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than you have to sign my name on a check or I yours. There is no
darkness save ignorance."
March 8, 1942. Gold:
". . . Arthur Golding's namesake and four generations over
descendant, points out that even in the time of Queen Elizabeth,
the Earl of Oxford was fallen. He was handing over his rents to
some shyster in return for a fixed income. Ten thousand, or whatever
it was, a year, and then the shyster had to squeeze what he
could out of the peasants and out of men working the land. The
return of the feudal system. Old Fordie used to talk about that.
Liberty is not a right but a duty. Rot and laziness got men under,
too lazy to function as lords and proprietors. The nobility sold out
to the shysters. In my twelve years in London, how many people
did I meet, I was meeting, as you might say, the flower of the
writing class in your island. How many people did I meet who had
read their own history? How many who had read Anthony
Trollope?"
March 19, 1942. Time Lag:
". . . Now if American students will recognize that universities
are there to prepare students for life in a given country, and in a
given time and insist on finding out what will happen to life in
that place and time, they can get their four years' work [worth?].
Nobody can do this for those students, they have got to do it for
themselves. Ma Hopkins on one end of the log, and the students
on the other. When Abe Lard [sic. transcriber] was kicked out of
the University of Paris, five thousand students followed him out
into the country. There were no dormitories or million-dollar
gymnasiums. That is the sort of thing that builds the revival of
learning, or intellectual re-birth."
March 30, 1942. Pattern:
"The place to defend the American heritage is on the American
continent and no man who had any part in helping Franklin D.
Roosevelt to spill out—get the United States into it—has enough
sense to win anything. If Roosevelt were not below the biological
level at which the concept of honor enters the mind, below the