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Visiting General Gamelin in France when news of the pact broke, Elder Statesman Churchill caught a plane for Croydon, dashed off a brilliant article for the London Daily Mirror, At the Eleventh Hour, on his way home. "Along all frontiers hundreds of thousands of men, armed with the most deadly weapons ever known, and behind them millions more, await the dread signal. There is only one man who can give it. There he sits, torn by passion and foreboding, by appetites and fears, with his finger moving toward a button which—if he presses it—will explode what is left of civilization. . . . But the choice is still open. There is no truth in the plea that Hitler has gone too far to start over. By a single impulse of will power he could regain solid foundations of health and sanity. ... If there is friendly action we will match it on our side. If there is renewed aggression we will make war."
Whether his spirit would put Winston Churchill in the Cabinet was dwarfed by bigger questions last week: certainly Britain's ruling class still considers him brilliant, erratic, unsafe; certainly Prime Minister Chamberlain would regard his entry as a major calamity. But in or out, Cabinet Minister or M. P. for Epping, Winston Churchill served last week as a symbol of British democracy, as an oppositionist of the kind that totalitarian governments cannot endure.