The franchise and the trade unions

By 1885, all adult men had the vote and the country was organized into single-member constituencies. In 1888, elected county councils replaced the former system of management by justices of the peace and local boards. In 1891, elementary education was made completely free. Though the secondary education system remained largely voluntary and paid for, there was a wide extension of university foundations, including those of Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Bristol. The Board of Agriculture was formed in 1889 and ten years later the Board of Education followed. Nobody had dreamed of controlling horse transport, but the arrival of the motor car led quickly to a national registration scheme. Between 1891 and 1911 the number of persons in government employment, 'civil servants', doubled. In his English History, 1914-1945, AJ.R Taylor wrote: 'Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.' Nevertheless, before the turn of the century many were deploring the extent of government involvement with everyday life.

The birth of labour and the women’s suffrage movement

At much the same time, ignored or opposed by most, though not all, of the supporters of democracy and workers' rights, the campaign for women's suffrage, which had existed in a small way for twenty years or more, began to take the form of an organised and widely supported movement. Seventy-three members of parliament had supported John Stuart Mill's attempt to secure votes for women in 1867, but since then the cause had gone into abeyance. A new generation of university-educated women, brought up to discuss all manner of new ideas, was chafing against the refusal of the legal and medical professions to admit them, and their exclusion from public life seemed more and more intolerable. Local women's suffrage groups and societies were formed, but no political party or movement took on their cause. Some of the most vocal opponents were women in leading society positions.

Neither of these developments seemed of great importance to the leaders of political and social life in the 1890s. The great issues were in foreign policy: the rise of imperial Germany, the division of Africa, the South African question; and in trade, where the Conservatives were beginning to promote imperial preference and tariff reform against the old-standing Liberal doctrine of free trade. Public opinion followed their priorities. The period from 1895 to the end of the century, under Salisbury's Conservative-Liberal Unionist government, marked the high point of British imperialism. The occasions of Queen Victoria's golden jubilee in 1887 and diamond jubilee ten years later were made national celebrations, with great pomp and ceremony.

English amateurism, which went arm-in-arm with voluntarism, was an elusive and complex aspect of life. Nobody wanted the railways to be operated by amateur signalmen, or to be chloroformed by an amateur anaesthetist. Nor were such things likely – professional standards were set and maintained across the range of responsible activities. Since 1854, candidates for most government service (though not the 'diplomatic') were appointed on merit after competitive examination. Competitiveness ran quite deep in all sorts of ways, whether in horse racing, or in municipalities vying to build a more sumptuous town hall, or in railway companies building new and uneconomic lines merely to prevent a rival from gaining a little extra traffic. Some unease was detectable around the end of the nineteenth century – a feeling that behind the brilliant façade of the 'top nation' all was not well. 'It is beginning to be hinted that we are a nation of amateurs,' said Lord Rosebery, a former Liberal prime minister, to a student audience in 1900, while the Boer War was going badly. Though England had pioneered the utilization of electricity with Michael Faraday, it was in the United States that electric lighting had been invented, and in Germany that the electric locomotive had first appeared. The cutting edge of industrial progress was no longer to be found in England. In 1902 Albert Einstein began publishing the papers on physics which would overturn the Newtonian concept of the universe. That the rest of the industrialized world should catch up with England was inevitable, but England did not seem to be keeping pace. The decades of the nineteenth century had fostered an English yen for a kind of effortless superiority, which deplored trying too hard, or struggling to succeed.

The schools, particularly the public schools, whose number and influence grew greatly in the later nineteenth century, were the nursery of this viewpoint, but they themselves reflected the expectations and attitudes of the wealthy parents who sent their sons (and eventually their daughters) away to be educated. The education was a largely classical one, based on Greek, Latin and history, with few concessions to the sciences. At its best it turned out able scholars and administrators, imbued with humane values, and a sense of team spirit. But it was an education for future judges, clergymen and administrators, not for scientists or engineers. A manufacturing background, and even more a manufacturing future, had little social prestige.