I feel and always have felt ambitious to establish some more popular and rational kind of society than is usual in London.  But the difficulty in our position would be to limit the numbers:  however, limiting the hours would help to do this; and I do not think one need be very brilliant or agreeable oneself to make such a thing succeed well.  But what a foolish presumptuous being I am, lying here on my sofa, not even able to share in the quiet amusements of Minto, making schemes for the entertainment of all the London world!  However, these dreams and others of a more serious nature as to my future life, if God should restore me to health, help to while away my hours of separation from you, and make me forget for awhile how long I have been debarred from fulfilling my natural duties, either to you, the children, or the world.  This, believe me, is the hardest of the many hard trials that belong to illness, or at least, such an illness as mine, in which I have mercifully but little physical suffering.

    Lady John Russell to Lady Mary Abercromby

    MINTO, March 1, 1846

What pleasant times we live in, when the triumph of right principles brings about one great and peaceful change after another in our country; each one (this from Free Trade in a great degree) promising an increase of happiness and diminution of war and bloodshed to the whole world.  No doubt, however, its good effects will be but slowly perceived, and I fear there is much disappointment in store for the millions of poor labourers, who expect to have abundance of food and clothing the moment the Bill becomes a law.  Poor creatures, their state is most deplorable and haunts me day and night.  The very best of Poor Laws must be quite insufficient.  Indeed, wherever there is a necessity for a Poor Law at all there must be something wrong, I think; for if each proprietor, farmer and clergyman did his duty there would be no misery, and if they do not, no Poor Law can prevent it.  You cannot think how I long for a few acres of our own, in order to know and do what little I could for the poor round us.  It would not lessen one’s deep pity for the many in all other parts of the country, but one’s own conscience would be relieved from what, rightly or wrongly, I now feel as a weight upon it; and without a permanent residence one does not become really acquainted with poor people in their prosperity as well as adversity; one only does a desultory unsatisfactory sort of good.  I have not seen Dickens’s letter about the ragged schools of which you speak.  What you say of the devotion of the Roman Catholic priests to the charities of religion reflects shame on ours of a purer faith, but is what I have always supposed.  The Puseyites are most like them in that as well as in their mischievous doctrines; but then a new sect is always zealous for good as well as for evil.

    Lord John to Lady John Russell