ABSTRACT
This is the period which has attracted more work and more historians than any other. The reasons are plain enough: the vast mass of materials and the great number of unsolved problems. Foreign relations apart, the history written about this age before the war was well behind that current for earlier centuries, and in most respects only the last twenty-five years have seen a move from the surface into the depths. The primitive condition of so much that is written about the nineteenth century is well illustrated by the fact that a man who would wish to know the details of constitutional or administrative history, for instance, must still too often laboriously disinter them from political biographies, sometimes written by intelligent amateurs not much interested in the fundamental questions that exercise the historians. And though we may record respectable progress, we are still a good way from the end of the tunnel. There are still many questions unasked, and many more are disputed over than are at a stage of knowledgeable agreement. One trouble is that the advance of learning has on too many occasions met with the sort of resistance that grows from political prejudice. Historical research usually demolishes legends, and for the nineteenth century the legends are mainly liberal. The story of the last 150 years is less simple than that legend liked to think: the progressive angels, who trod the path that ultimately led to the labour party, and the reactionary devils whom selfishness alone drove to reject the commonplaces of democracy, tend to look quite a bit different in the searchlight of research.
