Warm Qualities of Humanity

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27628, 7 April 1955, Page 10

Warm Qualities of Humanity

Nor has one to look far for the very different qualities that have made him loved and respected by the British people, regardless of their politics and their stations. For all his aristocratic background, Churchill has had the common touch; he has been the dedicated servant of the Throne, of Parliament, and of the people. He has never sought popularity, never advocated the easy course of expediency, never encouraged wishful thinking. Although he is a skilful debater and a master of political tactics, many of his best speeches in the House of Commons have been against the mood of the House and even against the wishes of his party. He has taken his successes with modesty and his reverses, although never submissively, with dignity; and always he has eome back ebullient and full of fight Faw men have had better reason to exult over enemies or detractors whom events have proved wrong; few men have shown a greater capacity for generosity and for willingness to forget the past.

His defects, such as they are, are the defects of these qualities. He has, on occasions, been excessively loyal to his friends and colleagues where such loyalty was scarcely deserved. His loyalty to his own high conceptions of the destiny of his country and the Commonwealth has on occasions seemed to leave him strangely far behind progressive leaders of thought. He may be judged by history to have failed the European movement to which he gave so much inspiration and encouragement because, although a great European, he was a greater imperialist. At least he has never failed, in his long career, the Parliamentary institutions of which he was both the defender and the ornament. Few men in a modern democratic State have held as much personal power or wielded as great an influence as Churchill during the last war. Yet in everything he did he was careful to acknowledge Parliament as his master. For this, democratic peoples in an increasingly authoritarian world owe a debt of gratitude to Sir Winston Churchill They will wish him many years in which to enjoy the comparative quiet and serenity of a private jnember of the House of Commons, and in which to complete his monumental chronicles of the times in which he has been an outstanding and often ’ dominant figure.