A gathering in Westminster from all walks of life, packing into the Gothic Glory of the Speaker’s House in the Palace of Westminster, for a St George’s Day function, and I squeezed in among them.
All sorts of interests were there – the Church, cultural champions, a scatter of journalists, entertainers, the economic and political worlds. After the rousing speeches, from The Speaker and others, came the Churchill moment. An actor, giving us Churchill to the T, delivered part of a speech from a St George’s Day function in 1933 (during the Great Depression, and just after the Austrian housepainter seized power in Germany).
The whole of Churchill’s speech that day is interesting – not just the ‘St George for Merrie England’ part. He expressed some frustration that in his time it was becoming frowned upon to say ‘England’ to mean the whole of Britain, so he talked of England, and left the audience to guess which he meant. To hand the rest of the article to Winston S Churchill then, as first he looked down at the BBC microphones recording every word said:
They have been placed upon our tables at their own responsibility by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Think of the risk these eminent men are running, of their suspense. We can almost see them in our mind’s eye gathered together in that very expensive building with the questionable statues on its front. We can picture Sir John Reith with the perspiration mantling on his lofty brow, with his hand upon the control switch wondering whether it will not be his duty to protect his innocent subscribers from some irreverent thing I might say about Mr. Gandhi or about the Russian Bolsheviks, or even about our peripatetic Prime Minister.
And after an amusing diversion, imagining a modern St George facing the Dragon not with a lance but with a secretariat, handing it taxpayers’ money and signing a trade treaty, then he found his main theme which showed his foresight in newly the darkening world, and which is a lesson to us to this day:
Historians had noticed all down the centuries one peculiarity of the English people, which had cost them dear. We had always thrown away after a victory the greater part of the advantages gained in time struggle. England, so resolute, so dogged, so invincible in danger, had always collapsed in spirit and action after time danger has been warded off. The worst difficulties from which we suffered did not come from without. They came from within. They did not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They came from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who if they added something to its culture took much from its strength.
Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. Religion, we are told, has its part except to teach us humbleness. Patriotism, they declare, is worn out, except where paying income tax is concerned. Our clever talkers have derided these ancient themes, but what have they to put in their place but a. vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias? That is all they offer us in a world where the struggle for national self-preservation is daily becoming intensified.
They tell us that our day is done, our sun is set, and night is coming on. They declare, some with crazy exultation in their tones, that the decline and fall of England’s glory is at hand. If that be true it will be our own fault. Nothing can save England if she will not save herself. If we lose faith in ourselves, in our capacity to guide and govern, if we lose our will to live, then, indeed, our story is told.
Why should we break up the solid structure of British power for dreams which may some day come true but are now only dreams—some of them nightmares?
We are, as a race and society, perhaps more capable of bearing shocks and strains—especially long strains— than any other. Our institutions are capable of chancing with time and circumstances. We ought, as a nation and Empire, to weather any storm that blows at least as well as any other existing system of human government. We are at once more experienced and more truly united than any people in the world. It may well be that time most glorious chapters of our history are yet to be written.
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