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For a century the British have avoided the dangers of an important extremist political party comparable to the Communists in France and Italy or the Nazis in Germany. The Communist Party exists in Britain, of course, but only barely. Sir Oswald Mosley and his blackshirts made some impression just before and just after the last war, but their direct political influence is negligible.

The British don't think extremism is good practical politics. They went through their own period of extremism in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries when for a variety of reasons, religious as well as political, they cut off one king's head, tried a dictatorship, brought back a king, and finally found comparative tranquillity in the development of a constitutional monarchy.

The memory of these troubled times is not dead. At the height of McCarthyism in the United States a British diplomat explained: "We're very fortunate; we went through the same sort of period under the Tudors and the Stuarts when treason and slander and libel were the common coin of politics."