WINSTON CHURCHILL
196
was not. Their stake in the country was not destroyed; it was still
possible to win that fame in public life which for Englishmen is the
summit of distinction and even yet join the company of the Pitts, Dis–
raeli, Gladstone. The times might be degenerate, but for such a man
as Churchill, the antithesis of the Hamlet type, they are never out of
joint. A more particular explanation, however, is to be found in the
strange aborted career of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, the
first Churchill after the victor of Blenheim who had seemed to promise
greatness. But then came the ill-judged offer of resignation from the
Chancellorship of the Exchequer, which was accepted, and Lord
Randolph, not wholly reluctantly (Churchill tells us in the biography of
his father that the latter, more of a Hamlet than his son, experienced
a periodic revulsion against politics), retired from the public scene
(as it proved) forever. In his autobiography Churchill recalls visitors to
Harrow, on the morrow of his father's resignation, pointing
him
out
among the boys trooping to chapel. Without having suffered from
paternal psychological domination, he admired his father tremendously,
and his career has been, among other things, a vindication of his parent.
The father's failure spurred the son to his success.
Like his father, Churchill is a staunch believer in the progressive
Toryism of Disraeli, and has not only accepted modern innovation as
inevitable but on occasion has even welcomed it. Tory Democracy,
though
in
large part simply a stratagem to win the Radical proletariat
over from the Liberal middle class to the side of the Tory gentry (as
it is now being revived in an attempt to win the working class away
from the Labor Party), was not the desperate and cynical expedient
that such amalgams have generally been on the Continent; there was
also in it a genuine solicitude for the worker's lot and it eased the way
to the introduction of important reforms. Certainly it was, in the
person of Lord Randolph and the other members of the "Fourth
Party," a goad to the benighted complacency of the dominant section of
the Conservative Party. For Churchill it was an education that he
might not otherwise have acquired. Of the time he is so fond of recalling
in his autobiography he can also say
(in
The Warld Crisis),
after
Disraeli: "In those days England was for the few-and for the very
few." He speaks with pride of having helped to write England's first
Unemployment Insurance Act, and in
My Early Life,
apropos of his
childhood nurse, a Mrs. Everest, Churchill writes:
When I think of the fate of poor old women, so many of whom have no
one to look after them and nothing to live on at the end of their lives,
I am glad to have had a hand in all that structure of pensions and
insurance which no other country can rival and which is especially a
help
to
them.
