CANNES, January 6, 1872

MY DEAREST NINA,—­Your New Year’s Day letter shows that you write as well as a volunteer as on compulsion....  I am sorry to have annoyed Maggie by my allusion to the Hertfordshire incumbent.  Here is my case.  Sixty-three years ago my father, with others founded a Society to teach the Bible to young boys and girls, which they called “Schools for all.”  One should have thought there was no harm in the project, and that they might have been left alone.  Not so.  The clergy were furious.  Sixty years ago they founded the National Society, and ever since they have libelled our schools....  Last year or the year before the H.I. [Hertfordshire Incumbent] attacked my proposals.  I left him alone, but I carried the day, and excluded formularies from schools provided by rates.  Still the bishops and clergy fulminate against us, shut out Baptists from the schools where they have influence, and declaim against us.  Now I happen to have a great respect for the Bible, and while I have life will not cease to defend our Bible schools.  You will say, if I do not, that in time the world will come round to Christianity, which is at a low ebb at present.  Men will understand at last that they ought to love God and to love their neighbour as themselves, not to steal, or commit murder, or cheat their neighbours.  The Athanasian Creed is making a pretty hubbub.  It was invented as a substitute for Christianity, and taken from Aristotle....

    Ever yours affectionately,

    RUSSELL

    Lady Russell to Lady Dunfermline

    CANNES, November 29, 1871

What is to be the result of the Republican ferment in our country?  It may not be widespread, and it certainly hardly exists above the working classes, yet I feel that the germ is there—­and who can say how far it is doomed to flourish, or whether it will die away....  Ours has been so free and independent and prosperous a nation, that the notion of any fundamental change in the Constitution is awful.  Yet when we boast of our freedom and prosperity we should not forget the enormous mass of misery, vice, filth, and all evil which disgraces all our large towns—­nor the brutish ignorance and apathy which pervades much of our rural population.  And it is well worth the most earnest thought and study, on the part of all Englishmen and women, to find out whether our form of government has or has not any share of the blame and to act accordingly.  I have great confidence in the British people.  They have never liked hasty, ill-considered changes; they hate revolution; and I hope I am not too trustful in believing that we shall go on in the wise and the right path, whatever that may be, and in spite of the freaks and follies of many a man whose aims are more selfish than patriotic.

While at Cannes Lord and Lady Russell saw a great deal of Princess Christian, who was living near them, and was in great anxiety and sorrow about the illness of her brother, the Prince of Wales, who nearly died in December, 1871.  His illness was the occasion of a display of loyalty and sympathy from thousands of British subjects.  Lady Russell received the following reply to a letter she wrote from Cannes to the Queen: