Long ago I had letters from you for which I was grateful and as to which I have been self-reproachful. I have been under a constant freshet of pressing desk duties with increasing infirmities, such as you know my father had, always urging me to put off what I might from day to day without failure of business obligations. I stop here over a train expressly to write you before I get into my mill again.

I have been staying for a week in a little shebang on an island in [685]Penobscot Bay to which Mrs Olmsted, Marion and sometimes Rick or John have been coming for several summers. They have never been able to get me there before but finding myself disabled for work at home I have made them this visit, and am returning.

I will answer your inquiries bringing my history down to date.

As you know, a year ago last March, finding that I could not meet the demands upon me, I ran away to England, guided by and guiding Rick and Marion; aiming to renew health. The attempt was a failure. More than a failure. I was more disabled when I returned than when I left. First, the East wind in England tormented me; so we hurried across to France. Came back in June to my cousin’s house in London where I could not sleep. Dr. Rainer, a distinguished nervous specialist, who had married the daughter of an old friend of mine, and who had visited us in Brookline, came to see us; said that if I would come to his house he would cure me. So I went there and was under careful treatment for three months with no substantial gain. Then I moved to the Northward, staying for a week at Oxford, and another with friends at Stratford, and so came back in October, hardly as well as when I left. Of course I could not avoid some worry about the progress of the Chicago affair and it seemed rather to help me to get out there and take hold of the work directly. I had been throwing a great deal upon my partner Codman, fine fellow. In January he suddenly died. I had by that time come to be sleeping more and was able to jump in and shoulder the Chicago work with others for a time, and so manage them that with good luck nobody complained and I was even myself not extremely dissatisfied with results.

With hot weather this year excessive sleeplessness returned. For six weeks before I came this way I had been unable to sleep at all at night, generally securing a few hours after day light or during the day.

We have taken Charles Eliot into partnership. He is the elder son of President Eliot, was several years a pupil of mine; then spent a year or two in study abroad; then practiced on his own account a few years; married a Miss Pitkin of Goshen, I believe. I suppose that you know her. I claim a cousinship, my father’s mother having been a daughter of a brother of the colonial Governor Pitkin. She is an excellent sort of Connecticut woman. He is clever; has a fine cultivated taste and some special talents but does not yet fill Codman’s place. He is now in the West as my alternate for various professional consultations with Milwaukee, Louisville, Kansas City and other corporations. John travels less than the rest of us, being in direction of the office in which there are fifteen to twenty draughtsmen and clerks, the preparation of work for whom over-fully occupies him. I have come to greatly dread traveling, being pretty sure to break down somewhere on every journey and have to lie abed a few days under care of a strange physician. I have given up night travel and Southern and Western roads being arranged for no long day “through” travel it is awkward for me. When forced to travel at night I do not go to bed. I suppose that as long as I live I shall be forced to make long journeys to meet Boards, [686]Legislative Committees &c. as, although the young men may be my superiors, they cannot testify with the weight of experience that I bring.

Of course, I am not planning to live longer. I have not laid up much, knowing always that my own health and that of those for whom I was responsible required that we should live rather freely and that I should deny myself nothing by which I should be helped to stand up to my work. Our two living boys seem to have been brought into firmly established good constitutions, which, as to John, is an almost unhoped for success. Rick is even robust. Marion is very delicate; suffers much from rheumatic troubles and I don’t know what, and she is just the nicest girl—little old maid—possible; patient, happy, indefatigable. I shall leave her and my wife tolerably provided for; so that I hope, with what John & Rick can do, they will not need to greatly change their habits. And John and Rick will have had a good education and training and the good will of a fair, but not a fortune-making business? Rick will this year be a Senior. He is going creditably thro’ college and I have provided for his technical education afterwards. He is a good boy, healthy, of fair ability, thoughtful for his mother and sister, industrious. Incidentally I do what I can for his education. I enjoy my children. They are one of the centers of my life; the other being the improvement of scenery and making the enjoyment of it available. Spite of my infirmities which do drag me cruelly, I am not to be thought of as an unhappy old man. I worry over my responsibilities lest justice shd not be done them, and we have to accomplish so much by excessive study, caution and painstaking management of ignorant, perverse and unskilled agents and by argument and persuasion with inept and wrong headed principles, our business being so unorganized, out of line, uncommercial and misunderstood, that it is very wearying and our best efforts sometimes lead to results, through the perversity of others, which are extremely mortifying. The worst is, of course, that we cannot keep our work out of the hell of politics. It is true that in many places through the blessing of Civil Service regulations a vast gain has been made, but we are nearly all the time at some point in a mortal fight with some scoundrel statesmen, as statesmen are trained with us. My professional life has been a series of engagements with them. I feel that I have made a good discreet fight with them and though failing sadly of my aims, have been more successful than most honest men have been allowed to be in public works. When I think of how much worse things might have been I don’t much mind my wounds.

