One day, more than twenty years ago, I ran across a reference to Winston Churchill's The World Crisis in the course of some reading I was doing on the Battle of Jutland. I found a copy of the book some time later and glanced through it casually before buying it. The volume happened to open to a page on which Churchill speaks of the Agadir Crisis of 1911 and the passage I am about to read to you caught my eye. It is written from the point of view of a participant; Churchill was a member of the British Cabinet at the time these events took place:

I followed attentively the repeated discussions on the subject in the British Cabinet. Was Germany looking for a pretext for war with France, or was she merely trying by pressure and uncertainty to improve her colonial position? In the latter case the dispute would no doubt be adjusted after a period of tension, as so many had been before. The great Powers marshalled on either side, preceded and protected by an elaborate cushio0n of diplomatic courtesies and formalities, would display to each other their respective arrays. In the forefront would be the two principal disputants, Germany and France, and echeloned back on either side at varying distances and under veils of reserves and qualifications of different density, would be drawn up the other parties to the Triple Alliance and to what was already now beginning to be called the Triple Entente. At the proper moment these seconds would utter certain cryptic words indicative of their state of mind, as a consequence of which France or Germany would step back or forward a very small distance or perhaps move slightly to the right or the left. When these delicate rectifications in the great balance or Europe, and indeed of the world, had been made, the formidable assembly would withdraw to their own apartments with ceremony and salutati0ns and congratulate or condole with each other in whispers on the results.

I am greatly tempted to use the remainder of my time this evening to share with you some small part of the pleasure I have derived over the years from Churchill's biographies, historical works, speeches and essays. A bibliography of his writings will be appended to this paper and I hope that may of you will read at least some of them. You will find that there is not a dull page in the many volumes of his historical and biographical works. All of them are written with an immediacy, a sense of participation and a narrative drive which very few men in the long line of historians since Herodotus have equaled and none have surpassed. And of course there is his wonderfully effective, glowing, vigorous style, his ability to make his sentences march across the page like an army with banners, and his unfailing ear for the right word and for the cadence of words. Indeed, in his hands, the English sentence (to use his own words) "fits together like a piece of polished machinery" and becomes "a noble thing." But we must return to the Civil War.

All of you know, I believe, that Churchill is the son of a British father who a younger son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, and of an American mother. His American grandfather was Leonard Jerome, a most interesting individual in his own right. He was an Upstate New Yorker who made his start in Rochester. To find greater scope for his talents, he moved to New York City where in a very short time he became a very considerable factor in the financial and social life of the city. He was primarily a stockbroker - or, if you like, a speculator in stocks. Before, during and after the Civil War, he made and lost and made again several fortunes on the Stock Market. Then as now, the price of securities was greatly affected by newspaper stories about the soundness and prospects of individual companies and it was only natural that Jerome, who had owned a newspaper in Rochester, should take advantage of the opportunities that would accrue to the owner of an influential metropolitan paper. He therefore acquired effective ownership of the New York Times. It is unnecessary to comment on the financial ethics of this arrangement. The fact is that from the late 1850s through the Civil War, the editorial policies of the New York Times were largely controlled by Jerome, who was an unwavering supporter of the Republican party and of the Union Cause. At the time of the Draft Riots, the Times office was attacked by the mob, but Leonard Jerome and Henry Raymond were ready for trouble. The offices were fortified with rifles and cannon and the attackers were beaten off with loss.

There is a tempting opportunity which I shall resist, to digress at this point and to tell the story of the courtship, engagement and marriage of Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome. They were engaged on the third evening after they met. Decisiveness is certainly not lacking in Churchill's heredity.

