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. At the
polls many votes that would not respond to the arguments of the
husband, and later of the son, were gained over to the cause by the
charm and wit of the American woman.

In his earlier days, if one can have days any earlier than those he
now enjoys, Churchill was entirely influenced by two things: the
tremendous admiration he felt for his father, which filled him with
ambition to follow in his orbit, and the camaraderie of his mother,
who treated him less like a mother than a sister and companion.

Indeed, Churchill was always so precocious that I cannot recall the
time when he was young enough to be Lady Randolph's son;