So can you tell ,what Voterbase are you trying create the Bloc Quebecois of? If it's not that spoilerry... or will there be a Bloc Quebecois analouge at all? Seems as if Socialists are going to be the NDP analouge if there's such thing at all...
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
BQ is so specific to actual Canada we’re not going to see anything like that. There’ll be a Reform/Canadian Alliance analogue, though, they just won’t merge with the Libs
Maybe they join the Socialists instead? Makes a bit of sense - an even in OTL I beliebe there was some Socialist outreach to the Chinese and Japanese communities. That might provide them a good home and provide a good boost to West Coast Socialism to boot
Consider all the transient Chinese loggers and miners in Idaho as a good jumping off point for Socialists there, for instance
La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers
"...partially staking his reputation on the summer of 1915's "Anglo-French Mission for Peace." Poincaré was skeptical, [1] worrying that a result that embarrassed France would damage his government ahead of early snap elections he called for late October of 1915 that had already left many of his political allies scratching their heads, but he gave Paleologue the go-ahead provided that France could find a second partner in the endeavor.
This was more difficult than met the eye. Russia, Germany and Italy were all emphatically pro-United States to begin with and Germany had even provided tangible assistance to American operations in the Caribbean, and exactly none of them viewed a negotiated peace settlement after the titanic defeats at Nashville (on land) and Hilton Head (at sea) for the Confederacy as creating a space where it was in their interest to now intervene diplomatically. Britain, suffering from tight economic conditions due to the war, was via backchannels already trying to find a conclusion to fighting between Brazil and Argentina, and indeed considered the looming American annihilation of the Confederate war economy as something of a secondary concern to its agricultural imports, but the flailing, unpopular Cecil government eventually acceded and agreed to send Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs Ronald McNeill as Paleologue's right hand.
The "Paleologue Mission," as the affair quickly became known to both its supporters and its much larger legions of detractors, was kneecapped almost immediately from its arrival in Philadelphia. Though American politicos, to French eyes, had famously short shelf-lives - William Hearst's eight years was the longest Presidency in seventy years, after all - there was a lengthy institutional memory of the Havana Conference that left the administration of Charles Evans Hughes polite but deeply skeptical of Paleologue and French intentions. Making matters worse, the bitter violence in Ireland and the Cecil administration's passive allowance bordering on tacit encouragement of paramilitary killings led by Ulster Unionists who were opposed to Home Rule over the island by its Catholic majority had made McNeill, who was Ulster-born and a staunch opponent of Home Rule, a persona non grata in the United States' massive and politically influential Irish-descended community. The Anglophilic Hughes administration was courteous, but Democratic officials, who depended heavily upon the graces of Irish political bosses in cities such as New York, Chicago, Cleveland and increasingly Boston, were loathe to even be photographed next to "Monster McNeill," let alone entertain him formally.
This deep suspicion from "official Philadelphia" and the American press together made Paleologue's job extraordinarily difficult, but he was game to try nonetheless. In a one-on-one meeting between him and Hughes alone, the exhausted American President outlined a straightforward list of demands that could be made to the Confederacy; when Paleologue noted that these demands made no mention of Mexico, Hughes demurred, and within a few months it had been revealed that backchannels between Philadelphia and Mexico City had been busy negotiating a peace everyone could live with. The American position on their immediate neighbors to the south was a bit too simple for European tastes: unilateral, unconditional, full surrender as the price for a ceasefire or armistice. Paleologue noted that the Confederacy was unlikely to accept such a conceit, what with American forces still only in the northernmost states, and Hughes responded simply that individual parameters of a final peace could be negotiated "as gentlemen, but gentlemen do not negotiate through cannon smoke." McNeill was told much the same from men such as American Secretary of State Elihu Root, Paleologue's direct counterpart, and by Senator George Turner, head of the Senate committee that would have to vote on a peace treaty and who was a Democrat rather than of the Liberal Party of Hughes and Root. There was no politician in Philadelphia, of any party, who would accept anything other than the Confederacy bending the knee. It was Richmond that had started the war, and Richmond that would have to now accept the consequences when it ended. McNeill noted that this view had, from what he gleaned, been longstanding, but that it had solidified after Hilton Head essentially ended any threat to American naval dominance and all the chief principals of the United States had met at Long Branch in New Jersey to agree on a joint position.