When Churchill was born, in 1874, the emotional aftermath of the Civil War, by far the longest and the bloodiest war of the placid era which succeeded the Napoleonic Wars, was still very strong. As a matter of fact, it was almost equally as strong in England as in the United States. The Civil War had stirred up intense partisanship in Great Britain. A young boy who had inherited a full-blooded, strenuous temperament and an ardent imagination from both of his parents, one of whom was an American, whose parents moved in the political world in which at the time of Churchill's childhood there were still many survivors of the controversy over the recognition of the Confederacy, needed only a spark to become interested in the Civil War. The spark in Churchill's case was provided by Tenniel's famous cartoons. As Churchill tells the story in Amid These Storms:

At my private school in Brighton there were three or four volumes of cartoons from Punch, and on Sundays we were allowed to study them. This was a good way of learning history, or at any rate of learning something . . . Here . . . I gained my first great interest in the American Civil War. First of all, Mr. Punch was against the South, and we had a picture of a fierce young woman, Miss Carolina, about to whip a naked slave, a sort of Uncle Tom, with a kind of scourge which, not being yet myself out of the zone of such possibilities, I regarded as undoubtedly severe. I was all for the slave. Then later on the Yankees came on the scene. There was a whole regiment of them running away from a place called Bull Run; their muskets, with bayonets fixed, were on their shoulders as they doubled in fours, and their noses were long and red. They ran very fast, and the signpost pointed to Canada . . . So Mr. Punch had turned against the North; and apparently there was a row between the North and England, too. However, the war went on, and there was a picture of North and South, two savage, haggard men in shirts and breeches, grappling and stabbing each other with knives as they reeled into an abyss called Bankruptcy. Finally, I seem to remember a picture of Lincoln's tomb, and Britannia, very sad, laying a wreath upon the cold marble . . .

I was not embarked on a military career. This orientation was entirely due to my collection of soldiers . . . The day came when my father himself paid a formal visit of inspection. All the troops were arranged in the correct formation of attack. He spent twenty minutes studying the scene - which was really impressive - with a keen eye and captivating smile. At the end he asked me if I would like to go into the Army. I thought it would be splendid to command an Army, so I said "Yes!" at once; and immediately I was taken at my word. For years I thought that my father with his experience and flair had discerned in me the qualities of military genius. But I was told later that he had only come to the conclusion that I was not clever enough to go to the Bar.

There is no evidence that Churchill maintained an active interest in the Civil War during the nineteen years that followed his graduation from Sandhurst in 1895. But then, he led a very busy life during those nineteen years; into that relatively brief period, he managed to cram enough experience and accomplishment to satisfy most men for a lifetime. I will mention only the highlights of these years. Churchill went with his regiment - the 4th Hussars - to India and became one of the finest polo players of his time. He played in the finals of the All-India Tournament in 1899 with a dislocated shoulder and helped his regimental team win the match and the tournament by scoring - with his right elbow strapped to his side, mind you - three of his team's four goals. On a more serious level, he decided:

. . . that it must be a thrilling and immense experience to hear the whistle of bullets all around . . . Moreover, now that I had assumed professional obligations in the matter, I thought that it might be as well to have a private rehearsal, a secluded trial trip, in order to make sure that the ordeal was one not unsuited to my temperament.

But Churchill's life during these years held other things besides fighting and Parliament. The Army, war and politics were not sufficient to exhaust his energies. While still a subaltern in India, he proceeded on a formidable course of self-education. In history, he began with Gibbon and Macaulay. In Philosophy, his point of departure was Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics. All his reading was on the same level: Schopenhauer, Malthus, The Origin of the Species and so on. You notice that Churchill discovered the Great Books Progress fifty years before the University of Chicago. Even his soldiering served a double purpose; he was simultaneously a cavalry officer and a newspaper correspondent. Perhaps only Churchill could have carried of f the risky process of being the candid critic of the military competence of officers under whom he was serving. Nor was this all: Lieutenant Churchill was in the habit of putting pen to paper as soon as a campaign was over, and wrote a book about it. These books including a splendid biography of his father and the proceeds of lecture tours, made Churchill financially independent and enabled him to make a career of politics. And I must not forget to mention that in 1908 he married, and as he himself puts it in the closing words of A Roving Commission, " . . . lived happily ever afterwards."

