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vote of censure against the Government’s use of indentured Chinese labour in South Africa, arguing that it was the duty of the Westminster Parliament to be concerned with the plight of all those who were ill-treated anywhere in the British Empire. He also voted in favour of Liberal bills to restore legal rights to the trade unions and to tax the sale of land when it was bought cheaply and then sold at a far higher price as building land. (This legislation, which Churchill was to advocate again in 1918, only entered the Statute Book fifty-five years later, in 1969, in Harold Wilson’s premiership.)

On 18 April 1904 Churchill accepted an invitation from the Liberals of North-West Manchester to stand as a Free Trade candidate, with full Liberal support. He accepted. Six weeks later, in Manchester, he publicly denounced the Government’s Aliens Bill, aimed to curb foreign—and largely Jewish—immigration. His attack was published in the newspapers on May 31. It was the first parliamentary day after the Whitsun recess. That day Churchill took the step that was to alienate him for many years from a sizable portion of the Conservative Party. He entered the Chamber of the House of Commons, stood for a moment at the Bar of the House, looked briefly at the Government benches to his left and the Opposition benches to his right, walked up the aisle, bowed to the Speaker, turned sharply and emphatically to his right, and took his seat on the Liberal benches.

“Crossing the floor of the House,” as it is called, was Churchill’s ultimate assertion of the freedom of an individual Member of Parliament within the parliamentary system. The seat he chose was that in which his father had sat during his years in Opposition. On the Liberal benches he became the scourge of his former Conservative colleagues—not that he had given them much peace when he was one of their number. When the Government introduced its Aliens Bill, Churchill challenged it clause by clause on the floor of the House. At Carnarvon he shared a platform with one of the Liberal Party’s most radical members, David Lloyd George. At Edinburgh he declared that he was more afraid of the “Independent Capitalist Party” than the Independent Labour Party, a Labour left-wing grouping. Churchill had always been an opponent of monopoly capitalism. Capitalism “in the form of Trusts,” he had written to an American friend five years earlier, “has reached a pitch of power which the old economists never contemplated and which excites my most lively terror.”

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The Challenge of Legislation

Among the tests of the effectiveness and value of parliamentary democracy is the quality of the legislation passed by Parliament. An opportunity arose before Churchill had been in the House of Commons for five years whereby he would be tested in this demanding sphere. On 4 December 1904, feeling that the Liberal Party was in disarray and would lose a General Election, Arthur Balfour resigned as Prime Minister and his Conservative administration came to an end. King Edward VII asked the Liberal leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, to form a Government. Churchill, the newcomer to the Liberal benches, was appointed to the junior ministerial position of Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies.

Churchill’s entry into the Government came a week after his thirty-first birthday. His ministerial and legislative career had begun, as he plunged, for the first time, into the responsibilities of a parliamentarian in Government office. Henceforth the demands of ministerial office, some extremely onerous, were to be his in every decade during a turbulent half century.

In those first years of ministerial responsibility in the House of Commons, in an assertion of the values of parliamentary democracy, Churchill asserted the rights of Black subjects of the British Empire to the concern and protection of the Westminster Parliament: “Our responsibilities to the native races remains a real one,” he told a correspondent.

In the legislation that he piloted through the House of Commons to secure peace in South Africa, he