Paleologue and McNeill's efforts in Richmond somehow managed to go even more poorly. In Philadelphia, at least, the uncompromising stance of a people attacked and now on the front foot in the war was fairly understandable; Hughes had little to gain in a negotiated peace in July and August of 1915 when he could likely dictate terms at will by July and August of 1916. The air in Richmond was one of "remarkable delusions," McNeill wrote back to his immediate superior Curzon as well as Cecil. Army officers confidently predicted coming offensives that would drive the "hated Yankee" back across the Potomac, and politicians, in particular President-in-waiting James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, had essentially created a hermetically-sealed environment where the mere idea that victory was not around the corner was tantamount to treason. Nearly the whole city, from its tony Senators and generals to its poor working class, was convinced that they were in a civilizational struggle (here, they were perhaps not wrong) and that they were providentially ordained to secure the last great future of Anglo-Saxon superiority over barbarism. "Having convinced themselves that their mission of racial supremacy is divine, and of the belief that their society will implode from within should anyone breathe the reality that they are beginning to lose this war," McNeill noted, "the entire country, at least its residents of European stock, have concluded that they would rather die than lose. If they cannot defeat the Yankee, the Confederate States will commit mass suicide rather than face what they think is like to be homicide." Ellison Smith, the lame-duck President of the Confederacy who was barely in charge over day-to-day decisions any longer and mostly just smoked cigars and drank whiskey alone at the executive mansion, suggested to McNeill in private and on condition that the exchange be kept utterly secret that Confederate politicians who spoke the truth were likely to be assassinated, and he noted the case in the weeks before the war began of the Speaker of the House, John Sharp Williams, being murdered simply for his language being insufficiently belligerent.
There was thus little reasoning in Richmond, not while the industrial heartland of the Confederacy and capital remained, for the time being, relatively unthreatened. The Confederacy had their own list of demands drafted, that being the tolling of the Mississippi River, the immediate evacuation of the US forces from their land, and the return of all escaped and captured slaves. Paleologue was utterly baffled by the intransigence of these demands and noted that they seemed utterly divorced from reality; in a few years time, he too would become familiar with diplomatic notes that seemed exist in an entirely different plane of existence, but in 1915 he wrote in bewilderment back to the Quai d'Orsay of the "near-rabid stubbornness of the Confederate political class." He did, however, manage to secure one major boon in his Mission - the release of seventeen American politicians held captive since near the start of the war, including Senators Carroll Prouty and Dudley Doolittle, and their return to Philadelphia in a brokered prisoner exchange in which thirty captured Confederate Army officers and two hundred wounded infantrymen were returned, with the French dreadnought Napoleon III managing the exchange. This was, in the end, the lasting legacy for the Paleologue Mission, a considerable letdown when taking into account the high hopes and hype that it had begun with in Paris.
By mid-August, Paleologue elected to quit while he was ahead and return to France empty-handed but for the prisoner exchange, which Root graciously credited him for facilitating but which in France was met largely with mockery. In the early days of that month, a reconstituted American naval force recovered from Hilton Head had ambushed a Confederate-Mexican squadron off the coast of Key West near the southern tip of Florida and, in what came to be known as the Battle of the Florida Straits, sunk the CSS Arkansas, the last dreadnought in the Confederate fleet, and several Mexican vessels including two cruisers and so badly damaging the dreadnought Imperador Maximiliano that it was forced to retreat back into port at Tampico where it remained stuck for the final months of Mexico's participation in the war. This elimination of a major force of the Bloc Sud plugging up the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico essentially ended the ability of Confederate-Mexican shipping to occur unmolested in the Gulf and provided a second huge strategic boon, in that commercial shipping in the Gulf was now fair game and, after the Confederacy had sunk American ships at will, the United States Navy announced in a bluntly worded missive to all European powers that it would reciprocate and consider "all waters west of Florida and the Yucatan an area of combat in which prize rules for merchant vessels do not apply, in the manner in which the Confederacy has treated the Caribbean for the past eleven months." Between Hilton Head and now Florida Straits, punctuated by the capture of Key West by US Marines, Europe definitively no longer had any real say on how the US Navy conducted itself in the waters of the Confederacy, nor did it really have any desire to. This battle and its aftermath perhaps put paid to the Paleologue Mission more than anything else that had occurred, because Philadelphia clearly had no incentive to indulge European entreaties any longer, either.
