"Knowing as I do how you sympathize with rustics and disapprove our existing Land Laws, I make sure that with me you are delighted by the movement of the peasants under the initiative of Joseph Arch to claim access to freehold land by purchase or equivalent payments. I never dared to hope such an initiative from the peasants themselves, but I always foresaw that a destruction of slavery in the U.S. would give to the States such a desire to people their territories and the South, with English immigrants, that our peasants, as soon as they became more wideawake, would have the game in their own hands, and neither farmers nor landlords could resist.... I now should not wonder to live to see ... household suffrage extended to the peasantry-and as results, coming some earlier, all soon, overthrow of the existing Drink Traffic, of Contagious Diseases Act, Army Reform on a vast scale, Female Equality with Men in the Eye of the Law, overthrow of Landlords' predominance.... I wonder whether abolition of Foreign Embassies must precede a serious grapple with the National Debt. I doubt whether any nominally free State ever had such an Augean Stable left to it by forty years' eminently active legislation. "In corruptissima Republica plurimae leges," sounds like it. Without carving England and Ireland into States, I do not think the work can be got through: if indeed we are to avoid new wars with Ireland and India, which may God avert!... "Your constant friend, "F. W. Newman." I quote next from a note written three years later, which ascribes his health to the Triple alliance of his three "Anti's"--anti-alcohol, anti- tobacco, and anti-flesh food. * * * * * "How many a pleasant year has run its course since I first visited you at Penrith! It was the summer of 1842, I think, that we ascended High Street together, a company of seventeen. "It is my fancy that I could walk as well now: yet I believe it would make me lazy for a week after. Moderate exertions are surely best when one is past seventy, yet my spirits are inexhaustible, and my sense of health perfect. Seriously I attribute this to the TRIPLE ABSTINENCE [from alcohol, from narcotic (tobacco), and from flesh meat].... "Your affectionate friend, "F. W. Newman."