I received enclosed from Mr. B. from New York. He has not been here.

This letter, I must tell you, confirms a feeling I have before in some slight way expressed to you about B. Do you not feel in it the revelation of a different man than that you have known as Mr. B? As I said I do not know another man who could have written with so much real dignity of soul & so little false pride, so much honest & unconscious humility. Men do not often appear to men in this way. It is the bubbling up of the suppressed goodness & humanity of a soul that has been somehow hardly dealt with. All that is disagreeable in the nature of the man has been forced to the outside in defense of the interior and uneducated & ordinarily-and-at-will inexpressible refinement, delicacy & tenderness. It is the antipodes of the French ideal of man, that in which all the possibility of refinement, grace, amiability, tact of a soul is spun by the most laborious machinery into thread & woven into a garment which is always worn or only taken off to be washed in excessive trials of the temper. Return it me sometime.

Read the articles about Cayenne prisoners—especially note that the alleged facts offered from the French government in extenuation are proved to be falsehoods. Remember that today Louis Napoleon feels so strong that he & his wife & baby, lounge about on the rocks and sands & through the dark woods of Biarritz unattended & so much assured that they are not known by strangers or the peasants from common people. And yet & yet philosophers, poets and [393] statesmen & private gentlemen of no name or position different from father for instance, because they had been appointed to offices by the Republic which this man swore to support & defend with his life & because, when he was not, they were faithful to their oaths & refused [to] acknowledge his treason as a holy right—these men are thought safe nowhere but & in no circumstances but in chains in the pestilential climate of Cayenne on the “Island of Despair,” half starved & treated altogether like galley slaves. A few—something like a tenth of these gentlemen still surviving—the safety of——France requires it. Noble monarch, sweet empress, darling little cherub! There are other wives & little ones in France, not so happy—nay, there can be no happiness even at Biarritz for these never-tiring murderers.

Read also the account of himself by a German revolutionist in Household Words, beginning I think in July—& still continuing, & see who even in cool blooded Prussia are the Reds—the blood-men. Remember how rarely we get even the smallest glimpse of this side of the story. What interests are engaged at any cost to maintain order. Yours & mine for instance. Only justice & mercy, only conscience demand of us not to subject our minds to the slavery forced on our hands & tongues in all Europe.