The Henson Journals

[358]

Thursday, February 10th, 1927.

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["]In the Middle Ages there had been liberties but no liberty – that is, there were clear liberties of the lords, the squires, the citizens and the clergy, but there was no liberty common to these four classes. From this angle, there were estates, but there was no State, no body uniting all living on the same soil.["]

R. H. Murray, "The Political Consequences of the Reformation", p. 15

The modern world seems to be returning to medieval conditions, exchanging the liberty of the private citizens [sic] for the autonomy of the associations to which he must needs belong.

Old Mr Holliday, Vicar of Hamsterley, where he has held office for some 22 years, and is now 74 years old, came to see me with respect to his resignation. I told him to take a week to think over the matter, and then, if he decided to resign, I would approve & issue a Commission to assign a pension. The living is in my gift. There is a net income of £350, and a population of 77. Holliday & his wife stayed to lunch.

Then I walked round the Park. Young Christopher Dawson, a pleasant lad of 16, who was riding, had some talk with me.

I received from my bookseller a book which is highly commended by the Times reviewer. Bolshevist Russia by Anton Karlgren, Professor of Slav [sic] at the University of Copenhagen, translated from the Swedish by Anna Barwell. In a short "Foreword", the Author states that "from 1904 to 1916 he visited the country every year", and that "for some months in 1924 he has studied conditions on the spot during a visit to Russia which tended considerably to modify his former conception of Soviet Russia". He must have been in Russia about the time when the British Trade Union Delegation visited the country, and his account will form some kind of a standard by which to appraise theirs. It is certainly a very severe condemnation of Bolshevism from the point of view of practical statesmanship.

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