I find in the next great episode of Churchill's life - an episode that was thought at the time to have wrecked irretrievably his political career - a strong suggestion that he had studied to good purpose the strategic lessons of the Civil War. I refer to the Gallipoli Campaign of 1915. By the Winter of 1914/15, there seemed little left for the British Navy to do. The British Army had transported to the Continent, German shipping had been swept from the seas, the German Fleet was bottled up in its harbors and the German submarines were not yet the menace they afterwards became. Churchill therefore turned his attention and his energies to the problems of the armies. On the Western Front millions of troops, English, French and German, were dug in on a line more than 350 miles long, running from the Alps to the North Sea. This line could not be flanked or turned, and frontal attacks upon it had no chance of succeeding. The fire power of massed machine guns and magazine rifles in the hands of troops sheltered by trenches gave the defense a superiority that the offense was at that period unable to overcome. As a matter of fact, one of the most significant tactical lessons of the Civil War was the deadly effectiveness of massed infantry fire. The subsequent development of quick-firing rifles for the infantry, and above all, of the machine gun, merely multiplied the effectiveness of the defense. Churchill realized this clearly long before the professional soldiers did. He devoted a part of his energies to the development of devices to restore the power of the offense and became in a very real and practical sense, the father of the tank. It is perhaps not too much to ascribe to his Yankee ancestry an interest in gadgets and a willingness to try novel solutions.

The actual problem facing the Allies was not only complicated by other factors, but it was of an urgency that did not allow for the lengthy process of developing new weapons. On the Eastern Front, Russia had suffered over a million casualties in the first eight months of the war and her looses in rifles, guns and ammunition were on a scale which her primitive industrial capacity - O tempora, O mores! -- was unable to make good. It was axiomatic that the Allies must bend every effort to keep Russia in the war by supplying her with the war materiel she needed. Her Barents Sea ports were barred by ice and her Baltic ports by ice and the German Navy. Turkey had gone into the war on the side of Germany and through her possession of both sides of the Dardanelles, barred the Black Sea route. In Churchill's mind, the Dardanelles became the master key that would open all doors. Turkey was relatively weak and the forts guarding the Straits were obsolete or obsolescent. British Sea Power provided the necessary mobility - notice the influence of Admiral Mahan - by the use of which the Allies could execute a gigantic flanking movement that would simultaneously solve both the salient strategic problems as they stood at the beginning of 1915: the breaking of the deadlock in France and the relief of Russia. Moreover, a successful operation against the Dardanelles would inevitably knock Turkey out of the war, bring in Greece and Romania on the side of England and France and would enable the Western Powers to open a Balkan front against the weak Austro-Hungarian flank of the Central Powers. Lord Kitchener, the Secretary of State for War, Lord Fisher, the First Sea Lord, Lloyd-George and Colonel Hankey, Secretary of the War Cabinet, suggested some phases of the plan or contributed to it, but the basic concept of the plan and all the drive behind it, were Churchill's. There is an underlying and perhaps not entirely accidental similarity between the Dardanelles plan and Jackson's attack on the exposed right wing of Hooker's army while Lee held its center. An even better strategic analogy in terms of geographic scale is Sherman's Atlanta and Savannah campaigns, with Grant pinning down the main army of the Confederacy.

Churchill believed in 1923, when he wrote The World Crisis -- and I think that the best military opinion supports him - that the Gallipoli campaign could have succeeded. Had it done so, it would have altered the whole course of the war and much history besides. It is interesting and very sad to speculate on the story of the last forty years as it might have been if the Gallipoli campaign had turned out as Churchill intended. The war could well have ended in 1916 without a Russian revolution and without the intervention of the United States. Had the war ended in 1916, the subsequent treaties of peace would not have been inspired by the grim vindictiveness that four years of slaughter and suffering made inevitable. Nor would a two-year war have produced the complete material and moral prostration of victors and vanquished alike. Without the malignant peace treaties of 1919 and the war-born depression of the 1930s, the names Hitler and Stalin would be unknown, there might not have been a second World War . . . but since I am addressing a sober group of historical scholars, I must not pursue these fantasies.

At any rate, the Dardanelles plan failed because of a lack of grip on the part of the War Cabinet, divided counsels, poor leadership on the spot and just plain bad luck; there were:

. . . at least a dozen situations all beyond the control of the enemy, any one of which, decided differently, would have ensured success.