McNeill turned his attention to brokering a deal in Rio de Janeiro instead, steaming south on the HMS Invincible and leaving Paleologue to rue his failure. But the endeavor had likely been doomed to peace anyways, and in a sense his failure was perhaps better than succeeding. By summer of 1915, the Confederacy was almost as unpopular with European leadership, even its conservative elite, as it was toxic with the European street, which held its slave-owning society in contempt and broadly sympathized with the United States - indeed, the war had perhaps made America more popular with Europe's populace than it had been previously. Politically speaking, Paleologue having his fingers on a peace deal that rescued the Confederacy from its just desserts could indeed have been worse than coming home having given his best efforts to end to bloodshed to no avail. Indeed, the tide was now turning so decisively in public and elite opinion against the Bloc Sud across Europe that it was even rumored that Spain, which was known to despise Richmond but hold great sympathy for Mexico City, had assisted from Cuba in providing key intelligence to the United States and had even mulled intervening in the Florida Straits directly with its own naval vessels.
Europe's role in the Great American War was drawing rapidly to an end before it even began - and the Poincaré ministry had little to show for it but egg on its face..."
- La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers
[1] Raymond Poincaré and peace, name a less iconic duo
This was more difficult than met the eye. Russia, Germany and Italy were all emphatically pro-United States to begin with and Germany had even provided tangible assistance to American operations in the Caribbean, and exactly none of them viewed a negotiated peace settlement after the titanic defeats at Nashville (on land) and Hilton Head (at sea) for the Confederacy as creating a space where it was in their interest to now intervene diplomatically. Britain, suffering from tight economic conditions due to the war, was via backchannels already trying to find a conclusion to fighting between Brazil and Argentina, and indeed considered the looming American annihilation of the Confederate war economy as something of a secondary concern to its agricultural imports, but the flailing, unpopular Cecil government eventually acceded and agreed to send Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs Ronald McNeill as Paleologue's right hand.
The "Paleologue Mission," as the affair quickly became known to both its supporters and its much larger legions of detractors, was kneecapped almost immediately from its arrival in Philadelphia. Though American politicos, to French eyes, had famously short shelf-lives - William Hearst's eight years was the longest Presidency in seventy years, after all - there was a lengthy institutional memory of the Havana Conference that left the administration of Charles Evans Hughes polite but deeply skeptical of Paleologue and French intentions. Making matters worse, the bitter violence in Ireland and the Cecil administration's passive allowance bordering on tacit encouragement of paramilitary killings led by Ulster Unionists who were opposed to Home Rule over the island by its Catholic majority had made McNeill, who was Ulster-born and a staunch opponent of Home Rule, a persona non grata in the United States' massive and politically influential Irish-descended community. The Anglophilic Hughes administration was courteous, but Democratic officials, who depended heavily upon the graces of Irish political bosses in cities such as New York, Chicago, Cleveland and increasingly Boston, were loathe to even be photographed next to "Monster McNeill," let alone entertain him formally.
