July 17, 2013

ACTION THIS DAY: FINEST HOUR 126, SPRING 205

BY MICHAEL MCMENAMIN

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 125 Years Ago:
Spring 1880-Age 5
“Nevertheless his hour had come.”

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Writing of his father’s career at the moment, in April, 1880, when the Conservatives had been routed by the Liberals, Churchill noted that “Starting with many advantages, he was still at thirty-one obscure. Four or five speeches in as many years had made no particular impression, and the House of Commons had scarcely formed an opinion about him….Out- of-doors among the people he was unknown. Adverse social influences denied the recognition of such ability as he had shown. His party was now
humbled in the dust….Grave and violent dangers beset the State and no one troubled to think about an undistinguished sprig of the nobility. Nevertheless his hour had come.”

Churchill then summed up in a series of rhetorical questions what his father and the other three members of the informal group known as “The Fourth Party”—Sir Henry Drummond Wolfe, Harold Gorst and Arthur Balfour—were able to accomplish in the next five years: “What political prophet or philosopher, surveying the triumphant Liberal array, would have predicted that this Parliament, from which so much was hoped, would be indeed the most disastrous and even fatal period in their party history? Or who could have foreseen that these dejected conservatives in scarcely five years, with the growing assent of an immense electorate, would advance to the enjoyment of twenty years of power?…and who without the audacity of genius would have dared to force the Conservative party to base the foundations of their authority with confidence upon the very masses they dreaded and to teach those masses to venerate and guard the institutions they had formerly despised?”

100 Years Ago:
Spring 1905 • Age 30
“They want to have everything both ways.”

In Manchester on 30 March, Churchill continued to attack the Conservatives, accusing them of clinging to office at all costs: “All principles are alike to these marvelous ministers. They want to have everything both ways. Free Trade or Protection, Home Rule or the Union, devolution or coordination, a strong navy or a weak navy, increased expenditure or retrenchment, army reform or no army reform, it is all the same to them. One thing only seems to matter—office, office at any cost, office on any terms, office at any price, office by the votes of members who will never present themselves to their constituents again, office by the votes of the Irish Orangemen who think they are being betrayed…but above all, at all costs, office for self and friends. (Cheers.)”

Again at Salisbury on 14 April, Churchill suggested that the Tories sought to bring to English life the worst characteristics of America, Germany and Russia: “At the coming election the country will have to decide whether it will follow in the regular, settled lines of English democratic development, or whether, by borrowing a tariff from the United States, a military system from Germany, and—when I think of the Aliens Bill—a system of police from Russia, we will change the free British Empire, which we have known and cherished, into a greedy, sordid, Jingo, profit-sharing domination. That is the issue, and it is intimately interwoven with the question of Free Trade.”

75 Years Ago:
Spring 1930 »Age 55
“The noble lady is entirely wrong.”

On 15 April, Churchill attacked the high taxes in the first Socialist budget introduced since the Conservatives lost power in the general election the year before: “We are the heaviest taxed nation in the world. We are incomparably die most heavily, directly-taxed nation. Our three great competitors, the United States, Germany, and France, are reducing by scores of millions a year their demands upon the direct taxpayer, with the avowed object of increasing their world-financial and world-competition power. These countries take the view that direct and indirect taxation, particularly direct, are a clog upon trade and a danger upon
enterprise, and, if the nation wishes to realise for its own people the immense possibilities of modern scientific production, every possible encouragement should be given to the accumulation of wealth in private hands and the fruitful use of that wealth by active individual effort. I belong to the school that holds that taxation has reached a point where it has become a grievous impediment in the production of new wealth….I am convinced that, under the present circumstances, the emphasis and the main intention of any Chancellor of the Exchequer should be in the direction of an alleviation of the public burden. Therefore, it was my continuous endeavour to reduce taxation, and especially onerous taxation, and even to lean in the direction of reducing
taxation in preference, if need be, to austere and drastic repayment of the National Debt.”

Viscountess Astor and the American experiment of prohibition became the object of Churchill’s attention in a debate in the Commons on 17 May, on reducing the tax on beer: 

“I know the Noble Lady’s views—we have been made very familiar with them—but what astonishes me is that she should proceed with unabated, and I might almost say unabashed, vigour in the reiteration of those views, in face of the ghastly muddle which has been made in her own country in the treatment of the liquor problems.”

Later in the debate, Lady Astor claimed that lowering taxes on beer
would increase profits for brewers. Churchill promptly put her down:
“Therefore, the Noble Lady is entirely wrong, absolutely wrong—I mean, as wrong as is the difference between night and day—in her statement of
facts; but even if it were true that the brewers gained the profits by reductions in the charges put upon beer, it is far preferable that they should get the profit than that the profit should be reaped, as it is in another country, to which I have already referred, by the bootleggers.”

Churchill promptly jumped on Astor’s assertion that only men supported lower beer taxes: “Nothing constitutes a more false view of British society at the present time than the idea that all the women voters are now banded together in order to take up a fundamentally different position on this question from all the men voters. Such an idea is manifestly absurd, and the sooner the Noble Lady clears her mind when she is fundamentally wrong in her conceptions, the sooner will she be able to take not only an engaging but a useful and well-informed part in our debates.”

In an Empire Day address in London in late May, Churchill took on the Socialist Party’s economic record: “The Socialist Party promised anything they could to the electors, not only a cure for unemployment, but some splendid new world where all the work did itself, and every one was fully employed doing nothing at trade union rates, and all the taxes would be paid by the idle rich; and no one would need to do anything except go about and kiss all the foreigners he met, and in a spirit of true comradeship hand over to them any possessions England might still have left.

“Wonderful hopes were centred in the new Labour Government and all the newspapers cheered them as loudly as they possibly could. But what has happened? A very grim thing has happened; the Socialist Government has run straight into the worst economic blizzard on record in time of peace. Under the storm they have crumpled completely. Although they have been loyally supported by our strong and competent Civil Service, they have failed in such a manner as to show complete incapacity, not only to cure unemployment, but even to face the problem in a manly and mentally vigorous manner. Their collapse is pitiful. But when we remember all the harsh and untruthful things they said about their predecessors, one cannot find much sympathy to waste on them. They asked for it and they have got it. They made their bed and they should lie on it.”

Churchill also spoke forcefully against the recent Naval Disarmament Treaty: “We have this Paper here—’An International Treaty for the Limitation and Reduction of Naval Armaments.’ Is not this the most glaring misnomer that has ever stared at us from an official document?…Let me give the Rt. Hon. Gentleman another title for this treaty: ‘An international treaty for the limitation of the power and the right of Great Britain to safeguard its food supply, and for the multiplication and improvement of all means possessed by other nations for interrupting the said food supply.'”

50 Years Ago:
Spring 1955 -Age 80
“To resign is not to retire.”

Churchill informed the Queen on 31 March that he would resign as Prime Minister on 5 April. Two days earlier, unaware of that plan, President Eisenhower sent him an “Eyes Only, Top Secret” letter: “You and I have been through many things where our judgments have not always been as one, but, on my part at least, my admiration and affection for you were never lessened. In this long experience, my hope is rooted that the two of us may bring up some thought or idea that could help us achieve a personal concord that could, in turn, help our two governments act more effectively against Communists everywhere.”

In his reply, Churchill advised Eisenhower of his decision to resign: “To resign is not to retire, and I am by no means sure that other opportunities may not come upon me to serve and influence those causes for which we have both of us worked so long. Of these the first is Anglo-American brotherhood, and the second is the arrest of the Communist menace. They are, I believe, identical.”

Churchill now began work hand-revising the 1939 proofs of A History of the English-Speaking Peoples which he had set aside with the onset of war, taking them along on a two-week holiday in Sicily where he also completed two paintings.

His successor, Anthony Eden, scheduled a general election for May at which the Conservatives received a fifty-nine seat majority as well as an absolute majority in votes cast. Churchill was easily returned to his own seat in Parliament, having warned his constituents: “Do not be lulled with a false sense of security… or think in terms of mass effects, averages, and Gallup Polls.” They had to vote, he said: “Apathy, complacency, illness, chatter or indifference may often be faults. On Thursday they will be crimes.”

 

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