Memoir and Letters of Francis W. NewmanSieveking, I. Giberne (Isabel Giberne)
Religion
Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman
Sieveking, I. Giberne (Isabel Giberne)
Newman, Francis William, 1805-1897
For a great many years before he died Newman lived at Weston-super-Mare.
But two years before his death, in October, 1897, when he was ninety-two
years of age, he found himself, partly owing to senile decay and partly
owing to a bad fall he had had in the spring of the year, and also to loss
of eyesight, unable to take part in public affairs any longer, nor yet to
write as he had been used to do.
The unpublished article on "Land Nationalization" (which is printed in
this volume) came into the hands of Mr. William Jameson (to whose kindness
I am indebted for it) in 1886, at which time he was Hon. Secretary of the
Land Nationalization Society, and Francis Newman, Vice-President.
Mr. Jameson, at the time of sending me the article, wrote me a letter from
which I shall here quote those parts relating to his friendship with
Newman. He says, speaking of their first meeting: "There was an instant
fellowship that endears his memory to me. I was then about thirty-five,
and he past eighty. There was a quiet dignity in his manner, but no
suggestion of _old age_."
One little anecdote may be of interest.
"We left a rather stormy committee meeting together, over which Professor
Newman had presided. The _storm_ was due to one member who had a grievance
against some others. Speaking of the pity of this, Professor Newman said
to me, 'You know how very strongly my brother and myself differ in
opinion; yet this has never created the _slightest personal discord_....'"
Several years later. Professor Newman wrote Mr. Jameson a letter (on
finding out that he was suffering from overwork and the fear of subsequent
breakdown), saying these strong words of sympathy: "I charge you to give
it up. Save yourself for the years to come." He went on to say that a
friend of his own had kept working on for some cherished cause at the cost
of much mental pressure, and had ended his days in a lunatic asylum. Mr.
Jameson adds that Newman's words of counsel have often and often rung in
his ears since they were first said to him, and he attributes to the fact
that he obeyed them, his having been saved from a physical breakdown.
"Save yourself for the years to come" is a counsel which we, who are
workers, are so often in danger of forgetting. Except in extreme youth,
most men and women live far more in the present and in the past than they
do in the future which lies before them, so largely to be carved into
shape by their Present.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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