This deep suspicion from "official Philadelphia" and the American press together made Paleologue's job extraordinarily difficult, but he was game to try nonetheless. In a one-on-one meeting between him and Hughes alone, the exhausted American President outlined a straightforward list of demands that could be made to the Confederacy; when Paleologue noted that these demands made no mention of Mexico, Hughes demurred, and within a few months it had been revealed that backchannels between Philadelphia and Mexico City had been busy negotiating a peace everyone could live with. The American position on their immediate neighbors to the south was a bit too simple for European tastes: unilateral, unconditional, full surrender as the price for a ceasefire or armistice. Paleologue noted that the Confederacy was unlikely to accept such a conceit, what with American forces still only in the northernmost states, and Hughes responded simply that individual parameters of a final peace could be negotiated "as gentlemen, but gentlemen do not negotiate through cannon smoke." McNeill was told much the same from men such as American Secretary of State Elihu Root, Paleologue's direct counterpart, and by Senator George Turner, head of the Senate committee that would have to vote on a peace treaty and who was a Democrat rather than of the Liberal Party of Hughes and Root. There was no politician in Philadelphia, of any party, who would accept anything other than the Confederacy bending the knee. It was Richmond that had started the war, and Richmond that would have to now accept the consequences when it ended. McNeill noted that this view had, from what he gleaned, been longstanding, but that it had solidified after Hilton Head essentially ended any threat to American naval dominance and all the chief principals of the United States had met at Long Branch in New Jersey to agree on a joint position.
Paleologue and McNeill's efforts in Richmond somehow managed to go even more poorly. In Philadelphia, at least, the uncompromising stance of a people attacked and now on the front foot in the war was fairly understandable; Hughes had little to gain in a negotiated peace in July and August of 1915 when he could likely dictate terms at will by July and August of 1916. The air in Richmond was one of "remarkable delusions," McNeill wrote back to his immediate superior Curzon as well as Cecil. Army officers confidently predicted coming offensives that would drive the "hated Yankee" back across the Potomac, and politicians, in particular President-in-waiting James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, had essentially created a hermetically-sealed environment where the mere idea that victory was not around the corner was tantamount to treason. Nearly the whole city, from its tony Senators and generals to its poor working class, was convinced that they were in a civilizational struggle (here, they were perhaps not wrong) and that they were providentially ordained to secure the last great future of Anglo-Saxon superiority over barbarism. "Having convinced themselves that their mission of racial supremacy is divine, and of the belief that their society will implode from within should anyone breathe the reality that they are beginning to lose this war," McNeill noted, "the entire country, at least its residents of European stock, have concluded that they would rather die than lose. If they cannot defeat the Yankee, the Confederate States will commit mass suicide rather than face what they think is like to be homicide." Ellison Smith, the lame-duck President of the Confederacy who was barely in charge over day-to-day decisions any longer and mostly just smoked cigars and drank whiskey alone at the executive mansion, suggested to McNeill in private and on condition that the exchange be kept utterly secret that Confederate politicians who spoke the truth were likely to be assassinated, and he noted the case in the weeks before the war began of the Speaker of the House, John Sharp Williams, being murdered simply for his language being insufficiently belligerent.
There was thus little reasoning in Richmond, not while the industrial heartland of the Confederacy and capital remained, for the time being, relatively unthreatened. The Confederacy had their own list of demands drafted, that being the tolling of the Mississippi River, the immediate evacuation of the US forces from their land, and the return of all escaped and captured slaves. Paleologue was utterly baffled by the intransigence of these demands and noted that they seemed utterly divorced from reality; in a few years time, he too would become familiar with diplomatic notes that seemed exist in an entirely different plane of existence, but in 1915 he wrote in bewilderment back to the Quai d'Orsay of the "near-rabid stubbornness of the Confederate political class." He did, however, manage to secure one major boon in his Mission - the release of seventeen American politicians held captive since near the start of the war, including Senators Carroll Prouty and Dudley Doolittle, and their return to Philadelphia in a brokered prisoner exchange in which thirty captured Confederate Army officers and two hundred wounded infantrymen were returned, with the French dreadnought Napoleon III managing the exchange. This was, in the end, the lasting legacy for the Paleologue Mission, a considerable letdown when taking into account the high hopes and hype that it had begun with in Paris.
