Oxford has never quite recovered from Matthew Arnold's description of his beloved alma mater as a ‘home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names and impossible loyalties’. 1 While in popular stereotype Oxford is associated with such movements as the laudians, the Jacobites and the tractarians, Cambridge, by contrast, is seen as the home of more radical and reformist creeds: the puritans, the latitudinarians and the academic reformers of the nineteenth century. Consequently, we are predisposed to think it unremarkable that in the early eighteenth century Cambridge almost totally shed the last vestiges of the scholastic academic order which had its origins in the Tiigh middle ages and, in its place, adopted a style of education which, in its overriding emphasis on mathematics, departed significantly from the curriculum offered at Oxford.

In theory the eighteenth-century criminal law was a rigid, fixed and bloody penal code laying down the penalty of death for a broad range of property crimes. In practice it was a flexible and highly selective system. The legal process had no effective police force to provide an organizational core and it was therefore a private and negotiable process involving personal confrontation rather than bureaucratic procedure. All the major published studies of the administration of the criminal law in this period have stressed its highly discretionary nature. They have also shown that the law was important as ideology. The widely held notions that every freeborn Englishman was protected by the rule of law and that all were equal before the law both constrained authority and legitimized and strengthened it.

On 17 February 1785, William Pitt reported to the house of commons on his administration's response to the reports of the commission for examining the public accounts established by Lord North five years earlier. Since 1780, the commissioners of accounts had summarized and rationalized the new approaches to public administration that had blossomed in the economical-reform movement of the early 1780s; their work has been described by recent commentators as ‘a comprehensive and quite radical philosophy of the public interest’, and even ‘a new bureaucratic ideology’. For his part, Pitt commended the commissioners for having ‘given light to parliament on subjects hitherto involved in the most inscrutable obscurity’, and he stated that it was ‘the duty of the House to profit from the Reports’. After reviewing their findings of manifold deficiencies in the issue and audit of public money, Pitt introduced legislation to reform the treasurership of the navy and to set up a new department for auditing public accounts. The commissioners' more sweeping recommendations for reforms of official compensation and discipline were to be addressed by a new commission on fees, whose broad charge would be: to inquire into the fees, gratuities, perquisites, and emoluments, which are, or lately have been, received in the several public offices…; and to report such observations as may occur to them for the better conducting and managing the business transacted….

In November 1844 the young Lord Ashley, not for 16 years to become the seventh earl of Shaftesbury, was in search of a public school for his son and heir, Anthony. ‘I fear Eton,’ he confided to his diary:

…it makes admirable gentlemen and finished scholars, fits a man, beyond all competition, for the dancing-room, the Club, St James' Street, and all the mysteries of social elegance; but it does not make the man required for the coming generation. We must have nobler, deeper, sterner stuff; less of refinement, and more of truth; more of the inward, not so much of the outward gentleman; a rigid sense of duty, not a ‘delicate sense of honour’; a just estimate of rank and property, not as manners of personal enjoyment and display, but as gifts from God, bringing with them serious responsibilities, and involving a fearful account; a contempt of ridicule, not a dread of it; a desire and a courage to live for the service of God, and the best interests of mankind, and by His grace, to accomplish the baptismal promise… Unless we have such men as these for our successors, goodbye to the British Empire.

Lynn Zastoupil, in his article ‘Moral Government: J. S. Mill on Ireland’, (Historical Journal, 26, 3 (Sept. 1983)), has made an important contribution to our understanding of the sources and character of Mill's views on Ireland. He is right to suggest that insufficient attention has been paid to the lengthy series of Morning Chronicle leaders written by Mill in response to the Famine. No less instructive is his emphasis on the centrality of moral regeneration to Mill's political and ethical enterprise. Ably analysing the evolution of Mill's opinions on Ireland between the 1840s and late 1860s, Mr Zastoupil effectively demonstrates the way in which Mill's changing position on the issue was at each stage informed by a fundamental moral purpose. What his article does not fully convey, however, is the extent to which the expression of that purpose was shaped and conditioned not only by Mill's assessment of Irish circumstances at any particular time, but also by a certain tension and ambivalence in his attitude towards Ireland and her people.

In the summer of 1867 Lord Derby's minority Conservative government, scarcely recovered from the political steeplechase which ended in the Second Reform Act, launched an expedition into Abyssinia, the declared aim of which was to free a group of British captives in duress there. This expensive little war is now remembered, if at all, as a lavish and triumphant picnic for the Indian army yet, as a recent historian has pointed out, it does not deserve to be dismissed as a ‘military curiosity’. Certainly for contemporaries its origins were a vexed issue and one which was never satisfactorily resolved. Critics in the press and parliament laid the blame on the previous Liberal administration. They maintained that back in 1863 the Foreign Office had lost an important letter from Theodore of Abyssinia. When the king failed to receive a reply, he reacted to this snub by throwing the British consul and a group of missionaries into fetters. Responsibility for any such blunder lay in the last resort with the foreign secretary of the day, Lord John Russell. Elderly, frail, and with a reputation for rashness untarnished by time, Russell's term of office (1859–65) had been marked by a series of crises which had brought Britain into dangerous or ignominious confrontation with the U.S.A. over the Trent incident, with Russia over the Polish rebellion, and with Prussia over Schleswig-Holstein.

‘The rapid growth of wealth, especially among the classes of the greatest activity and enterprise, has led, for a number of years past, to a diminished watchfulness, outside the walls of Parliament, respecting the great and cardinal subject of economy in the public charges, and the relation between the income of the State and its expenditure. I earnesdy desire that the paramount interest of the lately enfranchised classes in thrifty administration may operate powerfully to bring about a change.’ So Gladstone trumpeted the leitmotif of his administration, at the outset of the general election campaign in October 1868. The fundamental importance of fiscal strategy in Gladstone's politics has recently been emphasized. Faced with an ineluctable increase in civil expenditure and rising expectations of governmental contributions to the public weal – what he termed ‘scattering grants at the solicitation of individuals and classes’, the system of ‘making things pleasant all round’ and stimulating ‘local cupidity to feed upon the public purse’ – Gladstone was determined that his ministry, backed as he believed by the votes of the thrifty working classes, should reduce such expectations. ‘I t is the special duty of public men’, he told his constituents soon after taking office, ‘to watch the very beginnings of evil’ in regard to any relaxing of the general principles of economy and thrift; and he promised to reduce expenditure in the coming year.

The benevolence of Leo XIII towards France has puzzled historians, just as it exasperated many contemporaries – especially during the anticlerical high tide of the Dreyfus crisis. The opening of the Vatican archives for Leo's reign (1878–1903) has put investigation of the issue on a much firmer footing, as have the latest releases of documents at the Jesuit archives in Rome. This article indicates some of the ways in which thisnew material enlarges and qualifies the impressions given by older sources – notably the valuable holdings of the Assumptionist archives in Rome and the more familiar contents of the various governmental archives in France, Italy and elsewhere.

During the First World War, Britain was obliged for the first time for over a century to raise a mass army. Initially, this seemed to raise no insuperable problem; by the end of 1914, slightly over one million men had enlisted. Thereafter, however, civilian enthusiasm waned, and the government had to employ other means to stimulate the flow of recruits – alteration of the military service age limits and, later, the introduction of compulsory military service. Taken together, voluntary recruiting and conscription permitted the raising and maintenance of a mass army. By the time of the armistice on 11 November t 1918, almost five million men had entered the army, and a further half million had entered the two other services.