The World Crisis
By Winston S. Churchill
Children were taught of the Great War against Napoleon as the culminating effort in the British people’s history, and they looked at Waterloo and Trafalgar as the supreme achievements of British arms by land and sea. These prodigious victories, eclipsing all that had gone before, seemed the fit and predestined ending to the long drama of our island race, which had advanced over a thousand years from small and weak beginnings to a foremost position in the world.
The British rescued Europe from military domination thrice in three centuries. Thrice had Spain, the French Monarchy, and the French Empire have assailed the Low Countries. Thrice had British war and policy, often maintained single-handedly, overthrown the aggressor. Always at the outset, the strength of the enemy had seemed overwhelming invariably, the struggle had been prolonged through many years and across awful hazards, the victory had at last been won, and the last of all the victories had been the greatest of all, gained after the most ruinous struggle and over the most formidable foe. Indeed, that was the end of the tale, as it was often the end of the book.
History showed the rise, culmination, splendour, transition, and decline of States and Empires. It seemed inconceivable that the same series of tremendous events through which, since the days of Queen Elizabeth, we had made our way successfully three times should be repeated a fourth time and on an immeasurably more significant scale. Yet that is what has happened and what we have lived to see.
Genre: Non-Fiction
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Winston S. Churchill
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, soldier, and writer.
Biography.
He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from 1940 to 1945 during the Second World War and 1951 to 1955. Apart from two years between 1922 and 1924, he was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1900 to 1964 and represented five constituencies. Ideologically an adherent to economic liberalism and imperialism, he was a member of the Conservative Party for most of his career, which he led from 1940 to 1955. He was a member of the Liberal Party from 1904 to 1924.
Of mixed English and American parentage, Churchill was born in Oxfordshire into the wealthy, aristocratic Spencer family. He joined the British Army in 1895 and saw action in British India, the Mahdist War (also known as the Anglo-Sudan War), and the Second Boer War. He later gained fame as a war correspondent and wrote books about his campaigns. Elected a Conservative MP in 1900, he defected to the Liberals in 1904. In H. H. Asquith’s Liberal government, Churchill served as President of the Board of Trade and Home Secretary, championing prison reform and workers’ social security. He oversaw the Gallipoli campaign as First Lord of the Admiralty during the First World War. However, after it proved a disaster, he was demoted to Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
He resigned in November 1915 and joined the Royal Scots Fusiliers on the Western Front for six months. In 1917, he returned to government under David Lloyd George. He served successively as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, and Secretary of State for the Colonies, overseeing the Anglo-Irish Treaty and British foreign policy in the Middle East. After two years out of Parliament, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government, returning the pound sterling in 1925 to the gold standard at its pre-war parity, a move widely seen as creating deflationary pressure and depressing the UK economy.
Winston S. Churchill
