“When you said that you would assume my permission to print passages from the letter, I supposed that they would be those relating to the general life of Wakefield. All that I have written is essentially true, but I do not wish to hold any controversy on the matter, for if I defended myself publicly I should have to wound still further the feelings of one who is no doubt a devoted wife. “It is for your satisfaction alone that I write these lines. I have been inaccurate on two points, on which I wrote too hastily, from hearsay, gleaned on brief visits to Wakefield. Mr. Green has not a Scotch estate, only occasional shooting, and he is not concerned in the forges that stand near the bridge, as I was wrongly informed. “I did not say, though I may have led your readers to infer it, that the so-called ‘American devil’ was his. I knew, or rather was told, that it belonged to Whithams, who have the largest foundry. He (Mr. Green) does not forge iron, it seems; he makes it into machines. He can hardly be classed as an engineer; he is a machine-maker. If he is not an ‘iron lord,’ on what is his wealth based? “Robin the Pedlar is no myth. I often heard him mentioned, when a girl, as being Mrs. Green’s father. I dare say that Mrs. Edward Green never heard of him. She came into the family in its genteeler days; but there are old people in Wakefield who remember all about him. I send by this post a Wakefield paper containing some speeches highly illustrative of the town of which Mr. Green is the hero and model.” (These I do not think it necessary to publish.) “Party feeling still runs high at Wakefield, and when the next election occurs, Mrs. Green expects to find big yellow bills on the gate-pillars of Heath Common, ‘Professor Ruskin on Ned Green,’ and she is naturally angry. “Of course he is not the sole offender. This case occurred to me because he is the most prominent type of the modern successful men who are to inaugurate a new era in the town’s history. It is the blind leader of the blind in the downward way that things are going. Everybody wants to get rich like him; everybody who has greed and competence pushes to the front. The town council promise them that they will make of Wakefield a second Bradford. Meanwhile they squabble about their duties, the streets are filthy, smallpox breeds there, and they set up a hospital in a tent. It catches fire, and nurse and patients are burnt together. I think that was eight or nine years since. Possibly arrangements are better now. “You say truly that quickly acquired fortunes must be ill acquired, but you must live on my level to realize fully how the prospect and possibility of such gains are disorganizing middle-class life. English people do not lift their families along with them, as we reproach the ‘clannish’ Scotch with doing. “Ignorant pride on the one hand, envy on the other, breed hate between those who should be a mutual stay. As classes are estranged, so are families.