I am sorry I never got to St. Louis, because I may be too busy to go, for a long time.  But I have been busy all the time and St. Louis is clear out of the way, and remote from the world and all ordinary routes of travel.  You must not place too much weight upon this idea of moving the capital from Washington.  St. Louis is in some respects a better place for it than Washington, though there isn’t more than a toss-up between the two after all.  One is dead and the other in a trance.  Washington is in the centre of population and business, while St. Louis is far removed from both.  And you know there is no geographical centre any more.  The railroads and telegraph have done away with all that.  It is no longer a matter of sufficient importance to be gravely considered by thinking men.  The only centres, now, are narrowed down to those of intelligence, capital and population.  As I said before Washington is the nearest to those and you don’t have to paddle across a river on ferry boats of a pattern popular in the dark ages to get to it, nor have to clamber up vilely paved hills in rascally omnibuses along with a herd of all sorts of people after you are there.  Secondly, the removal of the capital is one of those old, regular, reliable dodges that are the bread-and meat of back country congressmen.  It is agitated every year.  It always has been, it always will be; It is not new in any respect.  Thirdly.  The Capitol has cost $40,000,000 already and lacks a good deal of being finished, yet.  There are single stones in the Treasury building (and a good many of them) that cost twenty-seven thousand dollars apiece—­and millions were spent in the construction of that and the Patent Office and the other great government buildings.  To move to St. Louis, the country must throw away a hundred millions of capital invested in those buildings, and go right to work to spend a hundred millions on new buildings in St. Louis.  Shall we ever have a Congress, a majority of whose members are hopelessly insane?  Probably not.  But it is possible —­unquestionably such a thing is possible.  Only I don’t believe it will happen in our time; and I am satisfied the capital will not be moved until it does happen.  But if St. Louis would donate the ground and the buildings, it would be a different matter.  No, Pamela, I don’t see any good reason to believe you or I will ever see the capital moved.

I have twice instructed the publishers to send you a book—­it was the first thing I did—­long before the proofs were finished.  Write me if it is not yet done.

Livy says we must have you all at our marriage, and I say we can’t.  It will be at Christmas or New Years, when such a trip across the country would be equivalent to murder & arson & everything else.—­And it would cost five hundred dollars—­an amount of money she don’t know the value of now, but will before a year is gone.  She grieves over it, poor little rascal, but it can’t be