(One of a series of weekday posts on the life of Winston S. Churchill.)
Because time presses, today’s post will be brief; it will be wise because of Churchill’s words.
In 1929, in a now almost entirely forgotten incident, a group of Chinese warlords attacked and destroyed British property in China.
The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, was encouraged by many to overlook the matter. The warlords did wrong, certainly, but they were a bother and not a real problem. Let the matter go, Baldwin was advised. Or better yet, find some way to appease the warlords so they won’t do such things in the future.
Churchill, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, was not, as we would all know, one of the appeasers. His official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, told a London audience in 1991 of a letter Churchill wrote Baldwin at the time of the incident. In it, Churchill set out beliefs he’d held throughout his public life :
[T]here is no evil worse than submitting to wrong and violence for fear of war. Once you take the position of not being able in any circumstance to defend your rights against the aggression of some particular set of people, there is no end to the demands that will be made upon you or to the humiliations that must be accepted.
0 comments:
Post a Comment