To the Same.
SHEFFIELD, March 12, 1866.
MY DEAR FRIEND,--I should like to know whether you propose, from
your own pen, to provide me with all my reading. Look which way I
will,--towards the "Inquirer," the "Monthly," or the "Examiner,"--and
H. W. B. is coming at me with an article, and sometimes with both
hands full. You must write like a horse in full gallop. And yet you
don't seem to. Those articles in the "Examiner," and the letter in
the "Inquirer," seem to be thoroughly well considered; the breadth
of view in them, the penetration, the candor and fairness, the sound
judgment, please me exceedingly. Only one thing I questioned; and that
is, putting the plea for universal suffrage on the ground that it is
education for the people. One might ask if it were well to put a ship
in the hands of the crew because it would be a good school for them.
And looking at our popular elections, one, may doubt whether they are
a good school. I should be inclined to say that if the people could
consent that only property holders who could read [286] and write
should vote, it would be better. But they will not consent; we are on
the popular tide, and suffrage must be universal, and the freedmen
eventually must and will have the franchise.
But with the general strain of your writing I agree entirely. What you
say of the exceptional character of the Southern treason is true, and
it has not been so distinctly nor so well said before. I had thought
the same myself, and, of course, you must be right! Yet we must take
care lest the concession go too far. Treason must forever be branded as
the greatest of crimes. It aims not to murder a man, but a people. And
as to opinion and conscience, I suppose all traitors have an opinion
and a conscience.
I have read this time the whole of the "Examiner," which I seldom do.
It is all very good and satisfactory. Osgood's article on Robertson is
excellent; it appreciates him and his time. One laments that his mind
had so hard a lot; but every real man must, in one way or another,
fight a great battle. . . . Especially I feel indebted to Abbot's
article. Truly he 'says, that the great question of the coming days
is,--theism, or atheism? Not whether Jesus is our Master, the chief
among men, but whether the God in whom Jesus believed really exists;
and, by consequence, whether the immortality which lay open to his
vision is but a dream of weary and burdened humanity? Herbert Spencer
believes in no such God and Father, and his religion, which he vaunts
so much, is but a hard and cold abstraction. On other subjects he is a
great writer; and in his volume of essays there is not one which is not
marked with strong and original thought. It is a prodigious intellect,
certainly, and struggling hard with the greatest questions. [287] May
it find its way out to light! Thus far its light is, to my thinking,
the profoundest darkness. With our house's love to your house,
Yours ever,