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 tions, and the ordinarily dull, incommunicative pen of Washington could not kill it.

The general tranquillity with which the public has regarded Washington's private records seems indicated by the fact that his diaries for the important years 1789 to 1791 waited for publication till Benjamin Lossing brought them out in Richmond in 1861. In 1920 Joseph A. Hoskins published at Summerfield, N. C., "President Washington's Diaries, 1791 to 1799," and much of his material then first came into print.

Within the last two years the diaries have been burrowed into twice by men with imagination. In 1923 Mr. Archibald Henderson made a big and handsome book, "Washington's Southern Tour," all in elucidation of diaries which occupy only fifty pages of our fourth volume in telling the story of the first President's first swing around the circle. As indication of the relative novelty of the material, Mr. Henderson notes that "neither Woodrow Wilson nor Henry Cabot Lodge," two of the chief biographers, "even so much as makes mention of the Southern Tour"—which one hopes is an extraordinary instance of historial indolence. In 1925 P. S. Haworth made a fresh attack upon the august sphinx in a book called "George Washington: Country Gentleman," which was based on the Mount Vernon farm journals.

Obviously within the last five years the suspicion has got abroad that those forty or fifty old diaries in the Library of Congress and elsewhere are worth a thorough working over. And yet Editor Fitzpatrick informs us that till the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association of the Union put its fair shoulder to the task "hardly one-sixth of the available record" had been