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Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was born thirty-two years ago,
in November, 1874. By birth he is half-American. His father was
Lord Randolph Churchill, and his mother was Jennie Jerome, of
New York. On the father's side he is the grandchild of the seventh
Duke of Marlborough, on the distaff side, of Leonard Jerome.
To a student of heredity it would be interesting to try and discover
from which of these ancestors Churchill drew those qualities
which in him are most prominent, and which have led to his
success.
What he owes to his father and mother it is difficult to
overestimate, almost as difficult as to overestimate what he has
accomplished by his own efforts.
He was not a child born a full-grown genius of commonplace
parents. Rather his fate threatened that he should always be known
as the son of his father. And certainly it was asking much of a boy
that he should live up to a father who was one of the most
conspicuous, clever, and erratic statesmen of the later Victorian
era, and a mother who is as brilliant as she is beautiful.
For at no time was the American wife content to be merely
ornamental. Throughout the political career of her husband she
was his helpmate, and as an officer of the Primrose League, as an
editor of the _Anglo-Saxon Review_, as, for many hot, weary
months in Durban Harbor, the head of the hospital ship _Maine_,
she has shown an acute mind and real executive power.
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