Читать книгу These are the British онлайн

52 страница из 108

The course of history has strengthened the position of parliamentary government. Parliament and Britain have survived and triumphed, but where is the Europe of Louis XIV, of Napoleon, of Wilhelm II, of Hitler? Even in times of great stress the business of government must go on. I remember my astonishment in June of 1940 when I returned from a stricken, hopeless France to learn from a Member of Parliament that a committee was considering plans for uniting the West Indian islands in a single Commonwealth unit after the war.

The idea that politics and government are essential to the well-being of the nation fortifies tolerance in British public life. The political and military disasters of 1940 were far more damaging and dangerous to Britain than Pearl Harbor was to the United States. They invited bitter recrimination. Yet Winston Churchill, himself bitterly attacked in the locust years for predicting these very disasters, took Neville Chamberlain into his cabinet and silenced recrimination with the salient reminder that if the nation dwelt too much on the past it might lose the future.