For Party or Country

Lord Hugh Cecil, commenting in 1912 on the British Conservative party's staying power, said the party's success was largely a matter of temperament, `recruited from ... the natural conservatism that is found in almost every human mind.' The Conservatives regarded the parties of the left as faddists or federations of pressure groups. Frans Coetzee argues that the emphasis is misplaced, for it obscures the extent to which Conservative pressure groups forced their party to adapt in Edwardian England. His book explores the Conservatives in transition during the two decades preceding the First World War, a period marked by the foundation of an unprecedented number of conservative pressure groups. The British Navy League, Tariff Reform League, Anti-Socialist Union, and myriad other groups changed the face of British conservatism, though not without much internal party conflict.