The last “Spectator” received gives an abstract of Gladstone’s and Forster’s Irish Land and Education bills, and of the general favor they were received with upon their introduction. To have almost satisfied all parties and interests is really a wonderful and a most unexpected achievement. You ought to be proud of Gladstone, and well satisfied at having inevitable and great changes wrought out under so strong a ministry, and so high-minded a leader. Courage, earnestness, and high principle here are seen to command success, in Parliament at least. How anything will work in Ireland remains to be seen. But don’t think as some of my English friends do, that the Irish are incapable of good things. The race over here, as a general thing, develop at once what they seem to lack at home, thrift, and with thrift come order and respect for law. I happened to be in Boston on St. Patrick’s Day, and was stopped in my carriage while a very long Irish procession passed. They were mainly of the more well-to-do sort, no doubt; but they had made themselves so. Probably nearly every one of middle age was born in Ireland, and would have been a peasant laborer at home, very likely ill-conditioned enough. They were, however, in holiday attire; still they were fair representatives of the race, and I wished we could send them over to you for a day, as specimens of what may be made out of such material, under circumstances, not altogether the best, but much better than those at home. They are not the best element of our population, certainly, but they make by no means a bad lower stratum, out of which many show a truly Yankee-like aptitude for rising. They are almost all Romanists, to be sure; and there is an element of danger. But the influence of the priesthood is much tempered (as witness how they ran into Fenianism, against their exhortations) and in most respects is far from bad. The Germans are counted as a much better population, but they are quite as clannish, and in the towns are rather disposed to be actively anti-Christian. By the way, I met some time ago Mr. Stanley, who has been in the country before; is now on his way round the world via California, a favorite route. He is, or was, an M. P., a son of Lord Stanley of Alderley, an Oxford man, bright, sharp, and very talkative. He is a specimen of ultra-secularistic liberalism, I should think, of a set that will be apt to give you some trouble hereafter, in the questions that are to come up; if I do not misjudge him, one who thinks the world, or at least England, has not much farther use for distinctive Christianity; just one of the sort you must have had in view, in yours of February 4, as extremely generous “in making free with what other people value, and you don’t care for.” Most uncivilly, I fear, I fell almost into a wrangle with him directly. He even seemed to think us on the whole a bigoted set here in Cambridge,--rather a novel view to us.... Well, I must break off.