[Paris], 138 Avenue des Ch.-Elysées: February 27, [1852]. I get your second letter, my dearest Mrs. Martin, before I answer your first, which makes me rather ashamed. ... Dearest friend, it is true that I have seldom been so upset as by this act of poor dear Miss Mitford's, and the very impossibility of being vindictive on this occasion increased my agitation at the moment.... There are defects in delicacy and apprehensiveness, one cannot deny it, and yet I assure you that a more generous and fervent woman never lived than dear Miss Mitford is, and if you knew her you would do her this justice. She is better in herself than in her books--more large, more energetic, more human altogether. I think I understand her better on the whole than she understands me (which is not saying much), and I admire her on various accounts. She talks better, for instance, than most writers, male or female, whom I have had any intercourse with. And affectionate in the extreme, she has always been to me. So I have mystified you and disgusted you with my politics, and my friends in England have put me in the corner; just so.... The French nation is very peculiar. We choose to boast ourselves of being different in England, but we have simply _les qualités de nos défauts_ after all. The clash of speculative opinions is dreadful here, practical men catch at the ideal as if it were a loaf of bread, and they literally set about cutting out their Romeos 'into little stars,' as if that were the most natural thing in the world. As for the socialists, I quite agree with you that various of them, yes, and some of their chief men, are full of pure and noble aspiration, the most virtuous of men and the most benevolent. Still, they hold in their hands, in their clean hands, ideas that kill, ideas which defile, ideas which, if carried out, would be the worst and most crushing kind of despotism. I would rather live under the feet of the Czar than in those states of perfectibility imagined by Fourier and Cabet, if I might choose my 'pis aller.' All these speculators (even Louis Blanc, who is one of the most rational) would revolutionalise, not merely countries, but the elemental conditions of humanity, it seems to me; none of them seeing that antagonism is necessary to all progress. A man, in walking, must set one foot before another, and in climbing (as Dante observed long ago) the foot behind 'è sempre il più basso.' Only the gods (Plato tells us) keep both feet joined together in moving onward. It is not so, and cannot be so, with men.