My Early Life: The Autobiography. Winston Churchill

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СКАЧАТЬ Trade controversy, nor the Lloyd George budget, nor the Ulster quarrel, severed our relations.

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      We were all delighted in the summer of 1895 to read that the Radical Home Rule Government had been beaten in the House of Commons and that Lord Salisbury was again forming an Administration. Everybody liked Lord Rosebery because he was thought to be patriotic. But then he had such bad companions! These bad companions dragged him down, and he was so weak, so they said, that he had to give way to them against his true convictions. Then too he was kept in office by the Irish Nationalists, who everyone knew would never be satisfied till they had broken up the British Empire. I put in a word for John Morley, but they said he was one of the worst of the lot and mixed up with Fenians and traitors of every kind. Particular pleasure was expressed that the Government should have been defeated for having let down the supply of cordite. Supposing a war came, how would you fight without cordite? Someone said that really there was plenty of cordite, but that any stick was good enough to beat such dogs! Certainly the Liberals were very unpopular at this time in Aldershot. The General Election proved that the rest of the country took our view, for Lord Salisbury was returned with a majority of 150, and the Conservatives ruled the country for ten years during which they fought a number of the wars which form a considerable part of this account. Indeed they were never turned out until they went in for Protection, and then the Liberals came in and made the greatest of wars. But all that is stopped now.

      I was invited to the party at Devonshire House after the Ministerial banquets. There I found all the new Ministers looking very smart in their blue and gold uniforms. These uniforms were not so magnificent as ours, but they had a style about them which commended them to my eye. I talked especially with Mr. George Curzon, the new Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He looked very splendid and prosperous, and received my congratulations with much affability. He explained that although his post was a small one, yet it carried with it the representation in the House of Commons of the Foreign Office and all that that implied. So he hoped he would have a share in making the foreign policy instead of only defending and explaining it. There were also some of those poor young men who had been left out; but they had to smile more gaily than anyone else, and go round congratulating all the people who had got the jobs these poor ones wanted for themselves. As no one had even considered me for any of these posts, I felt free to give rein to jealousy.

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      At this time Mrs. Everest died. As soon as I heard she was seriously ill I travelled up to London to see her. She lived with her sister's family in North London. She knew she was in danger, but her only anxiety was for me. There had been a heavy shower of rain. My jacket was wet. When she felt it with her hands she was greatly alarmed for fear I should catch cold. The jacket had to be taken off and thoroughly dried before she was calm again. Her only desire was to see my brother Jack, and this unhappily could not be arranged. I set out for London to get a good specialist, and the two doctors consulted together upon the case, which was one of peritonitis. I had to return to Aldershot by the midnight train for a very early morning parade. As soon as it was over, I returned to her bedside. She still knew me, but she gradually became unconscious. Death came very easily to her. She had lived such an innocent and loving life of service to others and held such a simple faith, that she had no fears at all, and did not seem to mind very much. She had been my dearest and most intimate friend during the whole of the twenty years I had lived. I now telegraphed to the clergyman with whom she had served nearly a quarter of a century before. He lived in Cumberland. He had a long memory for faithful service. We met at the graveside. He had become an Archdeacon. He did not bring little Ella with him.

      When I think of the fate of poor old women, so many of whom have no one to look after them and nothing to live on at the end of their lives, I am glad to have had a hand in all that structure of pensions and insurance which no other country can rival and which is especially a help to them.

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