Bill, the measures for establishing Trade Boards
and Labour Exchanges, the schemes of compulsory and voluntary
assurance, and the Budget. They possess the further characteristic of
describing and commending these proposals as "interdependent" parts of
a large and fruitful plan of Liberal statesmanship. Of this scheme the
Budget is at once the foundation and the most powerful and attractive
feature. If it prospers, the social policy for which it provides
prospers too. If it fails, the policy falls to the ground.

The material of these speeches is therefore of great importance to the
future of democracy in this country. Let me say a word as to their
authorship. To a friendly critic they appear to present not only rare
and highly trained qualities of statement and persuasion, but a unity
and sincerity of thought which give them a place above mere party
dialectics. Mr. Churchill's distinguished service to Liberalism has
not been long in point of years, but it opened with the first speeches
he ever delivered in the House of Commons. No competent observers of
political activities, and of the characters and temperaments which
direct them, can have doubted from the first moment of Mr. Churchill's
appearance on the stage where his moral and intellectual sympathies
lay and whither they would lead him. It is a true and, indeed, an
obvious comment on his career to say that he began where his father
left off--as a Democrat and a Free Trader, and that on these inherited
instincts and tendencies he has built what both his friends and his
enemies expected him to build. Mr. Churchill came to Liberalism from
the same fold as Gladstone, and for the same reason--that it presented
the one field of work open to a political talent of a high stamp, and
to a wide and eager outlook on the future of our social order.
Liberalism and Mr. Churchill have both had good reason to congratulate
themselves on that choice, and the party which failed to draw him into
a disastrous and reactionary change of view has no reason to resent
it. Before he became a Liberal Mr. Churchill had taken the broad views
of the South African problem that his father's later opinions
commended to him, and he was properly chosen to expound to the House
of Commons the plan of self-government that embodied them.

If, therefore, the political groundwork of these speeches is sound
Liberal principle, their meaning and purpose, taken in connection with
the Budget, and the industrial