist party opposed to his policy of tariff reform, even after he resigned from Balfour's cabinet in September 1903 to conduct his campaign untrammelled by office, is a curious aspect of Unionist history. The party had seen its defeat clearly foreshadowed in a series of catastrophic by-elections, and yet it persisted in fighting its own internal fiscal battles instead of closing its ranks to meet the most formidable combination of Radical and Socialist forces that it had ever had to face. It knew that no viable proposals for fiscal reform would be put forward for several years, since its opponents were all committed to free trade. Why then did it perversely continue to dispute a remote contingency, thus encouraging its opponents to drive wedges into the divided Unionist leadership by well-chosen parliamentary motions in the sessions of 1904–5, and ensuring that in 1906 it was a demoralized as well as a defeated party that emerged from the polls? After every allowance is made for the purely human impulses that might account for these fiscal quarrels—the hopelessness of defeat, weariness of office, uncertainty in new and alarming political circumstances, and the suspicion that Chamberlain's ‘new departure’ was a bid to salvage his own political fortunes from the wreck of the party—it is still necessary to adduce some more convincing explanation for this seeming folly. For such an explanation, one must appreciate the full significance to contemporaries of Chamberlain's tariff movement, and his determination to make tariff reform and its attendant social and economic policies ‘the great question of the future, and the one on which party divisions will ultimately settle themselves’. His Unionist opponents believed they were fighting to protect not simply free trade, vital as this appeared, but also the whole fabric of Conservatism, both as a historic creed, and as a practical movement.