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Churchill, as president of the Board of Trade (1908-10)* and Home Secretary (1910-11), was in the front ranks of the early Liberal drive for social security. He fought for old-age pensions and a job-finding service for the unemployed. But even in those Liberal salad days there were limits beyond which Churchill would not go. Offered the Local Government Board (now part of the Health Ministry), he recoiled: "I decline to be shut up in a soup kitchen with Mrs. Sidney Webb!"
The Smoking Volcano.
Like its successor, World War I came slowly, but more stealthily. There was no Hitler screaming in the Sportpalast, no Mussolini popping his eyeballs from a balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. International affairs before World War I were in the hands of gentlemen, trained diplomatists all. With great technical brilliance, they poulticed inflamed crises again & again with the salve of compromise.
The root of the trouble went deep. Germany had come late to nationalism and industrialization, late to the feast of trade and colonies — late but with a hearty appetite.'German steel production equaled Britain's by 1892, doubled it by 1910. The Prussian power cult had thrived in a poor land, now enriched by progress. Limitless expansion and conquest seemed to lie ahead. Germany's threatening moves from 1900 to 1914 drove old rivals — Britain, France and Russia — into one another's arms.
Churchill explained the Kaiser's-restlessness: "All he wished was to feel like Napoleon, and be like him without having had to fight his battles ... If you are the summit of a volcano, the least you can do is to smoke. So he smoked, a pillar of cloud by day and the gleam of fire by night, to all who gazed from afar; and slowly and surely these perturbed observers gathered and joined themselves together for mutual protection."
The Will to Suffer.
In 1911 Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. He plunged wholeheartedly into the navy's fathomless sea of details, visited every major naval installation in the British Isles and the Mediterranean. "I could put my hand on anything that was wanted," he recalls. He knew how to put the technicalities into memorable metaphors. In a 1914 debate on naval estimates, he told the House of Commons: "If you want a true picture in your mind of a battle between great modern ironclad ships, you must not think of it as if it were two men in armor striking at each other with heavy swords. It is more like a battle between two eggshells striking at each other with hammers."
Churchill gives this picture of the summer of 1914: "The world on the verge of its catastrophe was very brilliant. Nations and Empires crowned with princes and potentates rose majestically on every side, lapped in the accumulated treasures of the long peace. All were fitted and fastened — it seemed securely — into an immense cantilever. The two mighty European systems faced each other glittering and clanking in their panoply, but with a tranquil gaze . . . But there was a strange temper in the air ... Almost one might think the world wished to suffer . . ."
Danton v. Maxim.
The world did not wish nor