Lord Randolph Churchill Quotes

In reply to your letter I have to remark that members who sit below the gangway have always acted in the House of Commons with a very considerable degree of independence of the recognised and constituted chiefs of either party, nor can I (who owe nothing to anyone and depend on nobody) in any way or at any time depart from that well-established and highly respectable tradition.

[T]he interest of the Conservative party is undoubtedly to reform the land laws of this country with the view of multiplying the owners of land. (Cheers.) The more we can increase and multiply the owners of land in England the more we strengthen the real and true Conservative party in this country, for it is an undoubted fact that owners of land when once they come into their land develop strong Conservative tendencies.

I consider it to have been my good fortune to have heard and to have read many speeches and many orations of the Prime Minister [William Ewart Gladstone] with regard to Ireland. Many of his most confident predictions, vaticinations, and declarations are fresh in my mind. I have been more than once under what may be called the wand of the magician; and I know of no experience to which I can compare it, except, perhaps, the taking of morphia. The sensations, while the operation is going on, are transcendent; but the recovery is bitter beyond all experience.

[T]he main principle and the guiding motive of the policy of the Government in the future will be to maintain intact and unimpaired the union of the Unionist party.

Your iron industry is dead; dead as mutton; your coal industries, which depend greatly upon the iron industries, are languishing. Your silk industry is dead, assassinated by the foreigner. Your woollen industry is in articulo mortis, gasping, struggling. Your cotton industry is seriously sick. The shipbuilding industry, which held out longest of all, is come to a standstill. Turn your eyes where you will, survey any branch of British industry you like, you will find signs of mortal disease. The self-satisfied Radical philosophers will tell you it is nothing; they point to the great volume of British trade. Yes, the volume of British trade is still large, but it is a volume which is no longer profitable; it is working and struggling. So do the muscles and nerves of the body of a man who has been hanged twitch and work violently for a short time after the operation. But death is there all the same, life has utterly departed, and suddenly comes the rigor mortis. Well, but with this state of British industry what do you find going on? You find foreign iron, foreign wool, foreign silk and cotton pouring into the country, flooding you, drowning you, sinking you, swamping you; your labour market is congested, wages have sunk below the level of life, the misery in our large towns is too frightful to contemplate, and emigration or starvation is the remedy which the Radicals offer you with the most undisturbed complacency. But what has produced this state of things? Free imports? I am not sure; I should like an inquiry; but I suspect free imports of the murder of our industries much in the same way as if I found a man standing over a corpse and plunging his knife into it I should suspect that man of homicide, and I should recommend a coroner's inquest and a trial by jury.

For the sake of this fifth message of peace to Ireland, this farrago of superlative nonsense, the vexatious and costly machinery of a general election is to be put in motion, all business other than what may be connected with political agitation is to be impeded and suspended; trade and commercial enterprise, now suffering sadly from protracted bad times, and which political stability can alone re-invigorate, are to be further harassed and handicapped; all useful and desired reforms are to be indefinitely postponed; the British Constitution is to be torn up; the Liberal party shivered into fragments. And why? For this reason and no other. To gratify the ambition of an old man in a hurry.

The struggle between England and Russia at the present moment is rather analogous to a celebrated struggle which took place some years ago, and which I can just remember, between two individuals in this country—the great fight between Heenan and Sayers.

That state of things discloses this as a rule; it discloses as a general practice high rents, mercilessly exacted, wretched accommodation, total neglect by the ground landlords of their duties to their tenants, and of the general duties of property. (Hear, hear.) I fancy—I say it in warning to the ground landlords in the large towns—that a heavy reckoning is at hand for them from the people if they do not take time by the forelock, and if they do not recognize that property has its duties as well as its rights. (Cheers.)

I allude to the inquiry by the House of Lords' Committee into the sweating system. There we have had proof upon proof and witness after witness showing that there are men and women in this country in great numbers who, in order to earn a living, a mere pittance, have positively to labour 20 and even 22 hours a day. (Cries of "Shame.") It is almost incredible; and I say labour of that kind is totally inconsistent with either health or strength. (Cheers.) Now we wish to be a free people, but surely above all things we should try that we should be a strong and a healthy people (hear, hear); and where labour is carried to this excess for the benefit of one person or another I say it is carried to an excess which it is very difficult to justify.

My views as to the reforms in the public service, which public safety and economy alike urgently call for, are, I think, well known to you; they have undergone no change, save that I hold them more strongly than ever. You are also, I imagine, not unaware of my desire to meet with all legitimate sympathy and good will the newly-formed but very articulate and well-defined demands of the labouring classes.

The primary object of all government at the present moment is to maintain the Union, to maintain it not for a session or for a Parliament, but for our time.

To tell the truth I don't know myself what Tory Democracy is. But I believe it is principally opportunism.

Politics is not a science of the past; politics is the science of the future. You must use the past as a lever with which to manufacture the future. Politics is not a science, it is not a profession which consists in standing still; it is in this country essentially a science and a profession of progress.