ups downs but always
the sense of motion and the
illusion of hope
But the years 1895 to 1900 which are the staple of this story exceed in vividness, variety and exertion anything I have known—except of course the opening months of the Great War.
When I look back upon them I cannot but return my sincere thanks to the high gods for the gift of existence.
All the days were good and each day better than the other.
Ups and downs, risks and journeys, but always the sense of motion, and the illusion of hope.
Come on now all you young men, all over the world.
You are needed more than ever now to fill the gap of a generation shorn by the War.
You have not an hour to lose. You must take your places in life’s fighting line.
Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years!
Don’t be content with things as they are.
‘The earth is yours and the fulness thereof’.
Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities.
Raise the glorious flags again, advance them upon the new enemies, who constantly gather upon the front of the human army, and have only to be assaulted to be overthrown.
Don’t take No for an answer.
Never submit to failure.
Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance.
You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.
She was made to be wooed and won by youth.
She has lived and thrived only by repeated subjugations.
From My Early Life. A Roving Commission by Winston Churchill (London: Thornton Butterworth, September 1931).
Twenty to twenty-five! These are the years!
Enter upon your inheritance, accept your responsibilities.
Never submit to failure.
Do not be fobbed off with mere personal success or acceptance.
Is this not possibly the best GraduationAddress ever made?
This was Winston Churchill looking back in 1931 to a time when he was 25.
Looking back.
Spent the holiday with the kids and grand kids.
And I thought about this speech and I thought about young people who are growing up today.
I can look back to a time when I thought Twenty to twenty-five! Those are the years!
But what the kids too young to look back.
Those kids who grew up in this day and age and feel that this day and age is the norm.
They have no clue to how it was before the darkness started.
I hope they have a future to look forward to because these days are not much worth being excited about.
I am reminded of this passage from the book, 1984, where George Orwell writes:
” … it occurred to him that the old man, who must be eighty at the least, had already been middle-aged when the Revolution happened.
He and a few others like him were the last links that now existed with the vanished world of capitalism.
In the Party itself there were not many people left whose ideas had been formed before the Revolution.
The older generation had mostly been wiped out in the great purges of the Fifties and Sixties, and the few who survived had long ago been terrified into complete intellectual surrender.
If there was anyone still alive who could give you a truthful account of conditions in the early part of the century, it could only be a prole.
Suddenly the passage from the history book that he had copied into his diary came back into Winston’s mind, and a lunatic impulse took hold of him.
He would go into the pub, he would scrape acquaintance with that old man and question him.
He would say to him:
“Tell me about your life when you were a boy.
What was it like in those days?
Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?”
“Tell me about your life when you were a boy. What was it like in those days? Were things better than they are now, or were they worse?”
Echoes deep into my toes.
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