Two general observations are to be made as the result of my revisiting of England in which you will be interested. First, nobody seems to me to be realizing how England has been changing in the last forty years. More than New England, even in outward aspect. Whole villages so changed that after looking for hours I could surely recognize nothing of what I knew and was greatly interested in at the time of my first visit to them. The change in the aspect of the people, their manner, is almost equally marked. They are brisky, more worried-looking, more nervous; more American. Second, I believe that [687]there has been a great change for the better politically. Dr. Rainer with whom I lived is a warm anti Gladstone man, and in a certain sense what we should call an active politician, if that word could now ever be used in its proper sense with us. He was going out night after night, to address meetings and so on and there were frequent caucus-like meetings in a small way at his home at which I was present. I had no sympathy with his views but was greatly struck with the general tone of debate of matters of what we should call political management. It was so different, so vastly more respectable than I have ever known similar discussions to be even with the better sort of working politicians with us. It gave me encouragement as to the possibilities of the next century. The party heat was great, fanatical, unreasoning and destructive of reason for the truth, it seemed to me. We never get more heated. Yet in practical politics I never heard the slightest suggestion of anything looking toward, or recognizing the element of corruption or covert, disguised and sugar-coated bribery, such as is the essence of the highest and most respectable practical politics in our best and most religious circles. Contrasting this with what I had been led forty years ago to believe was the case with English politics—saying nothing of old time Walpolian politics, it seemed to me the most cheering historical fact of our time. If we could have such a change in our country I should value it more than the abolition of Slavery. In fact, I value the abolition of Slavery chiefly because of its removal of an obstruction to advance in that direction.

In the first of your two letters to which I am replying you invited my opinion of the cause of the result of the last election. My opinion is not worth much. I was absent during the canvass and took less interest in the election than in any since the Clay and Jackson contest. I knew that I was to be beaten anyhow, both parties being alike my mortal enemies. My careless notion was that the tariff was a wretchedly patched up, bungling contrivance for drawing money from manufacturers to buy votes with as a supplement to the standing fund at Harrison’s disposal in the form of influence, that is to say, bribery in patronage. I suppose the tariff was so bad that the common sense of the more decent people every where revolted from it. I suppose you will think me a crank. To be sure, I hate the tariff with all my might. Not that I object to the principle of protection if that alone were concerned. But I hate it because the efforts, the intrigues, the lobbyings, the political bargaining, the price paid for it, the offices which it requires and the price to be paid by the buyers of those offices, all work so for the demoralization, degradation and damnation of my people. I would be willing to have my children in the Poor House, I would be willing to have half the wealth of the country destroyed, every bank broken, every factory stopped and all of us brought to a diet of acorns and blackberries to get rid of that one source of corruption. That is my position. How do you think that I have been brought to it? I should like to take a different view of the election and to suppose that it meant that people generally were approaching a realizing sense of the villany of our present practical politics, but I do not so [688]flatter myself. I simply think that the greed of the protected conspirators has been too overreaching and the party the leaders of which offered protection for sale slipped up in their complicated bargaining. I don’t much care. The democrats will only palliate the evil and delay the day in which a real reform will begin. I think it might have worked better in the long run to give the Protectionists and other tradesmen in politics more rope. But, of course, I could not vote for it. And it is more comfortable for me, personally, for the time being, to have such a man as Cleveland stand as our figure-head. I know that practically he is under the thumb of rascally “ward politicians” and the like almost as badly as poor Harrison was.

You think I am a crank. If you had had half my experience you would be of the same way of thinking, and would, I hope, turn your thinking to better account for the country than I can.

I just accidentally came upon the Braces here. It’s an awful pity that a record for the public of Brace’s life should be left to such unskilled hands and be prepared from a domestic point of view. I wish that you could intervene.

I suppose you no longer come to Boston. I am always looking for you. There’s no use talking about it. I can’t come to you. I often dream of a ride thro my old haunts and meeting you & others but have pretty well surrendered to Fate. I must flounder along my way to the end. The nearer I get to it the more I live back to my early regard for you and all with whom you are associated in my memory.

Affectionately