Conservatism is a form of political wisdom that consists in thinking that the present can best be understood through what the past reveals. It is a way of “accessing” political reality, often obscured beneath confusing talk, the chatter and “noise” of the moment. That is why the historian Maurice Cowling thought that conservatism was a kind of historical method, a discovery procedure. Conventional academics may find this view absurd. How can a practical, value-laden idea like conservatism play an explanatory role? The answer is that it can help us avoid falling into at least some illusions. I propose to follow this thought in asking: What is the reality of early twenty-first-century Anglophone life?

I take my bearing from the last decade of the nineteenth century—from Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, or perhaps in American terms from the Spanish-American War of 1899. Queen Victoria and Teddy Roosevelt might thus be taken as symbols of that period—the one absolutely confident of her own probity, the other vibrant and ebullient. They believed in Western civilization as a wave of progress, and that they were on top of the wave.

The late nineteenth century is three or four generations back, a little beyond most direct contact, even for older people. I choose it because it was (in Britain at least) the last period in which a British government did little more for its people than govern them. Welfare was on the horizon, and was to begin arriving with Lloyd George’s 1909