Abuse was retorted on his head in vain. ‘"Yahoo Churchill,"’ ‘Little Randy,’ ‘Cheeky Randy,’ ‘the music-hall cad,’ ‘the Champagne Charley of politics,’ were designations which measured at once his popularity and the rising fury of his foes. His fierce moustache and ‘note of interrogation’ head lent themselves to caricature. He was drawn as a pigmy, a pug dog, a gnat, a wasp, a ribald and vicious monkey, so habitually, that nearly everyone, who had not seen him in the flesh, believed that his physical proportions were far below the common standards of humanity; but the contrast between his reputed stature and the majestic outlines of Mr. Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt only enhanced his fighting qualities in the public eye. ‘Give it ’em hot, Randy,’ cried the crowds in the streets and at the meetings, till he himself was forced to complain that he was expected to salute his opponents with every species of vituperation. But, to tell the truth, he responded to the public demand with inexhaustible generosity. He spared no one. Neither persons nor principles escaped an all-embracing ridicule. The most venerated leaders of the Liberal party, famous in the great days of its rise, fared no better at his hands than the crudest and most violent of the New Radicals. One by one Mr. Bright, Mr. Gladstone, Lord Hartington, Lord Granville, Sir Charles Dilke, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Bradlaugh, and Mr. Schnadhorst were summoned before that irreverent tribunal and exhibited to popular censure and derision.
His speeches were effective far beyond the circles of his hearers. As early as the spring of 1881 the Morning Post began to report him verbatim. Mr. Chenery, always a firm believer in his genius, followed this example almost immediately. Instead of that paragraph of mutilated misrepresentation with which so many eminent Ministers and ex-Ministers have to remain dissatisfied, column after column of the Times was filled with the oratory of an unproved stripling of thirty-two. The remonstrances which jealousy suggested did not discourage Mr. Chenery; for, indeed, Lord Randolph’s speeches were the best of ‘copy.’ His wonderful memory enabled him to make the most elaborate preparations. His earlier speeches were almost all written out beforehand and learned by heart. He had the knack of being able to foresee the occasion and he wrote not an essay or an argument, but just the kind of harangue that would fit the mood of his audience. His style was essentially rhetorical, and much more spontaneous than his peculiar methods of preparation would imply. He seems to have written with scarcely a single correction and without hesitation of any kind, as fast as he could set pen to paper. Indeed, I fancy that he wrote his speeches chiefly for an exercise of memory and to fix them clearly in his mind and did not by any means make them up with a pen in his hand. Once written, they could be repeated almost without notes and quite without alteration. But in this laborious process they gained a logical sequence which, while it did not in the least detract from the delivery, added vastly to their virtues in reproduction.
Above all, they were entirely fresh and original. Wit, abuse, epigrams, imagery, argument—all were ‘Randolphian.’ No one could guess beforehand what he was going to say nor how he would say it. No one else said the same kind of things, or said them in the same kind of way. He possessed the strange quality, unconsciously exerted and not by any means to be simulated, of compelling attention, and of getting himself talked about. Every word he spoke was studied with interest and apprehension. Each step he took was greeted with a gathering chorus of astonished cries. As Tacitus said of Mucianus: ‘Omnium quae dixerat, feceratque, arte quadam ostentator’ (‘He had the showman’s knack of drawing public attention to everything he said or did’). Before the end of 1882 a speech from Lord Randolph Churchill had become an event to the newspaper reader. The worthy, pious, and substantial citizen, hurriedly turning over the pages of his Times or still more respectable Morning Post, and folding it to his convenience, crouched himself in his most comfortable chair and ate it up line by line with snorts of indignation or gurglings of mirth. ‘Look what he says about Gladstone. I wonder the Times prints such things. How lowering to the dignity of public life! I can’t think why they pay so much attention to this young man. Randolph Churchill, indeed—preposterous! Give me the paper back, my dear.’
