ABSTRACT
The years between the turn of the century and the outbreak of the First World War were years of confusion and contradiction, years when, as H.G.Wells wrote in Tono Bungay in 1908, ‘…all the organising ideas have slackened, the old habitual bonds have relaxed or altogether come undone’. The gold and the glory of the nineteenth-century Empire lingered; the monarchy and aristocracy were more newsworthy, if more scandalous, than in the days of the old Queen; London was still the financial capital of the world; Britannia, from the bridge of a Dreadnought, still ruled the waves. There were, however, omens of changes to come: economic problems continued; foreign competition grew more intense and threats and fears of war mounted; violence spread at home; socialism gathered strength from a new awareness of poverty and social injustice; the nineteenth-century political system seemed to be succumbing to a creeping paralysis. National expenditure rose as spending on social services and armaments increased; real wages began to fall, and this combined with a variety of other forces to produce serious unrest and a number of strikes. Moving towards political maturity, the working classes showed an increasing determination to use their franchise for their own benefit, and the growth of the Labour Party, which had 42 members in the Commons by 1914, added to the disruption of the established two-party system. A strange tension built up, often marked by hysteria and irrationality, which culminated in the outburst of exhilaration and relief which greeted the declaration of war in 1914.
