The young Churchill at his most radical: President of the Board of Trade, not yet thirty-five, a dynamo of Asquith's reforming government. The volume gathers twenty-one platform speeches of 1906–1909 — on unemployment insurance, labour exchanges, the People's Budget, imperial preference and the conciliation of South Africa — through which Churchill, with Lloyd George, laid the foundations of the modern welfare state.

Its argument is the case for the New Liberalism as a middle way: the state should, in his image, "spread a net over the abyss," insuring the worker against unemployment and old age without extinguishing individual enterprise. In his Dundee speech of 14 December 1908 — printed here at page 155 — Churchill draws the sharpest line between the two creeds: "Socialism seeks to pull down wealth; Liberalism seeks to raise up poverty… Socialism exalts the rule; Liberalism exalts the man" — among the most-quoted formulations of Edwardian Liberalism [Hillsdale College, The Churchill Project, ed. R. Langworth]. Read beside his later career, the book records the social conscience a Conservative prime minister never wholly abandoned.

The historian Henry Pelling judged the reforming Churchill of these years "equalled only by Lloyd George" among his contemporaries in his capacity to diagnose and treat the worst social evils of the day — so that, even had his career ended in 1914, he would rank among the architects of the British welfare state [Pelling, Churchill, 128–29].

One of approximately 3,537 copies of the British first edition [Cohen A29.1.a]; the total printing was about 4,000, the remaining 465 constituting the separate American issue of 1910 [Peter Harrington]. Its survival rate is markedly lower than for Churchill's earlier books of travel and war — genuinely scarce in the first edition. Churchill's third book of speeches, following Mr. Brodrick's Army (1903) and For Free Trade (1906).

Octavo (pp. xxiv, 414 — 438 pages in all). Original burgundy cloth, spine and front board lettered in gilt, with Churchill's gilt-stamped facsimile signature to the front board. Published 26 December 1909 at 3s. 6d.

Very good to near-fine, and a genuine first printing (title-page imprint MCMIX, without the "Second Edition" notation of the later issue). Original red cloth with the gilt facsimile signature to the front board; slight rubbing and creasing to the cloth at the extremities and light toning to the spine; scattered foxing to the title page and preliminary leaves; the text otherwise clean and sound. A very presentable copy of a scarce first edition, without the (almost unobtainable) dust jacket.

REFERENCES

Cohen A29.1(a); Woods/ICS A15(a); Langworth p. 92