It may be added as a footnote that the Navy used "monitors" - shallow draft vessels carrying two 14 inch guns apiece - as part of the bombardment fleet. These ships, built during Churchill's tenure of office as First Lord of the Admiralty, were named Admiral Farragut, General Grant, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee.

Churchill was brought back into the government after a period of active service on the Western Front. From 1917 until 1929, he continued, with interruption, to occupy high office, and in fact performed the rather improbable feat of becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer in a Tory administration after a second change in party affiliation. Nevertheless Churchill's political life between the wars and particularly from 1929 on, seemed to lack any unity of purpose or central sense of direction. It was not until the start of World War II that he resumed his rightful place at the center of affairs, as First Lord of the Admiralty in the Chamberlain government. And on the evening of his appointment to this office, the Admiralty signaled to the Fleet "Winston is back."

As far as Churchill's political life in concerned, the years between the two wars were sterile and frustrating. But they were most fruitful in other respects.

(These years) . . . apart from my anxiety on public affairs, were personally very pleasant to me. I earned my livelihood by dictating articles which had a wide circulation, not only in Great Britain and the United States, but also, before Hitler's shadow fell upon them, in the most famous newspapers of sixteen European countries. I lived in fact from mouth to hand . . . I lived mainly at Chertwell, where I had much to amuse me. I built with my own hands a large part of two cottages and extensive kitchen-garden walls, and make all kinds of rockeries and waterworks and a large swimming-pool . . . Thus I never had a dull or idle moment from morning till midnight, and with my happy family around me dwelt at peace within my habitation.

Churchill also had time for travel during these years. He was in the United States a number of times - in December, 1931, he was struck and almost killed by a taxicab in New York - and in the course of these he visited, with Douglas Southall Freeman as his guide, most of the Civil War battlefields of the East: the Peninsula, the Rappahannock, the Wilderness and Gettysburg. These battlefield tours heightened the already vivid impressions Churchill had of the Civil War. When he addressed a Joint Session of Congress on May, 1943 and reviewed the progress of the war, which by then had taken a favorable turn, he had this to say:

I was driving the other day not far from the field of Gettysburg, which I know well, like most of your battlefields. It was the decisive battle of the American Civil War. No one after Gettysburg doubted which way the dread balance of the war would incline, yet far more blood was shed after the Union victory at Gettysburg than in all the fighting which went before.

Another century passes across our minds and we see Virginia and Richmond the centre of a tragedy which, however agonising at the time, is now for ever illuminated by drama and romance . . . My grandfather was a Northerner . . . and you would not expect me to belie the cause for which he strove . . . Old battles are remembered not as sources of bitterness but to celebrate the marital virtues and civic fidelity of both sides in that immortal struggle.

In 1931, there appeared a volume edited by Philip Guedalla, entitled "If, or History Rewritten". The book is a collection of essays by various authors. Each essay assumes that an important historical event occurred in the opposite way from the actual fact, and traces the consequences. For example, there is an essay by Milton Waldman entitled "If Booth Had Missed Lincoln". Churchill's contribution to the book is the essay entitled "If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg". You will note that as far as the title goes, Churchill at two removes from reality, or, more briefly, he uses a "double switch". Actually, Churchill quickly tired of the game, and most of the essay is an imaginary history of America, Great Britain and in fact of the world, based on the supposition that General Lee did win did the battle. It is interesting to note that Churchill, the ex-cavalryman, ascribes Lee's "victory" to the arrival of Stuart with his encircling cavalry in the rear of the left wing of the Union position, simultaneously with Pickett's charge upon its centre.

