WINSTON CHURCHILL
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make impersonal instruments of its practitioners, technicians who can
ill afford to seek to realize their personalities in their work. Their duty,
in the radical democracy of America (they know only too well), is to
represent the general will and not themselves. There is no place in
Congress, as there is apparently less and less place in Parliament, for
a man who looks on public life in the old-fashioned way as a means for
expressing his entire self. In the United States we should have made a
kind of Bernard Baruch out of Churchill, a darling of
T he New Yark
Times.
Even Franklin Roosevelt, thought to have been something of
an aristocrat, in addition to his will scarcely expressed more than his
personal charm in politics, the rest of the man either lying unused or
suppressed as a political liability until the cocktail hour. In Churchill
the soldier, statesman, and author something of the Renaissance and
English aristocratic tradition of the complete man is still alive. His
amateur painting is not, as has been said, the hobby of the bourgeois
relaxing after office hours (though that is how Churchill speaks of it),
on a par with Roosevelt's collecting of stamps, but is an expression of
this tradition of broad personal cultivation.
Churchill is neither a mountebank nor a stuffed shirt, but a person,
and in a time when programs, forces, and movements so preponderate
and statesmen are turned into abstractions, it is like an echo from the
heroic past to come upon a man whose purely personal qualities at
the same time constitute his public "program" and historical significance.
Again we must turn back to the autobiography for a clear statement
of the Churchillian program:
. . . I must confess that all through my life I have found myself in
disagreement alternately with both the historic English parties. I have
always urged fighting wars and other contentions with might and main
till overwhelming victory, and then offering the hand of friendship to
the vanquished. Thus I have always been against the Pacifists during
the quarrel, and against the Jingoes at its close.... And not only in
South Africa. I thought we ought to have starved out the Germans,
and then revictualled their country; and that after smashing the General
Strike, we should have met the grievances of the miners. I always get
into trouble because so few people take this line. I was once asked to
devise an inscription for a monument in France. I wrote, "In war,
Resolution. In defeat, Defiance. In victory, Magnanimity. In peace,
Goodwill." The inscription was not accepted.
What we have here are sentiments which are highly personal and
concrete and directly mirror the man, rather than principles (such as
we find in Wilson's program, for example) which are abstract. The
inscription that was not accepted for the monument in France now
