BR TO W.W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC. / WARDER NORTON, 21 JAN. 1932
BRACERS 47025. TLS. Norton papers, Columbia U.
Proofread by A. Duncan

<letterhead>
Telegraph House,
Harting, Petersfield1
21st January 1932

Dear Norton,

I have had a letter from A.S. Neill, enclosing yours about his book. I find he is willing to omit the passages on medical matters which gave offence to your medical orthodoxy. Would this make any difference to your decision not to print the book? He has not authorized me to approach you again, but I told him on my own account that I thought he should not complicate his position in America by medical heresies.

I am thinking about the book that I am to do for you. I think it should be called “The Disruption of the Nineteenth Century”. I have been reading Bismarck’s life, and find him a cheery old ruffian. When the doctors told him that he was in danger of death, he replied: “Oh no, a man shouldn’t die until he has smoked a hundred thousand cigars and drunk five thousand bottles of champagne.” I do not think there is anything equally amiable to be discovered about Rockefeller.

Everybody I talk to, on no matter what subject, assures me that things will be much worse after March. Somehow or other everything is going to begin to happen then, as in the end of the story of the old woman whose pig wouldn’t go over the stile! Meanwhile we rub along.

Yours in the interim,
Bertrand Russell.

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