Excerpt from Twenty-Five Years of Massachusetts Politics: From Russell to McCall, 1890-1915
There is a common saying that the history of which each man knows least is that which covers the period immediately preceding his own birth, for it has not yet been written and he can learn nothing about it except from the memory of his elders. Those years, indeed, have joined the long procession of their predecessors, but the time has not arrived to recount their story in enduring form and so there is a gulf between the point at which our history, biography and memoirs cease to tell us of the past, and the present which is actually before our eyes.
A book like Mr. Hennessy's, therefore, has both value and usefulness, because it contains a great array of facts, carefully verified and clearly arranged, which it is almost impossible for any man readily to find without, in many cases at least, great labor and research. But Mr. Hennessy's book is much more than this - far more than a compilation of facts and figures. It gives the impressions made upon a trained observer of politics, and of the men engaged in them, during a quarter of a century.
Although it professes to deal only with Massachusetts, in following the fortunes of the State one is led insensibly and necessarily into the wider fields of national elections and of national campaigns. Mr. Hennessy has made good use of all his opportunities and with practiced hand, and a keen interest in his subject gives us not only a picture of the time which he depicts, and which will always be of value as the impression of one who was both chronicler and critic from day to day, but he also offers us brief and well drawn sketches of the men who have been conspicuous in the public life of the State, portraits which possess all the vividness that springs from personal acquaintance and careful observation.
For those who come after us it is always well to learn, in Browning's words, "how it strikes a contemporary," and when the history of Massachusetts during the last twenty-five years shall be written by some historian still unborn he will find Mr. Hennessy's book not only one of his best authorities but the attraction of the personal note, inseparate from the man who describes events of which he was a part.
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