WINSTON CHURCHILL
203
matter very plainly in his
Reflections on the Revolution in France:
You will observe, that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of
Right, it has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and
assert our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived to us from our
forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity;
as an estate specially
belonging to the people of this kingdom, without any reference what–
ever to any other more general or prior right.
rMy italics.l
In the two world wars of the present century England donned
with some awkwardness the mantle of Defender of Universal Freedom,
being relieved of it in each instance by the accession of America to the
conflict, that New World which the Old regarded, at least until a short
time ago, as enshrining the Idea of Democracy in its most untarnished
and universal form.
4
As Wilson's moral authority in the world at large
overshadowed Lloyd George's, the American becoming the moral
spokesman of the Allies, so Roosevelt's overshadowed Churchill's. Al–
though the Tory Democrat claims, not without a touch of pique, the
honor of having composed the first draft of that Atlantic Charter
which looked forward to a peace affording "assurance that all the men
in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and
want";6 and although Pearl Harbor might have been thought to have
transformed what was in England's case, strategically as well as morally,
a war of survival, into an Allied crusade against Nazi tyranny; yet for
Churchill it remained "The Unnecessary War" which he was thankful
that Great Britain and the Commonwealth should have come out of
whole. Where a Frenchman of the old style, or an American, in a like
situation, would have seen the fate of the universal, Liberty, inextricably
involved in the fate of his own country, Churchill sees nothing of the
sort, or at most sees it only as a secondary and relatively weak con–
sideration. It is for the preservation of English particularity, of England's
unique history, of "the long continuity of our island tale," that his
strongest emotions are reserved:
No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the
United States at our side was to me the greatest joy.. .. So we had
4. The New World as a political and moral idea dates almost from the time
or America's discovery. This ancient tradition, however, is dying before our eyes,
and the European working class, full of socialist prepossession and self-righteous–
ness, now looks with suspicion on the "Land of Wall Street," the standard of
living of whose proletariat, if the European workers were to possess it, would be
socialism enough for them.
5. "Considering all the tales of my reactionary, Old-World outlook, and the
pain this is said to have caused the President, I am glad it should be on record
that the substance and spirit of what came to be called the 'Atlantic Charter'
was in its first draft a British production cast in my own words."
