Moderate liberals across Europe continued after 1848, indeed, to point to Britain’s gradualist reforms as the way to defuse social tension. For mid-Victorian Britons, the idea of progress legitimized the nation’s global hegemony and informed the politics of improvement. Lord Palmerston, a leading figure in the Whig governments of the late 1840s and 1850s, and Prime Minister (with a short break in the middle) from 1855 to 1865, encouraged liberal movements on the European Continent in the belief that the British model of society and politics was the way to be followed by all.
