Winston Churchill's Birthday

The Llamas break out the pull-crackers in honor of the day.

A Churchill exhibition page at the Library of Congress provides the fine picture above of Winnie with Kaiser Bill in 1909. Somewhere, Otto Clemson Hiss is smiling.

The Library of Congress exhibit also recalls Churchill's trials over Constantinople (where the pope today presses a campaign of his own), and Theodore Roosevelt's underwhelmed reaction in 1900 on meeting the brash young Churchill, whom TR sized up as "a rather cheap character."

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I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.

Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'

-- Winston Churchill, June 18, 1940