Liberal Party

            
             I thought that instead of reading the entire paper, I would instead give you a summary of my research, since this paper is part of my dissertation "entitled "Last Chance for Liberalism: Factionalism and Financial Chaos in the British Liberal Party, 1916-1926. I'll summarize for a minute the issues surrounding the British Liberal Party in the 1920s and then lead into the financial crisis of 1924, which I argue is the crisis within the overall crisis and one that can, in the few minutes that we have here, provide examples of the problems faced by British Liberals in general after World War I.
             The Liberal Party was the major political force in Britain in 1906 but by 1924 had been reduced "at least in numbers "to an insignificant part of the British Parliament. Historians have, of course, studied this rapid decline but most have concentrated on the period during the First World War or even before. (I'll mention only a couple because of time constraints) George Dangerfield wrote the first major study of Liberal decline in the 1930s in "The Strange Death of Liberal England,"" arguing that a series of domestic crises regarding organized labor, women's suffrage, and, of course, the Irish question sowed the seeds of the party's destruction. Others have looked at the First World War as the catalyst for Liberal doom, most notably in Trevor Wilson's influential work "The Downfall of the Liberal Party- published in 1967. Wilson uses the analogy of Liberalism and the War as a train wreck, with the party at first being unable to deal with the government controls needed to fight a total war, and then being plunged into factionalism as the war lingers until 1916. Others, suggest that the party simply died of natural causes, being unable to cope with the changing political climate of the 20th century "specifically the rise of the left, in this case the Labour Party.