When I wrote English History 1914–1945 I believed that victory and the Attlee government made a triumphant conclusion. Now I feel differently. The in… - A. J. P. Taylor

I came of Radical, Dissenting stock on both sides. A collateral ancestor of my father's was killed at Peterloo. My maternal great-grandfather voted for Orator Hunt at the Preston by-election in 1830 and received one of the medals struck in honor of "the free and independent voters of Preston." My father was a Lloyd George Radical before the First World War.

The traditional "liberties of England" rested on law and custom, not on rational dogma; and the man who maintained them, as in Poland or Hungary, was the country squire. He maintained them no doubt for his own profit and advantage, a point which Feiling is inclined to slide over; still England would not be a free country without him. The unique feature of our history is that the conservative defender of liberty had to take other classes into partnership, and finally indeed found himself in the position of a tolerated minority.

Injustice occurs in free states as in despotic states; and the attempt to right the wrong is as unpopular and dangerous in the one as in the other – as the case of Zola shows. The difference between free and unfree countries is that in the free country there are always men who will champion the unpopular cause at whatever the cost. It is this stage army of the good, with its slightly ridiculous reappearances which alone keeps our liberties alive. The Dreyfus case, at its outset, was a disgrace for France; but because of the struggles of a small minority it ended in bringing France more glory than all the campaigns of Napoleon.