I have yours of 18th.

I grow more and more cautious in dealing with young men who seek advice upon entering courses of study for our profession. In most cases I have discouraged them. I think that increasing experience strongly leads me more and more to do so, but it may be that this is mainly because of the growing cautiousness of old age.

It looks more and more as if the drift of things here was toward the condition now prevailing in England, where nine-tenths of all the work proper to the profession has fallen into the hands of men who pursue it essentially as tradesmen and artisans, not professionally or as artists. Two men have been here lately each wanting to review our Boston work instructively because they have obtained charge of works proper to our profession, for which they have not been educated, and for which at the time of their appointment they were no better qualified than I am to conduct a banking business or command a fleet. Such men cannot be got to take our point of view; to realize the responsibility they are assuming, or to take up their work otherwise than flippantly and upon a radically wrong foundation. But such men are getting business and even the cultivated public cannot see that they are going to make poor work of it, following paltry and childish motives of design. I can advise no one to become a student of the profession unless he is prepared to give it more preliminary study than is required for entering the legal or the medical profession, or that of architecture or engineering. But I cannot say that the prospects of success in the profession hereafter are such as to justify the investment of the capital thus required. Unless there is a strong bias toward this particular form of art rather than another I should say that it was much safer to take to architecture or engineering.

Suppose you let Fritz come on here after John shall have returned and talk the question over with us. I suppose John will return in the course of a month and then that Mary and Marion and Rick will be here also.

Yours Affectionately