While Britain was helping carve up Africa and creating the biggest empire the world had ever seen, it experienced an atmosphere of crisis at home. The mid-Victorian economic boom faltered. Social investigators in the 1880s rediscovered poverty, especially in London, speaking in aghast tones of ''darkest England,'' the cramped courtyards and ''rookeries'' of the East End, a concentration of 2 million working-class people who were as unknown to the respectable classes and as uncivilized as the natives of ''darkest Africa.''

Slum housing seemed to have worsened over vast acres in large cities as more people, often displaced by slum clearance or the construction of buildings and railways elsewhere, crowded into deteriorating housing stock. A gulf grew between the better-off working classes in regular jobs, living in bylaw housing, furnishing their homes moderately well, spending money on soccer matches, the music hall, and a couple of weeks each summer in seaside resorts like Blackpool and Southend, and the physically stunted, badly nourished, casually employed slum dweller. Anxieties about national weakness in an increasingly competitive international climate found expression in fashionable languages of social Darwinism and of racial and sexual degeneration.

One answer to poor living conditions was for the central government to take more vigorous measures. Mindful of the establishment of small socialist parties and of the stirrings of the union-backed Labour Party, which aimed to attract working-class votes on the left, progressive thinkers in the Liberal Party began advocating a more interventionist strategy. Some of their ideas found expression in the famous 1909 and 1911 budgets of David Lloyd George, Liberal chancellor of the exchequer, that introduced old-age pensions and social insurance schemes. In simultaneously attacking unearned, landed wealth, the Liberal measures gave an extra push to the sociopolitical decline of the aristocracy and gentry. Aristocratic social, economic, and political power during the twentieth century remained too substantial for radical tastes, but it was a mere shadow of its former self.

Both world wars boosted the living standards of the poor even at a time of intense rationing because full employment enhanced lower-class purchasing power, thereby improving nutritional intake. Equally significantly, total mobilization during World War I habituated the public to an unprecedented degree of government intervention in social and economic affairs and brought the labor movement into the heart of government. Lloyd George, wartime coalition prime minister, combining his earlier progressivism with wartime state interventionism and a rhetorical appeal to the men fighting in the trenches of Flanders, promised to build ''a land fit for heroes.'' . . .

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