Foreign News: Churchill Reports

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"No prudent and far-seeing man," said Churchill, "can doubt that the eventual and total defeat of Hitler and Mussolini is certain. . . . There are less than 70,000,000 malignant Huns, some of whom are curable and others killable. . . . The people of the British Empire and the U.S. number 200,000,000. . . . They have more wealth, more technical resources, and they make more steel than the whole of the rest of the world put together."

Answering the lines from Longfellow that Mr. Roosevelt scribbled out and sent him last winter by Wendell Willkie (TIME, Feb. 17), Britain's classical Prime Minister ended with a few lines from a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough (subject of Matthew Arnold's poem Thyrsis). Quoted Winston Churchill:

. . . Not by eastern windows only,

When daylight comes, comes in the light;

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!

But westward, look, the land is bright!

If Prime Minister Churchill was disturbed about the ordeal to come when he defends his acts in Parliament, he gave no sign of it. He had no reason to fear any serious threat against his power, for his prestige with the British people was impregnable.

Wrote the London News-Chronicle's perceptive Columnist A. J. Cummings one day last week: "I wonder sometimes whether Mr. Churchill is fully aware of the strength of his popular authority in this country. Confidence in his leadership transcends all partisanship. So deep-rooted is it that if he thought it desirable he could sack every member of his Government without provoking a successful Party revolt."

Said another Briton, Socialist Harold Laski: "His hold over the . . . people in a time of adversity is greater, if anything, than his influence in hours of triumph. . . . He has made himself the first Englishman of our time."

The fact was that for good or ill last week Winston Churchill had become Britain's Man of World War II. His strength was Britain's strength, his weaknesses her weaknesses.