The seven tests

Is there the right to free expression of opinion and of opposition and criticism of the Government of the day?

Have the people the right to turn out a Government of which they disapprove, and are constitutional means provided by which they can make their will apparent?

Are there courts of justice free from violence by the Executive and from threats of mob violence, and free from all association with particular political Parties?

Will these courts administer open and well-established laws which are associated in the human mind with the broad principles of decency and justice?

Will there be fair play for poor as well as for rich, for private persons as well as Government officials?

[And] will the rights of the individual, subject to his duties to the State, be maintained and asserted and exalted?

Is the ordinary peasant or workman, who is earning a living by daily toil and striving to bring up a family free from the fear that some grim police organization under the control of a single party, like the Gestapo, started by the Nazi and Fascist parties, will tap him on the shoulder and pack him off without fair or open trial to bondage or ill-treatment?

“These simple, practical tests,”

Churchill continued, must be “the title-deeds” of a new Italy.

Think of the years of experience, thought, and hard political lessons that went into those basic tenets. How Churchill expressed them in only 200 words, mostly of one or two syllables. How little we consider them today, when we rail over “threats to democracy”—whether from one side or the other. Or, conversely, when we blithely suppose certain nations to be free. How rarely we apply those questions in our own times.

Churchill’s Tests of Freedom remain evergreen. Sadly, in what seems to be a growing number of places, they answer themselves.

Related articles

“Churchill on Duty: Representatives of the People Please Note,” 2023.

“A Life Devoted to Constitutional Liberty,” 2021.

“Antithesis of Democracy (Or: Winston Churchill and Portland),” 2020.

“When Presidents and Prime Ministers Would Walk Among Us,” 2018.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” I see this alleged Churchill quotation often. I have tried to locate the source of that quote, but I have not been able to trace it. Is it genuine, and if so, where and when did he say it? —D.C., Bogotá, Colombia

A: Famous but unoriginal

He said it (House of Commons, 11 November 1947)—but he was quoting an unknown predecessor (note bold face below). Credit Churchill as publicist for an unsourced aphorism. From Churchill by Himself, 574:

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…

So, although these are Churchill’s words, he clearly did not originate the famous quip about democracy. William F. Buckley, Jr. reminded us similarly: “We are made to ask what it is that political democracy gives us. The system is utilitarian. But is it a fit object of faith and hope?”

Democracy: some WSC originals

Here are some original words (also in Churchill by Himself) that Churchill himself did say about democracy. They are of his own making—and from an early age:

If I had to sum up the immediate future of democratic politics in a single word I should say “insurance.” That is the future—insurance against dangers from abroad, insurance against dangers scarcely less grave and much more near and constant which threaten us here at home in our own island. —Free Trade Hall, Manchester, 23 May 1909

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper—no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of that point. —House of Commons, 31 October 1944

Understanding the word

How is that word “democracy” to be interpreted? My idea of it is that the plain, humble, common man, just the ordinary man who keeps a wife and family, who goes off to fight for his country when it is in trouble, goes to the poll at the appropriate time, and puts his cross on the ballot paper showing the candidate he wishes to be elected to Parliament—that he is the foundation of democracy.

And it is also essential to this foundation that this man or woman should do this without fear, and without any form of intimidation or victimization. He marks his ballot paper in strict secrecy, and then elected representatives and together decide what government, or even in times of stress, what form of government they wish to have in their country. If that is democracy, I salute it. I espouse it. I would work for it.” —House of Commons, 8 December 1944