By mid-August, Paleologue elected to quit while he was ahead and return to France empty-handed but for the prisoner exchange, which Root graciously credited him for facilitating but which in France was met largely with mockery. In the early days of that month, a reconstituted American naval force recovered from Hilton Head had ambushed a Confederate-Mexican squadron off the coast of Key West near the southern tip of Florida and, in what came to be known as the Battle of the Florida Straits, sunk the CSS Arkansas, the last dreadnought in the Confederate fleet, and several Mexican vessels including two cruisers and so badly damaging the dreadnought Imperador Maximiliano that it was forced to retreat back into port at Tampico where it remained stuck for the final months of Mexico's participation in the war. This elimination of a major force of the Bloc Sud plugging up the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico essentially ended the ability of Confederate-Mexican shipping to occur unmolested in the Gulf and provided a second huge strategic boon, in that commercial shipping in the Gulf was now fair game and, after the Confederacy had sunk American ships at will, the United States Navy announced in a bluntly worded missive to all European powers that it would reciprocate and consider "all waters west of Florida and the Yucatan an area of combat in which prize rules for merchant vessels do not apply, in the manner in which the Confederacy has treated the Caribbean for the past eleven months." Between Hilton Head and now Florida Straits, punctuated by the capture of Key West by US Marines, Europe definitively no longer had any real say on how the US Navy conducted itself in the waters of the Confederacy, nor did it really have any desire to. This battle and its aftermath perhaps put paid to the Paleologue Mission more than anything else that had occurred, because Philadelphia clearly had no incentive to indulge European entreaties any longer, either.
McNeill turned his attention to brokering a deal in Rio de Janeiro instead, steaming south on the HMS Invincible and leaving Paleologue to rue his failure. But the endeavor had likely been doomed to peace anyways, and in a sense his failure was perhaps better than succeeding. By summer of 1915, the Confederacy was almost as unpopular with European leadership, even its conservative elite, as it was toxic with the European street, which held its slave-owning society in contempt and broadly sympathized with the United States - indeed, the war had perhaps made America more popular with Europe's populace than it had been previously. Politically speaking, Paleologue having his fingers on a peace deal that rescued the Confederacy from its just desserts could indeed have been worse than coming home having given his best efforts to end to bloodshed to no avail. Indeed, the tide was now turning so decisively in public and elite opinion against the Bloc Sud across Europe that it was even rumored that Spain, which was known to despise Richmond but hold great sympathy for Mexico City, had assisted from Cuba in providing key intelligence to the United States and had even mulled intervening in the Florida Straits directly with its own naval vessels.
Europe's role in the Great American War was drawing rapidly to an end before it even began - and the Poincaré ministry had little to show for it but egg on its face..."
- La Politique Mondiale: Poincaré, France and the Waltz of the Great Powers
[1] Raymond Poincaré and peace, name a less iconic duo
As badly as this went, I think that the fact that the French managed to pull off the prisoner exchange *may* lead to the US Position to be somewhat more balanced in regards to the CEW. Even with the ports being open to all, American shipping and industry leaning in one direction would be a significant tilt in the war.
Both Hay and Blaine were elected for two terms - but managed to die before serving them fully (Blaine due to illness and Hay due to an assassin). Even in OTL, two term Presidents between Jackson and McKinley were more rare (really, only Grant was elected and served out both. MAYBE you could conisder Cleveland, but that was such a weird situation) but this timeline seems to lean even more in that direction.
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The US will have other reasons to resent the French in the CEW but, yes, this is a huge help
OTL’s Grant interregnum is sort of what I had in mind when I was piecing this together, yes
The US demands on Mexico, OTOH, are by 19th century european standards *quite* reasonable. Transfer of relatively empty land (even if as large as Baja or as small as a Naval Base), maybe some money exchanges hands, no problem. In terms of *general* concepts, not that different from the OTL treaties ending the Mexican-American War or the Spanish-American War.
OTOH, the treaty that the USA expects to sign really breaks that in that (I think) it will basically give the USA the right to intervene if slavery comes back).
