The Will of the People_ Winston Churchill and Parliamentary Democracy - Martin Gilbert [12]
A capacity for hard work was one of Churchill’s great strengths: “Work, which is a joy,” he once called it. Parliamentary democracy could not be sustained by opposition and oratory alone. He would sometimes quote a verse that could well have been his motto:
The heights achieved by men and kept
Were not achieved by sudden flight
But they, while their companions slept
Were toiling upwards through the night.
Another quotation, Talleyrand’s description of Napoleon, could also apply to Churchill: he possessed “the art of fixing his mind upon a topic for a long period of time without becoming tired” (L’art de fixer sur un object longtemps sans être fatigué). This diligence certainly was true of Churchill’s administrative and legislative efforts between 1906 and 1911, a high point of his active assertion of parliamentary democracy. “Our duty,” he wrote to Lord Elgin, his Colonial Office chief, “is to insist that the principles of justice and the safeguards of judicial procedures are rigidly, punctiliously and pedantically followed.” When the Governor of Ceylon pleaded “inconvenience” as a reason for not following up a case of alleged injustice, Churchill wrote to Elgin: “The inconvenience inseparable from the reparation of injustice or irregularity is one of the safeguards against their recurrence.” When a Zulu revolt in Natal was crushed with severity, Churchill protested to Elgin about the “disgusting butchery.”
A Junior Minister could not change the ethos of the Colonial civil service, but he could try to change the direction of parliamentary concerns at home. In a speech in Glasgow on 11 October 1906, he set out a panorama of measures whereby Parliament could strike out through legislation against inequalities in the nature of British society. The time had come, he asserted, for State intervention across the whole social field. The State, he said, must “increasingly and earnestly concern itself with the care of the sick and aged, and, above all, of the children.” The State should take a lead in replanting the forests that had been denuded of trees by those in search of profitable timber. The State should also assume the position “of the reserve employer of labour.” Above all, Churchill said, “I look forward to the universal establishment of minimum standards of life and labour, and their progressive elevation.… We want to draw a line below which we will not allow persons to live and labour, yet above which they may compete with all the strength of their manhood. We want to have free competition upwards; we decline to allow free competition to run downwards. We do not want to pull down the structure of science and civilisation, but to spread a net over the abyss.”
From these words came pioneering legislation. Appointed in 1908 to the Cabinet as President of the Board of Trade, after H.H. Asquith had succeeded the ailing Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister, Churchill drafted, introduced and piloted through Parliament a series of Bills that took their place on the Statute Book of progressive legislation. The Mines Eight Hours Act reduced the hours of work underground from eight to six. In other acts and measures that he introduced, Government shipbuilding orders were transferred to dockyards where there was high unemployment. More than two hundred Labour Exchanges nationwide, an innovation of Churchill’s inventive mind, enabled the unemployed in one part of the country to find work elsewhere. A senior Labour Member of Parliament, Arthur Henderson—the Labour Party was then emerging as a political force—called Churchill’s announcement of Labour Exchanges “one of the most far-reaching statements