"[T]he splendid leadership he gave this country and the Commonwealth from the moment he became Prime Minister in the Second World War—a leadership which not only saved the freedom and genius of Europe's most civilised peoples from eclipse, but also carried Britain triumphant with no more than a third of her former sacrifice of life through a Second World War half as long again as the First... Not one, in fact, of the great Englishmen who have possessed the priceless combination of political and military sense...has surpassed Churchill in the distinctive genius for statesmanship in peace and war on which the greatness of this little island has been built, namely, an infallible instinct for the balance of power indispensable to its security, alertness to any threatened disturbance of that balance however far ahead, and imaginative resource, when the balance has been disturbed, in righting it by the most effective and economical use of our always inadequate strength. It is due, I repeat, to this, the dominant element in his genius, that Western Europe is not at this moment a dependency of either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia."