9 - Churchill

Summary

‘The security of property depends upon its wide diffusion among great numbers and all classes of the population, and it becomes more secure year by year because it is gradually being more widely distributed. In distributing new burdens, a Government should have regard first of all to ability to pay and, secondly … should make a sensible difference between wealth which is the fruit of productive enterprise and industry or of individual skill, and wealth which represents the capture by individuals of socially created values.’

W. S. Churchill Liberalism and the Social Problem 1909 pp. 395–6.

‘During the forty-two years he was Duke of Marlborough the organism of English society underwent a complete revolution. The three or four hundred families which had for three or four hundred years guided the fortunes of the nation from a small, struggling community to the headship of a vast and still unconquered Empire lost their authority and control. They became merged peacefully, insensibly, without bloodshed or strife, in a much more powerful but less coherent form of national consciousness; and the class to which the late Duke belonged were not only almost entirely relieved of their political responsibilities, but they were to a very large extent stripped of their property and in many cases driven from their homes. This process may well be judged inevitable and by some people salutary. But it cast a depressing shadow upon the Duke of Marlborough's life.