Introduction: A Liberal State

Abstract

Addressing an Edinburgh audience in August 1884, the Prime Minister William Gladstone claimed that his Liberal Party embodied the ‘solid and permanent opinion’ of the British nation, at least since reform of the parliamentary system in 1832. Since then, Gladstone argued, ten out of twelve parliaments had had a liberal majority. The eleventh, that elected in 1841, had begun as a Tory parliament but had evicted a Tory government for a Whig-Liberal one in 1846. Only the 1874 parliament had been irredeemably Tory, and its Tory majority had been caused by Liberal divisions. In the age of reform the Liberals — and their Whig predecessors — had been the natural party of government.¹