Evening Post. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1924. MR. CHURCHILL'S RETURN

Evening Post, Volume CVIII, Issue 78, 29 September 1924, Page 6

Evening Post. MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 1924. MR. CHURCHILL'S RETURN

"At a meeting of the official Conservative Party, under the auspices of the Edinburgh branch," Mr. Winston Churchill has been ■welcomed back to the fold from which he had strayed twenty years f.go. "Bolted" would perhaps be a better word than "strayed," for there was nothing weak or casual or absent-minded about Mr. Churchill's defection from the party which he had been elected to serve only four years before, nor has there been anything suggestive of the helplessness and distress of the lost sheep in his bearing during those twenty years of absence. According to Mr. A. G. Gardiner, it was the aggressive self-confidence of the young recruit, the breezy "stand and deliver" vjth which he "galloped up to Westminster," that met with a rather chilly reception from Mr. | Balfour. "In the jolly Hounslow Heath days of the early 'eighties" 'Mr. Balfour and Lord Randolph Churchill—Winston's father—had been free lances together in the Fourth Party. "But while it was capital fun to go tiger-hunting ■ftith a Churchill, it was another affair, to have a Churchill worrying you in office." The frosty reception which temperament and policy concurred in dictating to Mr. Balfour is considered by Mr. Gardiner to have rendered the young M.P. for Oldham a service by heading him towards personal freedom and'democratic politics. Whether we accept 'this pretty theory or not, the propriety of the personal auspices under which Mr. Churchill the returning prodigal is now welcomed home is beyond question.

Though, entirely lacking in the brilliant and reckless pugnacity which makes Mr. Churchill so formidable an opponent and so un>comfortable a colleague, Lord Balfour is not much more adapted tban he to taking orders. The controversy. which drove the younger statesman out of the Conservative ranks gave the elder one what was pvobably the most embarrassing time of his life. In those days Mr. Joseph Chamberlain was" the strongest man in the Unionist Party. He had left the Cabinet in order to propagate his gospel of Imperial preference free from official restraint and without compromising his colleagues. From his position of independence Mr. Chamberlain was strong enough to capture the party machine, and at one time it even seemed that he was capturing the country also. But this striking success did hot include the complete conquest of the wary Prime Minister. It was characteristic of Mr. Balfour that, while colleagues and followers were finding salvation under the new gospel, he himself was never brought much nearer to conversion than a balanced and tepid state of philosophic doubt. It was mainly on this account that he was ultimately displaced from the leadership of the party in favour of Mr. Bonar Law, who in the language of the day was a "wholo hogger" that is to say, went the "whole hog" on the issue to which, even after the debacle of 1906, the Unionists still persisted in giving a foromost place.

The thoroughness of .the Tariff lloformcrs of those days was of course matched by an equal extravagance on the other side. The exultation with which the Liberals routed Mr. Chamberlain's fiscal Imperialism was not without an element of rudeness, even when the claims of.the colonies were in question and a representative of the Colonial Office was speaking. Just after the Imperial Conference of 1907 the Under-Secrotary for the Colonies boasted that

the Government had "banged, barred and bolted" the door on Imperial reciprocity, mid that they "would not concede ouo inuli, they would not sjivo one tartling preference on a singlo peppercorn."

As the speaker was Mr. Winston Churchill and' the speech was delivered at Edinburgh, it is a peculiar propriety in the Met that it is at Edinburgh, of at any rate under Edinburgh auspices, that his returu to Conservatism has been celebrated, and iv his improvement of the occasion by a wholesouled declaration in favour of Imperial preference. The irony of history has seldom been more happily illustrated both in substance and in detail than by this remarkable performance. In 190 V Mr. Churchill had helped to "bang, bolt, and bar the door" against preference, and- was aggressively and even truculently determined not to give "one farthing preference on a single peppercorn." Now one of the worst crimes of a Socialist Government is that it has "aggressively repudiated" a preferential scheme.

As a matter of fact, there- has been absolutely nothing aggressive about the repudiation of Protection and preference by the present Government. The only semblance of aggression was displayed by Mr. Asqnith, for whom they are not responsible, aud who is still an unrepentant and militant Freetrader of the type to which Mr. Ohm-chill himself belonged till a.'few months ago. The dissent of the Govci-u-Hionfc was expressed with courtesy,

were bound by election pledges and the vote of the people, and Mr. Mac Donald, Mr. Clynes, and Mr. J. H. Thomas all said so in polite and friendly terms which no practised diplomatist could have bettered. If they had imitated the exultant and truculent style of Mr. Churchill's repudiation of a similar policy in 1907, even his eloquence of denunciation would have bsen unequal to the occasion. As it is, he has overdone his part with an exuberance which reminds one of the remark made by Sheridan when he saw a Scotsman in an abnormally large pair of breeches: "Converts are always enthusiasts.'' In his forgetfulness of his chequered past and his blind determination to illustrate the irony of history to its utmost limit, Mr. Churchill has unfortunately tended to concentrate attention on the comical side of what is really an event of serious importance, viz., the restoration to public life of one of the ablest, most courageous, and most broad-minded of the Empire's statesmen.