try. I have not yet
had any news about my move to the Gunners, but the application
has only been in a comparatively short time, and these things
have to take their course. I know that my application was duly
forwarded and recommended by my C.O. to the Divisional
authorities. I shall be very much surprised if I don't get the
transfer. By Jove! if I only can. You cannot imagine anyone being
so fed up with anything as I am with my present job. Loathing is
not the word for the feeling with which I regard it.

I am reading Burke on the French Revolution. It is brilliant
writing, to be sure, but Burke is too biased and has not complete
knowledge of his subject. You would think from the way he writes
that the "Ancien Regime" was an ideal system of government which
brought to France nothing but prosperity! Had he possessed the
knowledge of Arthur Young, who had examined social and economic
conditions in France with piercing eyes, he would doubtless have
modified his views. Moreover, Burke forgets the maxim he himself
laid down in his speeches on the American Revolution--that large
masses of men do not, as a rule, rebel without some reason for so
doing. It seems to me that Burke's heart and his inborn
prejudices have run away with his head. Though he scoffs at
people who try to work out systems of government on the lines of
idealism, yet his own views are often purely idealistic,
especially on the subject of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, whom
he apparently regarded as a pair of demigods!

The style of the book is splendidly oratorical, sometimes too
much so, but there are passages in it which it would be difficult
to match even in the splendid realm of English prose--for
example, his great panegyric on the State. On England, too, he is
very fine. Many people to-day might do worse than read his
defence of the British Constitution, though I personally disagree
with some points in his argument. One sentence from this passage
might be addressed to our Allies very appropriately
to-day--"Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the
field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of
great cattle reposing beneath the shadow of the British oak chew
the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make
the noise are the on