That complex problems like the causes of the English civil war are constantly subject to reinterpretation is an obvious truism. Twenty years ago we were all embroiled in the gentry controversy; now it is the fashion to lay more stress on the blunders and failures of the government of Charles I. Lawrence Stone's recent survey is a case in point. Though his title, The Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642, promises a long running start, this quondam disciple of R. H. Tawney places a surprising amount of emphasis on what he calls precipitants and triggers, which, it turns out, are the blunders and failures of the government of Charles I. Among these is the mishandling of the situation in Scotland. It is well known, of course, that the attempt to impose the new service book in 1637 touched off the chain of events which led to the Long Parliament, but historians have pointed out that this was by no means the first of Charles's errors there. At the very beginning of his reign came the act of revocation, which among other things rescinded “all grants made of crown property since 1540, … all disposition of ecclesiastical property and the erections of such property into temporal lordships.” No such sweeping change came about, of course, but in the view of most scholars this act, though in some sense successful, since it achieved the purpose both of increasing clerical stipends and of providing a machinery for their continuing adjustment, made the Scottish landed classes so mistrustful and fearful for their property that Charles could never gain their confidence. The comment of Sir James Balfour is always quoted: the act “in effect was the ground stone of all the mischief that followed after.”

Whether Burke is placed in the tradition of natural law theorists or the school of historical utilitarians, scholars agree that his conception of liberty was inextricably linked to a belief in the inviolability of landed property, its salutary transmission through the ages, and a correspondingly acute historical consciousness. Perhaps the subsequent universalization of liberty and the gradual respectability of capital as an alternate form of property have obscured the significance of another principle which Burke invariably associated with liberty, but which could neither be universalized nor transformed. That principle was the aristocratic quality of honor, which, for Burke, as for generations of aristocratic spokesmen who succeeded him, remained a condition essential to liberty's preservation and transmission. The theme of honor has received some consideration from scholars in fields of literary criticism and, recently, social anthropology. But it has not attracted the attention it requires, particularly of modern historians, since Burckhardt, who characterized its presence in the Renaissance as “that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egoism.” This essay examines Burke's conception of honor and its affinity with his ideas of liberty.

Burke's concern for honor was hardly a novelty. In the eighteenth century, honor was taken seriously. It was a quality extolled by Addison, lauded by Pope. Moreover, honor had been analyzed by adherents of both the “selfish” and “moral sense” schools of thought among the British ethical philosophers, particularly in their disquisitions about self-love and benevolence. Hobbes had considered honor to be “the opinion of power.” It legitimized self-aggrandizement. Mandeville, similarly, conceived of honor as a worldly morality inconsistent with virtue which, after all, required self-denial. The man of honor was impelled by a pagan ethic to seek the rewards of approbation. He cherished posthumous fame rather than salvation. Consequently, he behaved according to a code that was superior to the laws of God and the laws of one's country.

Frank Ives Scudamore remains one of the least known of those Victorian civil servants who were, to use Sir James Stephen's phrase, statesmen in disguise. Readers of Trollope's autobiography may recall that Scudamore, the novelist's younger rival in the Post Office bureaucracy, emerged the victor in their 1867 contest for the department's Second Secretaryship. Indeed, it was Scudamore's triumph which finally convinced Trollope to resign from the Post Office in order to devote full time to writing. Yet Scudamore's importance has a much more substantial foundation than this incident in literary history. Even if one does not completely accept the Spectator's judgment that Scudamore was “perhaps the very ablest [civil servant] in the service of the crown,” he was still an administrator of fundamental consequence. As director of the first significant experiment in nationalization undertaken in modern British history—the 1870 acquisition of the telegraphs—Scudamore played a major role in the growth of the modern state.

Scudamore's impact on the course of government expansion has not been sufficiently studied and explored. It is certainly correct, as Professor Perkin recently pointed out, that the Victorians talked more of nationalization than actually attempting it. However, the fact that Scudamore was involved in an unusual activity does not mean that the endeavor was minor or the results unimportant. After all, he managed a department which in 1874 had over 3,600 offices spread in a network across the entire country and which collected over £1,000,000 in gross revenue. Such an operation deserves historical consideration in its own right.

Joseph Chamberlain startled many in Great Britain in 1895 when he informed Parliament that he “regarded many of our colonies in the condition of undeveloped estates. ” At the same time he announced the British Government's intention to consider “the judicious investment of British money” in British Crown Colonies to develop them “for the benefit of their population and for the benefit of the greater population which is outside. ” He thus not only signalled the Government's willingness to attempt alternative methods of development, but specifically proposed a new approach. However, this new approach required a change in attitude by those who supervised the colonial empire. The permanent officials at the Colonial Office had to be persuaded to give high priority to colonial economic development and to be more sympathetic to and cooperative with developmentally oriented colonial governors. The permanent officials were never so persuaded.