Having routed the Union army at Gettysburg, Lee in three days fixed his headquarters in Washington, following "the hurried flight to New York of all the politicians, place hunters, contractors, sentimentalists and their retinues". The ascendancy within the Confederacy which Lee acquired by his victory overrode even the authority of the civil government and he used it to issue upon his arrival in Washington, a declaration in which he reaffirmed the inflexible resolve of the South to secede from the Union but proclaimed also that "the victorious Confederacy would pursue no policy towards . . . (its) negroes which was not in harmony with the moral conceptions of Western Europe . . ." Lee in effect abolished slavery in the Confederacy. The declaration had tremendous consequences. It led not merely to British recognition of the Confederacy but to the signing within a month of a formal treaty of alliance between Great Britain and the Confederate States. The accession of the naval power of Britain to the side of the Confederacy ended the Northern blockade, and ". . . this opening of the Southern Ports released the pent-up cotton, restored the finances and replenished the arsenals of the Confederacy." The effect of Lee's declaration upon the North was equally decisive:

Now that the moral issue was withdrawn, now that the noble cause which inspired the Union armies . . . was gained, there was nothing left but a war of reconquest . . . Here was the South victorious, reinvigorated, reinforced, offering of her own free will to make a more complete abolition of the servile status on the American continent than even Lincoln himself had seen fit to demand. Was the war to continue . . . merely to assert the domination of one set of English-speaking people over another; was blood to flow indefinitely in an ever-broadening stream to gratify national pride or martial revenge?"

If [he declared], our brothers in the South are willing faithfully to cleanse this continent of negro slavery, and if they will dwell beside us in neighberly goodwill as an independent but friendly nation, it would not be right to prolong the slaughter on the question of sovereignty alone.

During the whole of the rest of the nineteenth century the United States of America, as the truncated Union continued to style itself, grew in wealth and population. An iron determination seemed to have taken hold of the entire people. By the eighties they were already cleared of their war debt, and indeed all traces of the war, except in the hearts of men, were entirely eradicated. But the hearts of men are strange things and the hearts of nations are still stranger. Never could the American Union endure the ghastly amputation which had been forced upon it. Just as France after 1870 nursed for more than forty years her dream of revanche, so did the multiplying peoples of the American Union concentrate their thoughts upon another trial of arms.

By the nineties North America bristled with armaments of every kind, and what with the ceaseless growth of the Confederate army - in which the reconciled negro population now formed a most important element - and the very large forces which England and Canada maintained in the North, it was computed that no less than two million armed men with trained reserves of six millions were required to preserve the uneasy peace of the North American continent.

By the end of 1905 the tension \was such that nothing could long avert a fratricidal struggle on a gigantic scale, except some great melting of hearts, some wave of inspiration which should lift the dull, deadly antagonisms of the hour.

Gentlemen, I will interrupt the trend of my paper at this point to reflect that we meet here in an expansive spirit of friendship to share a common interest that is absorbing and inherently worthy, but is still outside the main current of our lives. But we cannot lay aside entirely our wider responsibilities in this grim year of 1958 when we enter this room, and I will therefore ask you to note carefully, and to remember, the following passage, which is in every way worthy of the great man who wrote it:

The essence of . . . (the Covenant of the English-Speaking Association) was crystal clear. The doctrine of common citizenship for all the peoples involved in the agreement was proclaimed. There was not the slightest interference with the existing arrangements of any member. All that happened was that henceforward the peoples of the British Empire and of . . . 'The Re-United States' deemed themselves to be members of one body and inheritors of one estate. The flexibility of the plan, which invaded no national privacy, which left all particularisms entirely unchallenged, which altered no institutions and required no elaborate machinery, was its salvation . . . Hundreds of millions of people suddenly adopted a new point of view. Without prejudice to their existing loyalties and sentiments, they gave birth in themselves to a new higher loyalty an a wider sentiment . . .

The glittering spectacle of the great English-Speaking combination, its assured safety, its boundless power, the rapidity with which wealth was created and widely distributed within its bounds, the sense of buoyancy and hope which seemed to pervade the entire populations; all of this pointed to European eyes a moral which none but the dullest could ignore.

Should he achieve his purpose, he will have raised himself to a dazzling pinnacle of fame and honor. If this prize should fall to his Imperial Majesty, he may perhaps reflect how easily his career might have been wrecked in 1914 by the outbreak of a war which might have cost him his throne, and have laid his country in the dust. If today he occupies in his old age the most splendid situation in Europe, let him not forget that he might well have found himself eating the bitter bread of exile, a dethroned sovereign and a broken man loaded with unutterable reproach. And this, we repeat, might well have been his fate, if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg.