ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the Whig interpretation of history, as an aspect of the English mind and as a product of the English tradition. The Whig interpretation came at exactly the crucial moment and, whatever it may have done to our history, it had a wonderful effect on English politics. Those who, amid the breeze and agitation of contemporary debate, affect to court a controversy with such diluted remnants of the Whig interpretation as still keep their currency amongst us, must take heed when they sally forth in their carpet slippers against this entrenched tradition. We shall treat it not as a thing invented by some particularly willful historian, but as part of the landscape of English life, like our country lanes or our November mists or our historic inns. Along with the English language and the British constitution and our national genius for compromise, it is itself a product of history, part of the inescapable inheritance of Englishmen.
