ual laws become a
byeword when what is legal for one class becomes a criminal offence for
another. It did my heart good to hear that man tell M'Laren how, as he
had talked much of getting the franchise for working men, he must now be
content to see them use it now they had got it. This is a smooth stone
well planted in the foreheads of certain dilettanti radicals, after
M'Laren's fashion, who are willing to give the working men words and
wind, and votes and the like, and yet think to keep all the advantages,
just or unjust, of the wealthier classes without abatement. I do hope
wise men will not attempt to fight the working men on the head of this
notorious injustice. Any such step will only precipitate the action of
the newly enfranchised classes, and irritate them into acting hastily;
when what we ought to desire should be that they should act warily and
little for many years to come, until education and habit may make them
the more fit.

All this (intended for my father) is much after the fashion of his own
correspondence. I confess it has left my own head exhausted; I hope it
may not produce the same effect on yours. But I want him to look really
into this question (both sides of it, and not the representations of
rabid middle-class newspapers, sworn to support all the little tyrannies
of wealth), and I know he will be convinced that this is a case of
unjust law; and that, however desirable the end may seem to him, he will
not be Jesuit enough to think that any end will justify an unjust law.

Here ends the political sermon of your affectionate (and somewhat
dogmatical) son,

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

TO MRS. THOMAS STEVENSON

In the first week of January I went for some necessary work to Paris,
with the intention of returning towards the end of the month. The
following letter introduces the Russian sisters, Madame Zassetsky
and Madame Garschine, whose society and that of their children was to
do so much to cheer Stevenson during his remaining months on the
Riviera. The French painter Robinet (sometimes in his day known as
_le Raphael des cailloux_, from the minuteness of detail which he put
into his Provencal coast landscapes) was a chivalrous and
affectionate soul, in whom R. L. S. delighted in spite of his fervent
clerical and royalist opinions.

_[Menton], January 7, 1874._

MY DEAR MOTHER,--I received yesterday two most charming letters--the
nicest I have h