Of poor Miss R. (Lorraine Raymond) I never hear a word. It is charitable to attribute her silence to want of scholarship, but I am inclined to disbelieve the verity of this. I believe her to be a very fair scholar, and an average (to say the least of it) correspondent; but she seldom writes, I know. She wrote me a few letters from Europe _years_ ago, none of late years. She has a kind heart, and I am so _so_ sorry for her. I hope the trial of your brother will not result disastrously to him. Perhaps one cannot easily control a dislike, but he has certainly chosen a most powerful foe, and the odds _seem_ unequal. I agree with you in more than word, when you declare the Imperial Family of Germany to be a _respectable one_; it is all of that, nothing in Europe stands before it, and those of it whom I have known personally are of the highest excellence and purest worth. I am sure the more intimately they are known, the better they must be beloved. The Grand Duchess of Baden is to _me_ the loveliest woman on the earth; in this term I mean to combine all qualities of both mind and body; both nature and culture have made her a _Princess_. And I cannot see why she is not as good a Republican as if she had been born a peasant, or a Suisse, or American citizen; in no position would she knowingly do a wrong or commit an act of tyranny to the lowest human being whether subject or not. “Tired of Republics,” you say. Perhaps if you study your own meaning closely you will find that you are rather tired of politics than Republics. And, my esteemed and valued friend, let me in all childlike simplicity suggest what does not perhaps clearly appear to you, viz., that the standpoint one occupies, the surroundings one has, the outlook one takes, have a great deal to do in forming the opinion and swaying the judgment. I am sorry that you must perforce see our country, its political, moral, and social sides, through the slum, and mire, and haze of a lens like New York City. Out on our millions of acres of hills, valleys, and plains is a better, purer, nobler population, the force of whose earnestness and honesty will save our Nation long ages after the pollution of its cities would have turned it into a Sodom and Gomorrah. There is a true, steady, honest pulse beating in the veins of the yeomanry of this land that never throbbed a second in a city like New York, and never will; but when the trial comes, _it is the pulse that will tell_. Tweed and his “ring” didn’t go to the farmers sweating in their hay-fields with their _bargains_. They went to the politicians, and burrowed in the cities and made their nests like the bats and owls, under the eaves of churches and in halls and steeples; they can plan, and connive, and twiddle and fiddle with the lines a long time while the farmers work in their fields, but when real danger appears, when the load topples and is likely to upset, stouter hearts than theirs will come to the