Since I ended last the world has turned over on its other side, in order, one must hope, to some happy change in the dream. Our friend, Miss Bayley, in that very kind letter which has just reached me and shall be answered directly (will you tell her with my thankful love?), asks if Robert and I are communists, and then half draws back her question into a discreet reflection that _I_, at least, was never much celebrated for acumen on political economy. Most true indeed! And therefore, and on that very ground, is it not the more creditable to me that I don't set up for a communist immediately? In proportion to the ignorance might be the stringency of the embrace of 'la vérité sociale:' so I claim a little credit that it isn't. For really we are not communists, farther than to admit the wisdom of voluntary association in matters of material life among the poorer classes. And to legislate even on such points seems as objectionable as possible; all intermeddlings of government with domesticities, from Lacedaemon to Peru, were and must be objectionable; and of the growth of absolutism, let us, theorise as we choose. I would have the government educate the people absolutely, and _then_ give room for the individual to develop himself into life freely. Nothing can be more hateful to me than this communist idea of quenching individualities in the mass. As if the hope of the world did not always consist in the eliciting of the individual man from the background of the masses, in the evolvement of individual genius, virtue, magnanimity. Do you know how I love France and the French? Robert laughs at me for the mania of it, or used to laugh long before this revolution. When I was a prisoner, my other mania for imaginative literature used to be ministered to through the prison bars by Balzac, George Sand, and the like immortal improprieties. They kept the colour in my life to some degree and did good service in their time to me, I can assure you, though in dear discreet England women oughtn't to confess to such reading, I believe, or you told me so yourself one day. Well, but through reading the books I grew to love France, in a mania too; and the interest, which all must feel in the late occurrences there, has been with me, and is, quite painful. I read the newspapers as I never did in my life, and hope and fear in paroxysms, yes, and am guilty of thinking far more of Paris than of Lombardy itself, and try to understand financial difficulties and social theories with the best will in the world; much as Flush tries to understand me when I tell him that barking and jumping may be unseasonable things. Both of us open our eyes a good deal, but the comprehension is questionable after all. What, however, I do seem least of all to comprehend, is your hymn of triumph in England, just because you have a lower ideal of liberty than the French people have. See if in Louis Philippe's time France was not