Benjamin Franklin was a shrewd, excellent, kindly man.  I have a great respect for him.  The force of genial common-sense respectability could no further go.  George Fox was the very antipodes of all this, and yet one understands how he came to move the world of his day, and Franklin did not.

As to whether we can all fulfil the moral law, I should say hardly any of us.  Some of us are utterly incapable of fulfilling its plainest dictates.  As there are men born physically cripples, and intellectually idiots, so there are some who are moral cripples and idiots, and can be kept straight not even by punishment.  For these people there is nothing but shutting up, or extirpation.

I am, yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The peaceful aspect of the “Irenicon” seems to have veiled to most readers the unbroken nature of his defence, and he writes to his son-in-law, the Hon. John Collier, suggesting an alteration in the title of the essay:—­]

Hodeslea, Eastbourne, November 8, 1892.

My dear Jack,

It is delightful to find a reader who “twigs” every point as acutely as your brother has done.  I told somebody—­was it you?—­I rather wished the printer would substitute o for e in Irenicon.  So far as I have seen any notices, the British critic (what a dull ass he is) appears to have been seriously struck by my sweetness of temper.

I sent you the article yesterday, so you will judge for yourself.

With love, ever yours affectionately,

T.H.  Huxley.

You should see the place I am claiming for Art in the University.  I do believe something will grow out of my plan, which has made all the dry bones rattle.  It is coming on for discussion in the Senate, and I shall be coming to you to have my wounds dressed after the fight.  Don’t know the day yet.

[This allusion to the place of Art in the University refers to the proposed reorganisation of the London University.

Since the year 1887 the question of establishing a Teaching University for London had become more and more pressing.  London contained many isolated teaching bodies of various kinds—­University College, King’s College, the Royal College of Science, the Medical Schools, Bedford College, and so forth, while the London University was only an examining body.  Clearly these scattered bodies needed organising; the educational forces of the metropolis were disintegrated; much teaching—­and this was especially true of the medical schools—­that could have been better done and better paid in a single institution, was split up among several, none of which, perhaps, could offer sufficient inducement to keep the best men permanently.

The most burning question was, whether these bodies should be united into a new university, with power to grant degrees of its own, or should combine with the existing University of London, so that the latter would become a teaching as well as an examining body.  And if so, there was the additional question as to the form which this combination should take—­whether federation, for example, or absorption.