ABSTRACT
The election of July 1895 quietened fears that socialism was making headway in Britain. All the Independent Labour Party’s candidates and those of the Social Democratic Federation-twenty-eight and four respectively-were defeated. The ILP’s share of the votes cast was one per cent. Of the 411 Unionists returned, over a quarter were unopposed; the two per cent rise in the Unionist vote since 1892, when only forty of the seats they won did not see a contest, understated the turn of the political tide. The three Unionist seats in Wales became nine, and in Scotland the allies captured thirty-one out of seventy. Salisbury had formed his administration in June when Rosebery resigned after losing a relatively unimportant division on the army estimates. The new government dissolved parliament: their opponents were demoralized by the mutual hostility existing between Rosebery and Harcourt, rivals for the succession to Gladstone, and by failure to pass the main items in their legislative programme. Denunciations of the House of Lords in the ensuing election left the public unmoved. While the Liberal organization reflected the party’s low morale, the Unionist machine maintained the efficiency it had demonstrated since the alliance was born. It put up candidates against almost all of the 447 Liberals, of whom only 177 were successful. Salisbury could confidently refer beforehand to the Liberals’ impending defeat.1 However, the size of the Unionist majority came as a surprise. It was a response to anxieties in industry, and distress in the regions where high farming had flourished. There was also a feeling shared by the outgoing prime minister himself, that the country needed Salisbury to conduct her foreign policy. “I do not complain”, he said privately of his reverse, “for I see matter for congratulation in what has occurred to the patriot, though not perhaps to the politician”.2
