The Henson Journals

[72]

Wednesday, July 23rd, 1919.

I continued in bed until noon, & then got up. Ella went off to Ross to open a Baby–show there: and I entertained the Archdeacon & Sir Richard Harington at lunch, & then went to a meeting of the Preventive & Rescue Association, where I made a speech. Then I returned to the Palace, & wrote the article on Prohibition for the Sunday Pictorial.

The news from the coal–fields grows ever more serious. It is hardly credible but it is the case that the miners are doing to the Yorkshire mines the very same injuries as the Germans, amid universal execrations, inflicted on the mines in France. We are actually imposing on ourselves the losses which an invasion would have imposed! There seems as yet to be no means of bringing the miners to their senses. Indeed, it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the 'Bolshevik' poison has penetrated farther than we had supposed possible, and that the dislocation & loss to the nation caused by the strikes are directly intended by the strikers, under the fatuous notion that they are the indispensable price of that desired & desirable goal of Revolution, which they have been encouraged to contemplate as the sovereign remedy for all the ills – economical, social, political – of which they complain!

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