May 11, 2013

EDITOR’S ESSAY: FINEST HOUR 142, SPRING 2009

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A Churchillian born in Niagara Falls, New York asked if we knew what Winston Churchill was doing on New Year’s Eve, 31 December 1941. Surprisingly—because we don’t have many accounts of his ninety New Year’s Eves—we did.

On that evening, Churchill was hurtling past Niagara Falls itself, en route from Ottawa, where he’d described Britain as a chicken with an unwringable neck, to Washington, where he would resume urgent conversations with President Roosevelt in the wake of Japan’s onslaught in Asia and the Pacific. As the sweep second hand of “The Turnip,” his beloved pocket watch, counted down the remaining moments of 1941, Churchill called his staff and accompanying newspaper reporters to the dining car of his train. Then, raising his glass, as the train rocked and swayed over the tracks, he made this toast:

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“Here’s to 1942, here’s to a year of toil—a year of struggle and peril, and a long step forward towards victory. May we all come through safe and with honour.”

How apposite those words are right now. No, there is no Third Reich, no Imperial Japan—but there are stateless enemies who seek our ruin; there is economic chaos of epic proportions. As our chairman Laurence Geller writes: “People are holding back for fear of the unknown. Unemployment will soon double. This quarter most G-8 economies will experience a negative GDP. For the year it will almost certainly be negative and next year at best will be flat or insipid. People are frightened, inventories are diminished, business and consumer confidence is at an all-time low.”

What a time for Churchill. And there he is, trusting that we will all come through safe and with honour. How often Churchill knew exactly what to say! True, he insisted that the British people had the “lion heart,” that he had merely provided the roar; that he had always earned his living by his pen and tongue. What else did they expect? Makes no difference. His incandescent words remain. Vivre à jamais dans l’esprit des gens, n’est-ce pas l’immortalité? To live forever in the minds of men, is not that immortality? “When men said to each other, ‘There is no answer,'” wrote the poet Maxwell Anderson, “You spoke for Trafalgar, and for the sombre lions in the Square.”

I cast around for a Churchill “quotation of the season” to lead off this edition of Finest Hour: in this season to mark the largest peacetime expansion of government in history, and the arguments swirling around it. I found more than one. (Pages 6-7.)

We never proclaim what Churchill would think about a modern Act of Congress or Parliament. We haven’t the foggiest. But we have his words, and as always his words are worth the attention of thoughtful people. Leaders of parties or governments will often inevitably be influenced and encouraged by Churchill’s experience: his triumphs and tragedies, his mistakes and failures, for it diminishes Churchill to regard him as superhuman. Yet there was nobody like him when it came to communicating the unchanging verities by which, as he put it, “we mean to make our way.”

We are right to worry over events. And right to remember Churchill’s optimism, his determination, his unswerving faith in the English-Speaking Peoples, in their capacity to come through safe and with honour.

Churchill was a fatalist, but never troubled by what he could not control. “One only has to look at Nature,” he wrote his mother from India at the age of 24, “to see how very little store she sets by life. Its sanctity is entirely a human idea. You may think of a beautiful butterfly: 12 million feathers on his wings, 16,000 lenses in his eye; a mouthful for a bird. Let us laugh at Fate. It might please her.”

It is a good policy to conclude with Winston Churchill: “For myself I am an optimist—it does not seem to be much use being anything else.” There certainly does not seem to be much use in pessimism if you are charged with the leadership or a country, or a party, or a company, or an institution.

And we would probably agree with the Harrow Old Boy who, on his first visit there since his schooldays, substituted “sterner days” for “darker days” in a Harrow song verse written for him:

“Do not let us speak of darker days; let us rather speak of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days—the greatest days our country has ever lived; and we must all thank God that we have been allowed, each of us according to our stations, to play a part in making these days memorable in the history of our race.” RML 

 

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