A certain small group of men (hereafter called “the team”) shares an intention, the implementation of which requires at least a once-for-all decision of some public authority. The most obvious procedure is to plead in favor of that decision with the holders (or holder) of the competent authority. The next most obvious is to win over people who have easy and habitual access to the decision-maker or makers. These first and second procedures can be practiced under any regime.

In the popular imagination, the fall and death of Parnel was for Ireland the beginning of a long period of deep despair and dejection. Actually, the heroic period in modern Irish history only begins when that great man was dragged from his high place, and his magnificent creation, the Irish Parliamentary Party, was shattered into petty factions. His death and the destruction of his political legacy were the neccessary preliminary to the release of the Irish people, which had been for so long subordinated to the national cause. The twenty-five years that encompass the fall in 1891 of Ireland's “uncrowned king” and the rising in 1916, are the years in which the Irish people did great things. It was the period when they secured to them selves the art of representative goverment, created a new literature, and laid the foundations for their welfare state. In truth it was an exhilarating period and Ireland was never more in tellectually alive.

Emotional religion was embedded in the hearts of eighteenth-century Britons. The veneer of culture and moderation, so often considered the hallmark of the age of reason, was perilously thin. Conjure up an image of the Gordon Riots of June, 1780, to see the mob, rising in hysterical fear of popery, terrorizing the city of London for a week. From Charles Dickens' classic account in Barnaby Rudge to the recent King Mob of Christopher Hibbert, the saga of those savage days has fascinated historians and readers alike. Few of us remember that the Gordon Riots were merely the climax of organized agitation which had brewed for nearly two years and had already achieved singular success in Scotland. Victory there made possible the London disorders. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the intellectual capital of Britain, the heirs of John Knox had rejected the overtures of reason and moderation.

The political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes is rightly considered as marking the end of one era in political theory and the beginning of a new one. Formerly, men had sought and found a guide to political conduct in a basic principle upon which the order of well-being of the state depended. Hobbes broke with the past by postulating the state as simply a rationalization of the needs of men. He analyzed man's psychology and relied on his own observation and ratiocination to establish the best possible state commensurate with mankind's situation, but his supreme emphasis on force and authority left no room for the older constitutional, religious, and traditional safeguards of the citizen. This was the price that Hobbes willingly paid to achieve a secure state during the English Civil War.

In recent decades the socialists have attracted more attention and historical study than other social reformers. The extreme positions, utopian socialism and Marxism, have been the subject of many studies, and indeed, have been investigated to the neglect of the intermediate and moderate forms of socalism. The concentration of study upon the extreme positions may perhaps be explained in that they are older movements and they have had an influence that certainly makes for quantitative importance. Moreover, those who take extreme positions are often the first to gain attention.