Also read the speech of Lord Hartington on the address.  He is a man of sense like his father, and you will observe that he declares that the Government were perfectly within their right in declaring war without calling Parliament together...

If you had lived as long as I have and seen as much of men, you would cease to be surprised at the reputations men of essentially commonplace powers—­aided by circumstances and some amount of cleverness—­obtain.

I am as strong for justice as any one can be, but it is real justice, not sham conventional justice which the sentimentalists howl for.

At this present time real justice requires that the power of England should be used to maintain order and introduce civilisation wherever that power extends.

The Afghans are a pack of disorderly treacherous blood-thirsty thieves and caterans who should never have been allowed to escape from the heavy hand we laid upon them, after the massacre of twenty thousand of our men, women, and children in the Khoord Cabul Pass thirty years ago.

We have let them be, and the consequence is they now lend themselves to the Russians, and are ready to stir up disorder and undo all the good we have been doing in India for the last generation.

They are to India exactly what the Highlanders of Scotland were to the Lowlanders before 1745; and we have just as much right to deal with them in the same way.

I am of opinion that our Indian Empire is a curse to us.  But so long as we make up our minds to hold it, we must also make up our minds to do those things which are needful to hold it effectually, and in the long run it will be found that so doing is real justice both for ourselves, our subject population, and the Afghans themselves.

There, you plague.

Ever your affectionate Daddy,

T.H.  Huxley.

[A few days later he writes to his son:—­]

The Liberals are making fools of themselves, and “the family” declare I am becoming a Jingo! another speech from Gladstone is expected to complete my conversion.

[Among other occupations he still had to attend the Scottish Universities Commission, for which he wrote the paragraph on examinations in its report; he lectured on the Hand at the Working Men’s College; prepared new editions of the “Physiography,” “Elementary Physiology,” and “Vertebrate Anatomy,” and at length brought out the “Introductory Primer” in the Science Primer Series, in quite a different form from what he had originally sketched out.  But his chief interest lay in the Invertebrata.  From April 29 to June 3 he lectured to working men at Jermyn Street upon the Crayfish; read a paper on the Classification and Distribution of Crayfishes at the Zoological Society on June 4, and lectured at the Zoological Gardens weekly from May 17 to June 21 on Crustaceous Animals.  In all this work lay the foundations of his subsequent book on the Crayfish,