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With this concept of rule the philosophy of Nazi Germany was despicable to him: "Germany," he said, "is a place where a small band of ferocious men rose from the depths to dictatorship, there to take away the guarantee of life, law and liberty." To associate British democracy with Nazi methods meant the destruction of all that the Empire ever meant: "That power which burns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward progress with barbarous paganism, which vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest, which derives strength and pleasure from perverted persecution and uses the threat of murderous force—that power cannot ever be a trusted friend of British democracy."
Munich. To Churchill, the military man, the loss of Czecho-Slovakia was bad enough; to Churchill, the political moralist it was frightful. Coming after the abdication crisis (when Churchill had attacked Prime Minister Baldwin, been hauled down in the House), the Munich pact unnerved him as the World War never had. "The blow has been struck!" he cried, and as he harped steadily on its enormity, brooded over Britain falling into the power orbit and influence of Nazi Germany," the stories that Winston Churchill was passing out of public life flourished in the first post-Munich relief.
His anguish of mind was not so great, however, that he could not find time to write one more book (bringing his total, including the six volumes of his masterpiece, Marlborough, a biography of his famed warrior ancestor, to 19); to write articles, lecture, gamble, and swell his income to around $100,000 a year, to potter around his estate at "Chartwell," where he relaxes by putting up small brick buildings—he once belonged to a bricklayers' union—to play a little polo, paint tolerable landscapes which he exhibited under the name of "Charles Marin," and to organize a group of some 30 Tory M.P.s who challenged Prime Minister Chamberlain's foreign policy.
Cabinet. Last week's news of the German-Russian Pact put Mr. Churchill in his best vein, inspired a note of confidence he has scarcely expressed so firmly since the Boer War. Gone in an instant were the generous ideals and humane motives that Communism professed to accept, vindicated in the same instant were: 1) his distrust of Russia, 2) his fear of Germany, 3) his criticisms of the Prime Minister's delay, 4) his attacks on Munich as paving the way for a new crisis. Vindicated above all was his vision of the ideal British Empire as a force for social progress, an ideal undermined by 20 years of jeers from the Left, indifference from the Right.