Accept my best thanks for your very kind present of “Demeter.”  I have not had a Christmas Box I valued so much for many a long year.  I envy your vigour, and am ashamed of myself beside you for being turned out to grass.  I kick up my heels now and then, and have a gallop round the paddock, but it does not come to much.

With best wishes to you, and, if Lady Tennyson has not forgotten me altogether, to her also.

Believe me, yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[A discussion in the “Times” this autumn, in which he joined, was of unexpected moment to him, inasmuch as it was the starting-point for no fewer than four essays in political philosophy, which appeared the following year in the “Nineteenth Century”.

The correspondence referred to arose out of the heckling of Mr. John Morley by one of his constituents at Newcastle in November 1889.  The heckler questioned him concerning private property in land, quoting some early dicta from the “Social Statics” of Mr. Herbert Spencer, which denied the justice of such ownership.  Comments and explanations ensued in the “Times”; Mr. Spencer declared that he had since partly altered that view, showing that contract has in part superseded force as the ground of ownership; and that in any case it referred to the idea of absolute ethics, and not to relative or practical politics.

Huxley entered first into the correspondence to point out present and perilous applications of the absolute in contemporary politics.  Touching on a State guarantee of the title to land, he asks if there is any moral right for confiscation:—­In Ireland, he says, confiscation is justified by the appeal to wrongs inflicted a century ago; in England the theorems of “absolute political ethics” are in danger of being employed to make this generation of land-owners responsible for the misdeeds of William the Conqueror and his followers. ("Times” November 12.)

His remaining share in the discussion consisted of a brief passage of arms with Mr. Spencer on the main question [November 18.], and a reply to another correspondent [November 21.], which brings forward an argument enlarged upon in one of the essays, namely that if the land belongs to all men equally, why should one nation claim one portion rather than another?  For several ownership is just as much an infringement of the world’s ownership as is personal ownership.  Moreover, history shows that land was originally held in several ownership, and that not of the nation, but of the village community.

These signs of renewed vigour induced Mr. Knowles to write him a “begging letter,” proposing an article for the “Nineteenth Century” either in commendation of Bishop Magee’s recent utterances—­it would be fine for eulogy to come from such a quarter after the recent encounter—­or on the general subject of which his “Times” letters dealt with a part.

Huxley’s choice was for the latter.  Writing on November 21, he says:—­]