70

In London this week one of the very few living men of whom it could be said without question: He is a great man, celebrated a birthday. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was 70.

Three years before Churchill was born, Bismarck made the German Empire Europe's No. 1 power by defeating France. This same year, and as a result of the same war, Paris gave Europe the first example of a new revolutionary political form--the commune or soviet.

During the whole course of Churchill's life, Britain had been engaged in a hidden or open life & death struggle with Germany. In World War I the struggle had bled Britain white. In World War II Britain had had her closest squeak since Napoleon. More than any other single man, Winston Churchill had saved the Empire and in doing so had saved Western civilization. But there had been a price.

Now, as the Organizer of Victory looked toward Europe, he could not but feel: well done. Europe's No. 1 power was all but crushed. But that crushing had brought forth a new power in Europe. In the mighty form of Russia, the commune--the second of those political fates that stood near Winston Churchill's cradle--had emerged as a potential power such as Germany could never have hoped to be. Russia embodied a new form of social, economic and political organization--Socialism. Already most of Europe had felt her influence, as the heavings and threshings in the liberated countries clearly showed. And she was a vast Asiatic power. The mass of Russia in Asia weighed down upon the whole long northern line of Britain in Asia.

What did Russia portend for Britain and the world? Winston Churchill had invested heavily in the belief that Russia wanted and needed at least a generation of peace. Beyond that he could scarcely go. Even before that time had elapsed, Winston Churchill's task would have passed into other hands: "The old order changeth, yielding place to new--new faces, other minds."

For the present, the world might well say of him what he had said of his friend, South Africa's Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts: "The great General Smuts . . . that wonderful man with his ... eyes watching from the distance the whole panorama of European affairs, does well deserve our gratitude."

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