TBF, the confederacy is *not* a WWI ending Germany that hasn't seen combat, though I'm not sure how the US losses compare to those of the French in WWI. OTOH, I'm trying to imagine what the Treaty of Versailles would have looked like if only the French were involved in writing the treaty.
The other countries aligned with the Axis in any sense (Argentina, Haiti, Nicaragua, Peru, Bolivia) either don't really care what the USA/CSA peace treaty does to the CSA (the South American members), or are just as interested in kicking the Confederates in the groin with the treaty as the USA is (Nicaragua & Haiti).
OTOH, the treaty that the USA expects to sign really breaks that in that (I think) it will basically give the USA the right to intervene if slavery comes back).
TBF, the confederacy is *not* a WWI ending Germany that hasn't seen combat, though I'm not sure how the US losses compare to those of the French in WWI. OTOH, I'm trying to imagine what the Treaty of Versailles would have looked like if only the French were involved in writing the treaty.
The other countries aligned with the Axis in any sense (Argentina, Haiti, Nicaragua, Peru, Bolivia) either don't really care what the USA/CSA peace treaty does to the CSA (the South American members), or are just as interested in kicking the Confederates in the groin with the treaty as the USA is (Nicaragua & Haiti).
That’s more or less the case. By the time peace treaties come around everybody will have sort of washed their hands of the CSA, including their allies. Play stupid games; win stupid prizes
Honestly France really wanted to punish Germany for daring to going against them, so get back Alsace-Lorraine, get the Ruhr, either make the Rhineland an independent protectorate or even annex it, give back the territory towards Denmark, either give bits and parts of Prussia like Silesia and Danzig to independent Poland or Russia if they don't collapse, breakway the southern Catholic parts of Germany into another independent nation and force reparations on them and limitations on their armed forces. I honestly would've been very interested in seeing what would happen in case France really was the sole meditator in dealing with Germany post WW1, it would've been seen as extremely harsh but it would've prevented WW2.
To add to that Hearst was the first non-southerner to do so. Ironic.
This reminds me, looking ahead a bit, of the thought process coloring Germany's views on France post-CEW - dating back to the Napoleonic Wars, through 1868, and then the CEW, it would make sense why Germany largely views France as a belligerent aggressor that needs to be violently and decisively defanged for its own security.
Good point - hadn't thought of that!
The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924
"...extent of domestic policy paralysis that typified mid-1910s Britain quite like education. In his cumulative history of "Jix"-era Britain of the 1920s, historian Michael St John Revis-Brown noted that what separated the more conservative but more successful National Party of the Twenties from the flailing ineptitude of the Cecil regime of the Teens was that, in his words, "the Nats had not yet become Nats - they were still Tories who behaved like Tories." The men of the Cecil ministry were not the right-wing mirror of Liberals as middle-class reformers but rather the upper crust of the British aristocracy, a great many of them in the Commons only because they had fathers or elder brothers holding them up from their hereditary peerages and the Lords. Hugh Cecil perhaps personified this type more than anyone in his own government - he was an Old Etonian and had studied at University College, Oxford, and many of his political views and peculiarities were dependent on his experiences at those two institutions. He was of the old High Anglican stock that sometimes still wondered why Catholics had been allowed to enroll at the Oxbridge colleges and was as obsessive over minutiae of traditional classical education at both as he was his frequent insinuations about the inner workings of Anglican diocesal and liturgical politics. That he represented Oxford University in the Commons was perhaps of no surprise to anyone - oozed the place, for better or for worse.
