ABSTRACT

Joseph Chamberlain never enjoyed the fruits of office as a Prime Minister of Victorian Britain. Abroad, as Colonial Secretary in the 1890s, Chamberlain's aggressive imperialism and vision of the destiny of Anglo-German expansion set the tone for the jingoism of the Boer War and the tension of pre-1914 diplomacy. A natural liberal, perhaps even flirting with republicanism, Chamberlain imbibed the individualism and voluntarism characteristic of the Victorian middle class. Birmingham Town Council offered great potential to an aspiring local politician because of its stunted development. Historians, like contemporaries, have to grapple with a value system in which the collectivism of the municipal ideal coexisted with the individualism of self-help. Between 1867 and 1873 Birmingham Liberalism forged a new political device which was eventually to transform the organisation of British politics and which marked the emergence of a genuinely modern political system. Public health inspectors were to be appointed on the basis of one per ten thousand people.