Speeches are—next to leading articles—the most impermanent of impermanent things. But the character and conceptions of that political movement to the stimulation of which Lord Randolph Churchill devoted his life, and by which he was now to be so swiftly carried forward, cannot be better explained than in his own words; and, moreover, the reader is entitled to have some opportunities of judging for himself. The winter at Blenheim, with its diversions of the Harriers and the Woodstock Railway, seems to have refreshed Lord Randolph’s mind and added to his stores of fancy. He emerged from his retirement to plunge into a vehement political campaign. On three successive days in December he delivered at Edinburgh what he called a ‘trilogy’ of speeches. The first was upon Egypt. Here are its keynotes:—
The Court of Chancery repudiates loans made by money-lenders to infants even though they may have actually received and spent the money. Far more ought this country, acting as a great Court of Equity, to protect the Egyptians in any efforts they may make to free themselves from this frightful burden [of debt] which is strangling the life out of them—these Egyptians whom Sir Evelyn Wood so eloquently calls the infants of centuries: this burden for the contraction of which they are absolutely innocent, forced upon them by the great money-lenders of the Stock Exchanges of London and Paris. The other day the poor Egyptians were very near effecting a successful revolution; they were very near throwing off their suffocating bonds; but, unfortunately for Mr. Gladstone, the Prime Minister of Great Britain—Mr. Gladstone, the leader, the idol, the demi-god of the Liberal party—Mr. Gladstone, the member for Midlothian, came upon them with his armies and his fleets, destroyed their towns, devastated their country, slaughtered their thousands, and flung back these struggling wretches into the morass of oppression, back into the toils of their taskmasters. The revolution of Arabi was the movement of a nation; like all revolutions, it had its good side and its bad; you must never, for purposes of practical politics, criticise too minutely the origin, the authors, or the course of revolutions. Would you undo, if you could, the Revolution of 1688, which drove the Stuarts from the throne, because of the intrigues of the nobles and of the clergy? Would you undo the French Revolution because of the Reign of Terror? Would you undo the Revolution of Naples because Garibaldi might not be altogether a man of your mind? You know you would not; you know that those revolutions were justified by atrocious Governments.
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I advocate, in the first place, the expulsion ‘bag and baggage’ of the Khedive Tewfik, with all ‘his Turks and his Circassians, his Zaptiehs and his Mudirs, his Bimbashis and Yuzbashis, his Kaimakams and his Pashas’[15]—no great number of them in all; two or three ships would hold the lot. I advocate the recall of the exiles from Ceylon, the resuscitation of the national party, the formation of a genuine popular Government, at the head of which shall be placed a Prince—either native or European, as you will—who shall be indeed and in truth constitutional, enlightened, and just. I advocate a great re-arrangement and reduction of the Egyptian national debt and a clean sweep of the debts of the victimised, the bankrupt, and the ruined fellaheen. I advocate the placing of Egypt under the guarantee and guardianship of united Europe, so that no one single Power shall be able to exercise there superior influence to another, so that collective authority shall restrain individual ambition. In a word, I advocate—I plead for—the real emancipation of an historic land and the true freedom of an ancient race.
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You will be told that Egypt is the high-road to India, and that Britain must hold it at all costs. This is a terrible and a widespread delusion. Similar delusions have before now led astray the foreign policy of this country. At one time it was ‘the balance of power’: that has passed away. At another time it was ‘the integrity of the Ottoman Empire’: that has tumbled into an abandoned and forgotten grave; and now we have ‘the high-road to India’ will-o’-the-wisp, which in time will vanish too. Egypt is not the high-road to India. The Suez Canal is a commercial route to India, and a good route, too, in time of peace; but it never was, and never could be, a military route for Great Britain in time of war. In time of war there are no well-marked high-roads to and fro across the British Empire. The path of Britain is upon the ocean, her ways lie upon the deep, and you should avoid as your greatest danger any reliance on transcontinental communication, where, at any time, you may have to encounter gigantic military hosts. (Edinburgh, December 18, 1883.)
The second speech dealt with the question of the extension of the franchise, and must be considered in its place. The third foreshadowed the advent of the Home Rule struggle:—