Prime Ministers' English
England is Here. Selected Speeches and Writings of the Prime Ministers of England, 1721-1943. Edited by W. L. Hanchant. (John Lane. los. 6d.) THIS anthology, as the introduction and explanatory notes show all too plainly, has been chosen and edited more from a literary than from a historical point of view. The result is not very satisfactory. The reader is left with a number of short extracts which fail in most cases to give a clear picture of the speakers or of the age in which they lived or the subjects which they were discussing. It might have been better to have limited the selection to war speeches or to have chosen a single theme such as the defence or extension of civil liberty. On the principles of choice actually adopted, it is difficult to find a common standard of comparison between the obiter dicta of Lord Melbourne, a Quarterly Review article by Lord Salisbury on the necessity of religious belief, a note by Lord Palmerston about the right of access to the grass in public parks, the last speech of Lord Chatham, and a paragraph from one of Disraeli's novels.
Nevertheless, as a miscellany, the collection is interesting. It is true that a good many Prime Ministers were poor speakers, and that some of the finest parliamentary orators—for example, Burke and John Bright—never held the Prime Ministership. On the other hand, for obvious reasons, the average Prime Minister has had some- thing to say, and has known fairly well how to say it. It is also significant that nearly all the speeches ring true (there are exceptions which it would be invidious to name), and that they are not disfigured by forced emotion or empty rhetoric.
For our generation the speeches of the present Prime Minister are outstanding. Indeed, it is likely that two of Mr. Churchill's speeches —those of May 13th and June 4th, 194o—will survive longer than any other speeches or writings of our age. Hence it is worth while analysing the extracts given in the collection. The analysis can be applied to the choice of words, the distribution of stresses and emphasis, and the structure of sentences. One might point out that in the climax of the speech of June 4th—delivered under menace of invasion—there are some 25o words. Two-thirds of these words are monosyllables. The most important sentences . in this climax contain 81 words ; 66 of them are monosyllables, and the word
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