Your long interesting letter is most welcome.  You are very good and brave to do so much for the good of others, while suffering yourself.  How much harder it is to bear patiently, and keep up sympathy and fellow-feeling within us in spite of illness, than to do any amount of active work while in health.  I always find my highest examples in those who know how to “suffer and be strong,” because it is my own greatest difficulty.

Oh, my dear child, what opinions can poor I give on the almost insoluble problems you put before me?  I wish I knew of any book or any man or woman who could tell me whether a Poor Law, even the very best, is on the whole a blessing or a curse, and how the “unemployed” can be chosen out for work of any useful or productive kind without injury to others equally deserving, and what are the just limits of State interference with personal liberty.  The House of Lords puzzles me less.  I would simply declare it, by Act of the House of Commons, injurious to the best interests of the nation and for ever dissolved.  Then it may either show its attachment to the Constitution by giving its assent to its own annihilation, or oblige us to break through the worn-out Constitution and declare their assent unnecessary.  It is beyond all bearing that one great measure after another should be delayed, or mutilated, year after year, by such a body, and I chafe and fret inwardly to a painful degree.  Oh for a long talk with you!  I will not despair of going to you, “gin I be spared” till the days are reasonably long.

    Lady Russell to Lady Agatha Russell

    PEMBROKE LODGE, October 10, 1894

...  Alas! for our dear Oliver Wendell Holmes!  He has left the world much the poorer by his death, but much the richer by his life and works....  Lord Grey gone too, and with him what recollections of my young days, before and after marriage, when he and Lady Grey and we were very much together.  We loved them both.  He was a very trying political colleague to your father and others, but a very faithful friend.  The longer I live the more firmly I am convinced that in most cases to know people well is to like them—­to forget their faults in their merits.  But no doubt it is delightful to have no faults to forget.

    PEMBROKE LODGE, March 3, 1894

Touching accounts of meeting of the Cabinet—­the last with dear noble old Gladstone as Minister.  Tears in the eyes of his colleagues.  He made his last speech as Minister in the House of Commons, a grand and stirring one.

    PEMBROKE LODGE, January 23, 1895