The Henson Journals

[2]

Monday, September 8th, 1924.

I wrote a short Preface to the Charge, and arranged the Appendices. The horrid thing is now ready for the publishers. After lunch I played bowls with Ernest.

Edmund Parker arrived in his car on a visit. He has recently returned from America, and gives a very unfavourable account of Prohibition. He says that youths and girls are taking to whisky drinking.

The weather today was brilliant until night fall when it became wet and stormy.

Pollard is a very illuminating writer. He has the art of saying things in a way which really throws light on them. What, for instance, could be more informing than the following? It [2] shows at a glance the salient fact about the French Revolution viz: that is destroyed so much and changed so little:–

"The French Revolution was a high jump rather than a long jump: & the French people, in spite of their determination to cut themselves off the soil on which they had grown, came down from their leap not very far from where they started. The real progress of man often varies inversely with the noise it makes in the world, and with the attention it receives from historians".

(v. Factors in Modern History p. 33. Every page of this book is full of good things.)

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