Transactions of the Royal Historical Society: Presidential Address

Extract

You have honoured with your presidency this year not a leisured man, who is capable of making a serene survey of all historical work done during the last twelve months, but a very busy Government servant, whose duties keep him tight to desks (three separate desks!) in Whitehall from 10.30 a.m. to 8 p.m. on most days of the week, and who must confess to you with all frankness that he has read little historical literature during the past year, save the single volume of Magna Charta Essays, Which is this Society's most important contribution in the fields of research for 1918. Your President, therefore, feels some diffidence on coming before you to-day with an annual address, when he remembers that the last of the series was delivered in February 1917 by a master of research and expression, a great teacher, and a trainer of other teachers, who possesses such a command of a long period of English History as does no other man living, and whom every member of the Society respects and reveres as the unquestioned lord of his own domain. His enthusiasm for the systematic gathering of knowledge, and his power of orderly marshalling of the essential facts, makes his successor feel a proper humility as he takes over the chair that has been so efficiently filled during the last three years.