In _The New Machiavelli_ (1910) H. G. Wells dealt with Dick Remington, whose career is ruined like that of Parnell by an extra-marital affair. Before his fall, Dick changes from a Liberal to a Conservative. Reminiscent of Disraeli’s novels (which he has read), he becomes a Young Imperialist of the New Tory movement. Dick’s shifting of political allegiance is not at all uncommon. This change of loyalties appears much more often in the English novel than the American, and there is no opprobrium attaching to it. Dick’s career, in which he takes his stand on such timely subjects as woman suffrage, is the story of a journey from one political faith to another. Its background is the political milieu of late Victorian and Edwardian England. =Howard Spring: Labour and the Course of Empire= Spring’s massive _Fame Is the Spur_ (1940) records many of the major events in English national life in the seventy-five year period ending in 1940. But one of the primary formative influences in John Hamer Shawcross’ life took place forty-six years before he was born. It was the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which the working people gathered in Manchester to hear Orator Hunt were attacked by dragoons. This story, related by Hamer’s great uncle, first fires his imagination and then becomes part of his stock in trade. Entering politics as “Shawcross of Peterloo,” he carries the sabre which the old man had wrenched from a dragoon. One of the founders of the Labour Party, Shawcross scorns the Fabians and writes popular books on politics. In London he sees Keir Hardie take his seat as one of Labour’s first M.P.’s. Later his marriage is disrupted when his wife estranges herself from him for his opposition to her suffragist campaigns. Spring records the turbulence of these efforts--the pickets outside Parliament, the violence, the hunger strikes, and the “Cat and Mouse Act” (a convicted suffragist was placed under police surveillance so that she could be returned to jail when she appeared to have recovered from the effects of a hunger strike). Although Shawcross’ part in the World War I coalition government is considered by many a betrayal of Labour, he becomes Minister of Ways and Means when Labour comes in again in 1924. Having lost his chance to be Prime Minister, partly because of his stand in 1914, Shawcross in 1931 puts in motion the formation of the National Labour Party, intended as part of the coalition which is to be formed to take measures against the depression. This is thought to be his final betrayal of the Labour Party and cause. As a reward he is made Viscount Shawcross of Handforth in the same year. His forty-year political career is at an end. =Joyce Cary: The Edwardian Age and After=