“I never met a real lion in society before, and I studied both with interest. This fashionable society is nothing, after all, but a kind of licensed policy-shop. They want Frauenstein’s money, and Kendrick thinks he has the best right to it because his cousin was Frauenstein’s mother—an American woman; so you see he has blood! The Delanos are related to him in about the same degree; so of course you have heard of him. I like the count for one reason, and this is, that notwithstanding the display and cajolery of the women, and the flattery of most of the men, he had the good taste to talk with your old doctor more than to any one there; so the race is not wholly degenerate! In politics he is soundly radical, and hates war like a Quaker. He sees in it the degradation of the people. It was refreshing to hear him talk. He says the wealth-producers of the world are not dependent upon capital so much as capital upon them, if they only knew it; for they have everything in their own hands, and are slowly coming to realize the fact, and to see how they can organize and accomplish great things. He was very eloquent when the subject of education came up, and presented the whole matter in a clear and new light to most of those who heard him. He said it was a disgrace to the age that we have no text-book of morals for the public schools; and as the various systems of religion have monopolized the teaching of codes of morals, by shutting out all religious instruction, we have shut out moral training as well. It is right to exclude all creeds from schools supported by the people, but it is a great and vital error to deprive the young of constant and unremitting instruction in the laws that should govern human beings in their mutual relations. He would have a text-book on morals compiled from the writings of all the great teachers, whether pagan or Christian, excluding every myth and unverifiable hypothesis. Such a book could be made as acceptable to all religious sects, as works on arithmetic or chemistry now are. He talked also of woman’s coming position as that of perfect social and political equality. It is astonishing how radical Kendrick, old priest Cooke, and many other out-of-her-sphere noodles, have suddenly become. Kendrick actually assented to the very propositions he has repeatedly pooh-pooed when presented by me. I made him feel a little uncomfortable by saying, ‘Mind, Kendrick! I shall see that you stick to that.’