How much there is to confirm this view in present public opinion and the intellectual character of those who influence it!

It explains all your difficulties at once, and I regret that I do not seem to have mentioned it at any of those mid-day symposia which were so pleasant when you and I were younger.

Ever yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

P.S.—­Apropos of Athelstan Riley and his friends—­I fool rather obliged to them.  I assented to the compromise (1) because I felt that English opinion would not let us have the education of the masses at any cheaper price; (2) because, with the Bible in lay hands, I was satisfied that the teaching from it would gradually become modified into harmony with common sense.

I do not doubt that this is exactly what has happened, and is the ground of the alarm of the orthodox.

But I do not repent of the compromise in the least.  Twenty years of reasonably good primary education is “worth a mass.”

Moreover the Diggleites stand to lose anyhow, and they will lose most completely and finally if they win at the elections this month.  So I am rather inclined to hope they may.

Hodeslea, Staveley Road, Eastbourne, November 3, 1894.

My dear Mr. Clodd,

They say that the first thing an Englishman does when he is hard up for money is to abstain from buying books.  The first thing I do when I am liver-y, lumbagy, and generally short of energy, is to abstain from answering letters.  And I am only just emerging from a good many weeks of that sort of flabbiness and poverty.

Many thanks for your notice of Kidd’s book.  Some vile punsters called it an attempt to put a Kid glove on the iron hand of Nature.  I thought it (I mean the book, not the pun) clever from a literary point of view, and worthless from any other.  You will see that I have been giving Lord Salisbury a Roland for his Oliver in “Nature”.  But, as hinted, if we only had been in Section D!

With my wife’s and my kind regards and remembrances.

Ever yours very truly,

T.H.  Huxley.

Athenaeum Club, December 19, 1894.

My dear Farrer,

I am indebted to you for giving the recording angel less trouble than he might otherwise have had, on account of the worse than usual unpunctuality of the London and Brighton this morning.  For I have utilised the extra time in reading and thinking over your very interesting address.

Thanks for your protest against the mischievous a priori method, which people will not understand is as gross an anachronism in social matters as it would be in Hydrostatics.  The so-called “Sociology” is honeycombed with it, and it is hard to say who are worse, the individualists or the collectivists.  But in your just wrath don’t forget that there is such a thing as a science of social life, for which, if the term had not been so hopelessly degraded, Politics is the proper name.