Letter to Jenny Longuet, April 29, 1881

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To Jenny Longuet in Argenteuil

41 Maitland Park, N. W.

My dear Jenny,

I congratulate you upon the happy delivery; at least I presume that everything is right from your taking the trouble to write. My ‘womankind’ expected the ‘newcomer’ to increase ‘the better half of the population; for my own part I prefer the ‘manly’ sex for children born at this turning point of history. They have before them the most revolutionary period men had ever to pass through. The bad thing now is to be ‘old’ so as to be only able to foresee instead of seeing. The ‘newcomer’ steps in pretty closely to your own birthday, Johnny’s, and mine. He, like ourselves, patronizes the merry month of May. I am of course charged by Mama (and Tussy, though she finds perhaps yet the time to write herself) to wish you all possible good things, but I do not see that ‘wishes’ are good for anything except the glossing over one’s own powerlessness.

I hope by and by you will find the servants you want and get your 'ménage’ into some quiet routine. I felt rather anxious about the too many troubles weighing upon you just now, at such a critical moment. Johnny, according to your last letter, is recovering his health. He is in fact the most delicate of the three boys whom I have the honour to know personally. Tell him that while walking yesterday through the park — our own Maitland Park — that glorious person, the parkkeeper, suddenly approached, asked for news about Johnny, and at last communicated me the important fact that he will ‘retire’ from his office and make place to a younger ‘force’. With him one of the pillars of the ‘Lord Southampton’ disappears.

There is little going on in ‘our circle’ as Beesly daubed it. Pumps still awaits ‘news’ from Beust; has in the meanwhile thrown an eye upon ‘Kautsky’ who, however, did not yet ‘declare’; and she will always feel grateful to Hirsch for having not only virtually ‘declared’, but, after a refusal, renewed his ‘declaration’, just before his trip to Paris. This Hirsch becomes more and more a nuisance. My ‘opinion’ of him grows less and less.

The last London craze was the Disraeli exaltation which gave John Bull the satisfaction of admiring his own magnanimity. Is it not ‘grand’ to act the sycophant with regard to a dead man whom just before his kicking the bucket you had saluted with rotten apples and foul eggs? At the same time this teaches the ‘lower classes’ that however their ‘natural superiors’ may fall out amongst each other during the struggle for ‘place and pelf, death brings out the truth that the leaders of the ‘ruling classes’ are always ‘great and good men’.

It is a very fine trick of Gladstone — only the “stupid party” does not understand it — to offer at a moment when landed property in Ireland (as in England) will be depreciated by the import of corn and cattle from the U.St. — to offer them at that very moment the public Exchequer where they can sell that property at a price it does no longer possess!

The real intricacies of the Irish land problem — which indeed are not especially Irish — are so great that the only true way to solve it would be to give the Irish Home Rule and thus force them to solve it themselves. But John Bull is too stupid to understand this.

Engels comes just, sends you his best compliments, and as it is almost post-time, so that I cannot afterwards finish this letter, I must abruptly end it.

With my compliments to Johnny, Harry and the ‘good’ Wolf (who is indeed an excellent boy) and also to father Longuet.

Yours,

Old Nick