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Experience. Historic sessions were no novelty for Mr. Churchill. For 37 of his 65 years he has been a member of Parliament, a steady dweller of the eight acres of stone where more good things have been said, and more windy platitudes expounded, than anywhere else on earth—with the possible exceptions of the ancient Roman and present U. S. Senates. Even his greatest admirers admit that he has said more than his share of both. As First Lord of Admiralty he sat on the Government benches on the hushed night of Aug. 3, 1914. Out of the Government after the failure of the Dardanelles campaign that he initiated, he was back in the House as M.P. for Dundee, attending the secret sessions in the darkest days of the War—after the Passchendaele offensive, the five-month stalemate on the Western Front that cost the British 300,000 casualties. Back in Lloyd George's Cabinet as Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, Secretary of State for Colonies, he attended the still more panicky, still more secret sessions that followed the Russian Revolution, when Russia's leaving the Allies released about 50 more German divisions for the Western Front. Undismayed, undisturbed, a superb orator when aroused, his mind crammed with sonorous phrases (many of them taken from his own works), he thrilled his listeners with great rolling periods like this: "What they [Germany's allies] do not see or realize is the capacity of the ancient and mighty nations against whom Germany is warring to endure adversity, to put up with disappointment and mismanagement, to recreate and renew their strength, to toil on with boundless obstinacy through boundless suffering to the achievement of the greatest cause for which men have ever fought."
His eloquence was matchless because he meant every word of it. Not for him was the Hollywood-Rudyard Kipling version of the Empire, compounded of pukha sahibs, Gunga Din, the little brown men, and domains beyond the sea—for him Empire was a living faith, a political necessity, a way of life, a practical program and sometimes almost a religion. Son of brilliant, sensitive Lord Randolph who died young, of a handsome, American mother, Young Churchill was groomed to rule from the start, never let himself or his friends forget it. At 20, after Harrow and Sandhurst, he held a dinner for "those who are yet under 21 years of age but who in 20 years will control the destinies of the British Empire."