This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ...from co-operation between Conservatives and Liberals. It will happen again and again that their ways part as regards individual, and also important, questions. For the antagonism exists, and rightly so. It would also be quite wrong to credit the co-operation of Conservatives and Liberals with all great achievements in the sphere of home politics. The Centre played a distinguished and often a decisive part in our social legislation, in many of our Armament Bills, and, above all, in granting us the Navy. But strife between the Conservatives and the Liberals has always been disastrous--for the two parties themselves, for the course of our home policy, and, last but not least, for the temper of the nation. The antagonism between Liberals and Conservatives will never disappear. It has an historical and a practical significance. This friction is a part of our political life. But the antagonism in their views should not be exaggerated unnecessarily, nor made to involve such great matters as utterly irreconcilable conceptions of the Universe. In so doing one departs from sober political reality. Even religious antagonism which has been amongst us for four centuries, and which the nation, in accordance with its disposition, has always taken very seriously, makes way for the demands of the moment. In Socialism we really have a series of ideas, so different from our homely conceptions of Law and Custom, Religion, Society and State that it may indeed be termed a different conception of the Universe. I myself, in this connection, once spoke of a difference in the conception of the Universe. But that a middle-class Liberal differs from a middle-class Conservative in his conception of the Universe no one seriously believes. They have too many common...