By the midpoint of the decade, of course, the British educational system was while not a laughingstock clearly a good step behind almost all of its continental peers, and the Cecil government quite plainly knew little of what to do about it. Part of the issue was that Oxford and Cambridge were of course private institutions that set their own academic standards and curriculum, and the docents and dons of both universities were highly resistant to change. The other was that for a generation of well-heeled aristocrats, they took the idea that they had been educated in the manner befitting gentlemen as was necessary for their ability to properly rule Britain, and they too saw little reason to change a system that had successfully produced them. A closer look at British education told a different picture. The quality of education from local council to local council varied widely, but Cecil's brother's efforts to pursue wholesale reform in 1910 had brought down the Curzon ministry, and sour memories of that affair, with a minority government on paper stronger than the current one, left Cecil loathe to touch what he considered something of a poisoned chalice of British politics. [1] The British were loathe to standardize educational policy for fear of giving a future Liberal government the tools to totally nationalize schooling, and thus ignored some of the examples emerging overseas, such as Germany's gymnasia or the straightforward high school movement of the United States. Around tertiary education as well, the type of funding and innovation ongoing at American universities in particular was tossed off despite the rapid enrollment figures that occurred on their campuses after the Great American War concluded, and the money being thrown at German, French and even Italian universities to attract the best scientists, writers and lecturers went unanswered in Britain, where "societies" for science, exploration and literature remained dominant as the main force of academia rather than the university - a model trapped woefully in the 19th century.
The British schools of the late 1910s and early 1920s, then, were a place of remarkable stagnation in pedagogy, all while British technology continued to fall further behind the "big three" of the United States, Germany, and France, other than in the space of shipbuilding where Britain remained the world standard. It is little wonder, then, that the political conditions that had already produced the Great Unrest and anemic economic conditions, seen governments barely last a full term, and Ireland erupt in violence would soon produce the highbrow thuggery of the 1920s under William Joynson-Hicks - for the average Briton of the age, it seemed that nobody really knew how, or even cared to, govern the modern Britain..."
- The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924
[1] Says a lot I suppose that "reform school system" is more toxic to the Nats than "stop turning Ireland and India into bloodbaths"
By the midpoint of the decade, of course, the British educational system was while not a laughingstock clearly a good step behind almost all of its continental peers, and the Cecil government quite plainly knew little of what to do about it. Part of the issue was that Oxford and Cambridge were of course private institutions that set their own academic standards and curriculum, and the docents and dons of both universities were highly resistant to change. The other was that for a generation of well-heeled aristocrats, they took the idea that they had been educated in the manner befitting gentlemen as was necessary for their ability to properly rule Britain, and they too saw little reason to change a system that had successfully produced them. A closer look at British education told a different picture. The quality of education from local council to local council varied widely, but Cecil's brother's efforts to pursue wholesale reform in 1910 had brought down the Curzon ministry, and sour memories of that affair, with a minority government on paper stronger than the current one, left Cecil loathe to touch what he considered something of a poisoned chalice of British politics. [1] The British were loathe to standardize educational policy for fear of giving a future Liberal government the tools to totally nationalize schooling, and thus ignored some of the examples emerging overseas, such as Germany's gymnasia or the straightforward high school movement of the United States. Around tertiary education as well, the type of funding and innovation ongoing at American universities in particular was tossed off despite the rapid enrollment figures that occurred on their campuses after the Great American War concluded, and the money being thrown at German, French and even Italian universities to attract the best scientists, writers and lecturers went unanswered in Britain, where "societies" for science, exploration and literature remained dominant as the main force of academia rather than the university - a model trapped woefully in the 19th century.
The British schools of the late 1910s and early 1920s, then, were a place of remarkable stagnation in pedagogy, all while British technology continued to fall further behind the "big three" of the United States, Germany, and France, other than in the space of shipbuilding where Britain remained the world standard. It is little wonder, then, that the political conditions that had already produced the Great Unrest and anemic economic conditions, seen governments barely last a full term, and Ireland erupt in violence would soon produce the highbrow thuggery of the 1920s under William Joynson-Hicks - for the average Briton of the age, it seemed that nobody really knew how, or even cared to, govern the modern Britain..."
- The Second Act of the Georgian Age: Britain 1906-1924
[1] Says a lot I suppose that "reform school system" is more toxic to the Nats than "stop turning Ireland and India into bloodbaths"
I mean that possibly result in offending maybe even hurting the ''real British''' ie gentry something that cannot stand the massacres are to them more akin to a just punishment.
Though I imagine the education neglect may haunt them for a while.
Which
Haldane was this? (Apparently figuring out the correct *family* of Haldanes doesn't help that much)