a belt. One thing I have omitted: you will lose a certain
amount on the exchange, but this even I cannot foresee, as it is one of
the few things that vary with the way a man has.--I am, dear sir, yours
financially,

SAMUEL BUDGETT.

TO SIDNEY COLVIN

I had lately sent him two books, the fifth volume of Huxley's
_Collected Essays_ and Cotter Morison's _Service of Man_: the latter
a work of Positivist tendency, which its genial and accomplished
author had long meditated, but which unfortunately he only began to
write after a rapid decline of health and power had set in.

[_Skerryvore, Bournemouth, Spring 1887._]

MY DEAR COLVIN,--I read Huxley, and a lot of it with great interest. Eh,
what a gulf between a man with a mind like Huxley and a man like Cotter
Morison. Truly 'tis the book of a boy; before I was twenty I was done
with all these considerations. Nor is there one happy phrase, except
"the devastating flood of children." Why should he din our ears with
languid repetitions of the very first ideas and facts that a bright lad
gets hold of; and how can a man be so destitute of historical
perspective, so full of cheap outworn generalisations--feudal ages, time
of suffering--_pas tant qu'aujourdhui_, M. Cotter! Christianity--which?
what? how? You must not attack all forms, from Calvin to St. Thomas,
from St. Thomas to (One who should surely be considered) Jesus Christ,
with the same missiles: they do not all tell against all. But there it
is, as we said; a man joins a sect, and becomes one-eyed. He affects a
horror of vices which are just the thing to stop his "devastating flood
of babies," and just the thing above all to keep the vicious from
procreating. Where, then, is the ground of this horror in any
intelligent Servant of Humanity? O, beware of creeds and anti-creeds,
sects and anti-sects. There is but one truth, outside science, the truth
that comes of an earnest, smiling survey of mankind "from China to
Peru," or further, and from to-day to the days of Probably Arboreal;
and the truth (however true it is) that robs you of sympathy with any
form of thought or trait of man, is false for you, and heretical, and
heretico-plastic. Hear Morison struggling with his chains; hear me, hear
all of us, when we suffer our creeds or anti-creeds to degenerate
towards the whine, and begin to hate our neighbours, or our ancestors,
like ourselves. And yet in Morison, too, as in St. Thomas, as i