ABSTRACT
Certainly the historian cannot escape from the present. The more ambitious he is in attempting to create great comprehensive patterns of historical development, as did Marx, or Toynbee, or Spengler, or Sorokhin, the more evidently will he betray the moods and preoccupations of his own day. For their perceptions were also constrained by their cultural framework. Neville Chamberlain and his closest colleagues had been brought up in the England of Queen Victoria and were middle-aged when the First World War began. Their world was that of the British Empire. The problems posed by the Congress Party in India, by the Wafd movement in Egypt, and by the relations of Briton and Boer in South Africa were more immediate to them, more real, more urgent, than were the racial antagonisms of Central Europe. In the eighteenth century the world of classical antiquity provided a model whose 'relevance' to contemporary issues was unquestioned, or only just beginning to be questioned.
