Today in History: The Finest Hour Speech

On this day (June Eighteen) in 1940, Winston Churchill addressed the British House of Commons to brace the country for continuing the war against Nazi Germany alone without France. He ended the speech: “But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour."