Top 15 Lord Randolph Churchill Quotes

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.

It is our business as Tory politicians to uphold the Constitution. If under the Constitution as it now exists, and as we wish to see it preserved, the labour interest finds that it can obtain its objects and secure its own advantage, then that interest will be reconciled to the Constitution, will find faith in it, and will maintain it. But if it should unfortunately occur that the Constitutional party to which you and I belong are deaf to hear and slow to meet the demands of labour, are stubborn in opposition to those demands, and are persistent in the habit of ranging themselves in unreasoning and short-sighted support of all the present rights of property-capital, then the result may be that the labour interest may identify what it will take to be defects in the Constitutional party with the Constitution itself, and in a moment of indiscriminate impulse may use its power to sweep both away. This view of affairs, I submit, is worthy of attention at a time when it is a matter of life or death to the Constitutional party to enlist in the support of the Parliamentary Union of the United Kingdom a majority of the votes of the masses of labour.

Political power passed very considerably from the landed interest to the manufacturing capitalist interest, and our whole fiscal system was shaped by this latter power to its own advantage, foreign policy being also made to coincide. We are now come, or are coming fast, to a time when labour laws will be made by the labour interest for the advantage of labour. The regulation of all the conditions of labour by the State, controlled and guided by the labour vote, appears to be the ideal aimed at, and I think it extremely probable that a foreign policy which sought to extend by tariff reforms over our colonies and even over other friendly States the area of profitable barter of produce, will strongly commend itself to the mind of the labour interest. Personally I can discern no cause for alarm in this prospect, and I believe that on this point you and I are in perfect agreement. Labour, in this modern movement, has against it the prejudices of property, the resources of capital, and all the numerous forces—social, professional, and journalistic—which those prejudices and resources can influence.

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.

[S]uppose the town authorities purchased sites of land and erected great buildings such as I hold are suitable for the class that would inhabit them, the land so purchased and the dwellings so built would belong to the people of the town in which the operations took place, because the corporation or the town council is merely the representative of the people and merely distributes the rates and administers the rates they raise for the people; and, owning the houses, would own them in the name of the people, who would be virtually the owner of an enormous proportion of the dwellings in which they lived. (Cheers.) Under these circumstances, gentlemen, you would have no rack-renting, there would be no motive for rack-renting, for the profits which would arise from very moderate rents would be amply sufficient to maintain those buildings in repair, and would leave a margin for new buildings to be erected.

I say, and I say most earnestly, we ought by law to impose upon our local authorities the duty of re-housing the labouring classes within their jurisdiction where the labouring classes are housed in an insanitary, wretched, or improper manner. (Cheers.) We ought to give to the local authorities powers of compulsory purchase of land and of wretched, miserable dwellings... The ground landlords have to my mind so neglected their duties, they have been content to allow their tenants to be so miserably and wretchedly accommodated, they have been content as a rule, though, of course, there are exceptions, merely to fill their own pockets, and I do not think very much mercy or consideration need to be shown to them; and I think as a rule very few years' purchase would be sufficient to purchase out their rights.

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.)

[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.

Balfourism acts like a blister on Ireland and the Irish, and has the bad and good effects which such treatment generally produces. A too protracted application of the blister might do much harm.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

If political parties and political leaders, not only Parliamentary, but local, should be so utterly lost to every feeling and dictate of honour and courage as to hand over coldly, and for the sake of purchasing a short and illusory Parliamentary tranquility, the lives and liberties of the loyalists of Ireland to their hereditary and most bitter foes, make no doubt on this point: Ulster will not be a consenting party; Ulster at the proper moment will resort to the supreme arbitrament of force; Ulster will fight; Ulster will be right; Ulster will emerge from the struggle victorious, because all that Ulster represents to us Britons will command the sympathy and support of an enormous section of our British community, and also, I feel certain, will attract the admiration and the approval of free and civilized nations.

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.