ABSTRACT
In his early years Churchill’s English side had been uppermost, but from 1917 his growing contacts with sympathetic elements in the United States, straddled him upon a see-saw of conflicting emotions and aspirations from which he was never to escape. As a politician in 1917 he realized that the first flush of his political youth was over. In terms of his father’s life, and of his Spencer-Churchill blood, he was already old. The revolution which filled the vacuum of chaos following the total collapse of Tsarist Russia, and entry of the United States into Europe and the war, changed the whole course of European and world history, and brought mankind inevitably face to face with total disaster. Churchill’s gift for words and love of rhetoric, which held within bounds, had served him well, enabling him to expound his ideas and plead causes with virtuosity, evoking images tending to illuminate rather than to conceal, now too often became jungles of verbiage.
