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THE DECLINE of the Liberal Party was not due to the inescapable logic of history, or the inapplicability of Liberal remedies to the issues of the day, but to avoidable mistakes made by Liberals themselves. What failed was not Liberalism but Liberals."

So writes Dr. Douglas of the major theme of his book*, the astounding story of the twenty-five years from the General Election of 1906 to that of 1931. The secondary theme, the persistence of the Party since then in defiance of "the usual rule that an institution must either advance or retrogress" brings the story up to the present day.

In fact the Liberal collapse occurred over the ten years between the outbreak of World War I, when a Liberal Government was in office, and the General Election of 1924, which returned a mere forty Liberal M.P.s of whom only seven had won their seats against both Conservative and Labour opposition. 1929 was better, but at the time of the Slump the last of a series of disastrous splits sundered the Liberal Party, and its representation in the House of Commons has never been numerically significant since.

The book is what it says it is, the history of the Liberal Party. Because "we are here concerned primarily with the effect of events upon Liberals rather than with the effect of Liberals upon events" it is of great advantage for the reader to have some acquaintance with the general history of the present century. Nevertheless, sufficient information on the principal developments and major issues is supplied, through at least until 1933, for the main flow of events to be appreciated too. In fact, the book is most lucidly and tightly written, and the material admirably arranged and presented. Thus, the reader is surely and knowledgeably guided through the divisions and alliances, groupings and counter-groupings, splits and reunifications, which are the story of the Liberal Party from 1916 to 1926. This is the period of Asquithian and Lloyd Georgeite factionalism, the period when, electorally, the Party collapsed, but the seeds of that disaster had already been sown before World War I broke out.

In what is perhaps the most important chapter in the book. Dr. Douglas traces the relationship of the Liberal Party with the Trades Unions, the Labour Representation Committee, and, eventually, the Labour Party, in the period up to the outbreak of war in 1914. It is an astonishing story which unfolds. Although Lord Rosebery had issued a warning as far back as 1894, consistently down to 1914 and even afterwards, "the Party Whips fought those people who contended that the existence of a separate Labour organisation would at best split radical votes and at worst threaten the existence of the Liberal Party." Thus electoral arrangements were concluded favouring the Labour candidates, no effort was made to prevent the Miners' Federation from switching its allegiance, and no resistance was offered when the Labour Party insisted that Lib-Lab M.P.s defend their seats as Labour. None of this need have proved fatal in the long run, though, if the Trade Union Act of 1913, described by Dr. Douglas as "perhaps the most disastrous measure which the Liberals could possibly have set upon the Statute Book," had not made provisions for a separate Union political fund, which by definition could not be used for industrial action or for general welfare purposes, and which inevitably therefore made its way in large part into Labour Party coffers.

If the Liberal Party's collapse is attributable primarily to what Liberals themselves did, or did not do, it is a good deal less easy to explain why the Party has been able to maintain for the last thirty-five or forty years its small but frequently vigorous hold on life. The author suggests a number of possible reasons, but the most likely one seems to be "that the Liberal persistence has been due to different things at different times." Has the Party a future? Dr. Douglas thinks so, though he does suggest that an internal danger faces Liberals if they continue to ignore traditional Liberalism in the way they have done in the 1960s.